Western Standard - April 20, 2026


Why is Alberta still charging a gas tax？

Mentioned
Smith
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Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

149.79

Word count

284

Sentence count

25

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I give my thoughts on the gas tax, the fuel tax, and the "Yes" vote in the Alberta election. I also give my take on the "No" vote and why it's not as simple as that.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 here's one of the areas I want to hit on a bit. And that's the gas tax, the fuel tax in Alberta.
00:00:05.480 The Premier Smith not cutting it. All right. This is where you want to get on the provincial
00:00:10.400 government's case rather than, oh, she should be out, right? Becoming an independent supporter.
00:00:13.900 There's one of the more clownish people who heads the independence movement in some ways and speaks
00:00:19.100 for quite often. He's just got an incredible chip on his shoulder when it comes to Premier Smith,
00:00:23.320 wasting a lot of energy going after her. And you really should just stick to putting out,
00:00:27.580 try to get that yes vote. Either way, there's things that Smith needs to be criticized on,
00:00:31.540 not trying to turn her into an open secessionist. But why on earth is she not cutting the gas tax? 0.81
00:00:37.540 Come on. I don't care because they're saying we got our own law and we don't cut it until July
00:00:41.400 1st. You guys write the law. You've got a majority. And you're also for every dollar,
00:00:47.860 the price of a barrel oil rises. The Alberta government gets about $700 million in their
00:00:53.780 budget. Okay. And I understand that's over the course of a year, but still we're talking oil
00:00:59.860 has gone up by what, 60, $70 and it's been hanging there and it's going to for a while.
00:01:05.780 We can afford to cut the gas tax. And if you can't afford to cut the gas tax,
00:01:09.940 it really does mean you're spending way, way, way too much. So cut some spending,
00:01:14.960 be conservative. That's the critique we need. And that's how we need to keep pushing our honor.
00:01:23.780 Thank you.