Western Standard - February 28, 2026


Why abolishing the Senate isn't the simple answer

Topics
Western provinces discrimination Senate design
Western Standard News Update ｜ Alberta Treaty Chiefs pass ＂non-confidence＂ against UCP ｜ 27 Feb 2026 Emergencies Act ruling： no accountability and why it matters

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

145.82

Word count

234

Sentence count

22

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Would no Senate be better than the current one we have right now? We talk about the unfairness of the current Senate, and the ridiculous numbers of seats it has in it, and how it discriminates against the Western provinces.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 I mean, would no Senate be better than the current Senate?
00:00:02.420 Yes, it would.
00:00:03.280 The current Senate is grossly unfair. 0.98
00:00:06.400 It's appointed by the prime minister.
00:00:08.120 So most of the time it's just appointed by liberals without any real democratic mandate from Alberta.
00:00:12.640 So even Alberta senators, quote unquote, are not, they're not even appointed by someone who has the backing of Alberta in most cases.
00:00:23.020 And the numbers in the Senate are crazy.
00:00:25.900 Roughly a quarter of the seats are for Ontario.
00:00:28.120 Roughly a quarter are for Quebec.
00:00:31.240 And, you know, the territories, I think, get one each or something.
00:00:36.220 And then things get completely screwy.
00:00:39.860 Alberta, B.C., Saskatchewan, I think we get six each.
00:00:45.380 Alberta alone has roughly three times the population of all four Atlantic provinces.
00:00:51.940 Roughly three times the population of all four of the Atlantic provinces.
00:00:55.900 Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. New Brunswick alone
00:01:01.960 has nearly twice the senators of just Alberta. New Brunswick alone has nearly twice the senators
00:01:12.220 of Alberta, but Alberta has three times the population of all four of those provinces,
00:01:18.400 and that's set in stone for all time. It doesn't change based on populations of a province going
00:01:23.880 up or down. It's just set in stone for all time. So the current Senate is practically medieval
00:01:31.080 in the way it's designed. It wildly discriminates against the Western provinces.