Western Standard - November 06, 2026


Smiths Pipeline Promise Faces a Political Test

Alberta’s campus neutrality legislation needs teeth

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

193.41

Word count

448

Sentence count

26

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 And speaking of tantrums and protests and inability to debate, look at the pipeline.
00:00:08.100 Here's where I think Premier Smith's really going to, probably going to eat a whole pile of crow 1.00
00:00:12.580 and it could cost her the election. We'll see. 1.00
00:00:14.840 But you know, she's really staked her future on being hand in hand with Mark Carney.
00:00:19.940 She's really tried this cooperative approach.
00:00:22.500 We think that Mark Carney's actually just spiffy and he's got the same interests as Alberta
00:00:27.480 and he's going to help us and he's going to get things done.
00:00:30.000 And a lot of the cynics like myself saying, yeah, right, I'll believe it, want to see it.
00:00:33.480 Well, now we're seeing, now there's 10 of them, I believe, Indigenous bands lining up,
00:00:37.860 going into the courts, trying to hold this up and saying they're going to protest,
00:00:40.760 saying they're going to stop this.
00:00:43.600 Smith has basically come close to promising there's going to be dirt moving on this pipeline
00:00:48.020 by September next year.
00:00:49.140 That's just a month before the election.
00:00:52.660 What if it's not happening by then, which I'm pretty confident won't be happening by then. 0.99
00:00:56.980 And there's not much Smith can do about it because she partners herself with a coward who does nothing but talk and never actually acts. 0.94
00:01:02.700 That coward is Mark Carney. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. 0.98
00:01:06.040 More MOUs, more agreements, more bureaucracy, more meetings, more MOUs.
00:01:11.020 None of those get a pipe into the ground. 0.99
00:01:13.480 What he does have to do is stand up and tell those chiefs to blow it out their asses. 1.00
00:01:17.480 That's the truth of it. I mean, I understand he would say it more diplomatically than I do. 0.99
00:01:22.920 But they don't have the authority to stop this.
00:01:26.980 The only person who has the authority to give the thumbs up and thumbs down really is the
00:01:30.960 prime minister.
00:01:32.460 He could get, this is why private companies won't come out, even though he's saying it's
00:01:37.280 promising, they won't touch it.
00:01:38.960 Why? 0.98
00:01:39.220 Because they know it won't get done because the prime minister has no cojones. 0.97
00:01:43.540 He won't say, this is getting done, no more questions, we will consult, but let's please 0.74
00:01:50.500 understand we're consulting on the basis of this is going to happen, whether you like
00:01:55.200 it or not.
00:01:55.840 so how can we accommodate you a little better as it happens but he won't do that
00:02:00.160 so premier smith is going to have a lot of questions to answer a month before her
00:02:06.840 general election faces her as to why did we waste this much time trying the non-adversarial way to
00:02:15.220 deal with this government when clearly the adversarial way to go is is where we're at