The News Rundown

Premiers heap praise on meeting with Carney, but no specific projects identified

Premier's meeting: 13 leaders 'united' on attracting private sector
Carney: “Our first job is legislation, legislation to give ourselves the ability to make this a reality. But we will very quickly move into the summer to refine that list from the list we have. As more private proponents become aware of the opportunity here, we’re going to see more projects coming forward.”
On Monday, Carney listed a slew of project examples that could find their way onto the list of ones that would qualify for faster approvals, from building out Manitoba’s Port of Churchill to Ontario’s Ring of Fire (northern mineral mining) and the Northwest Coast oil pipeline.
The joint statement from leaders listed projects such as clean and conventional energy, highways, ports, pipelines and railways.
Ford: “This has been the best meeting we’ve had in 10 years. Simple. Best meeting I’ve had in seven years. There was no expectations that the prime minister was going to come out and say, ‘You get that project,’ ‘You get that project.’ It was a great discussion.”
Ford also elicited laughs from Carney and other premiers when he told reporters he described the prime minister as “Santa Claus.”
“He’s coming, and his sled was full of all sorts of stuff. Now, he’s taken off back to the North Pole. He’s going to sort it out, and then he’s going to call us.”
“We’re building a port at the North Pole,” quipped Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew.
“And critical minerals up in the North Pole,” Ford shot back.
Smith: wants the federal government to include an oil pipeline carrying bitumen from Alberta to British Columbia’s coast, to open up access to Asian markets. "must be on the initial list"
She warned that failing to do so would not only further the issue of investment uncertainty, but “send an unwelcome signal to Albertans concerned about Ottawa’s commitment to national unity.”
The federal Liberals have yet to reveal in Parliament their promised legislation to speed up approvals for select projects to a maximum of two years. That could be tabled as early as this week.
Supplementals:

The topic of zoning around existing neighbourhoods has come up again at Edmonton City Council and one mayoral candidate and his party is making this an election issue.
Tim Cartmell and his party Better Edmonton sees the zoning bylaw and changes to how properties are rebuilt as a major issue in the coming election.
Cartmell wants more focus on new neighbourhoods and under used inner-city land.
Both Edmonton and Calgary changed their zoning bylaws last year and as a result the city has seen a huge growth in housing redevelopment.
16,519 dwelling units were approved last year which represents a 30% increase over 2023.
40% were approved in the re-development area which is inside the Anthony Henday Drive ring.
The city says that 242 development permits were issued for sites large enough for 8plex builds and nearly half were used for projects of fewer than 8 units.
Neighbours have brought forward issues with parking, waste removal, and development layouts that outright look down into neighbouring backyards.
City planners have suggested: reducing building length maximum from 30 meters to 205 metres or half the sites length, whichever is less.
They’ve also suggested limiting building entrances to 4 per side along interior lot lines with the goal of minimizing yard impact.
They also have recommended including a covered main entrance facing the street and having windows over a minimum of 15% of the facade area.
Debby Waldman of the city’s Belgravia neighbourhood said, “our concern is that change is happening with no respect for the people who live here, who live in the neighbourhoods that seem to have fallen prey not to thoughtful safe and liveable design and development, but to deep-pocketed developers.”
Mayor Sohi who is not running for re-election (we can see why) defended the moves by saying we’re living through an affordability crisis and cited the concerns from some residents as due to misinformation.
We went through the numbers here, 8-plex has an interesting sound to it and that’s what the media has decided to focus on.
But the reality is that in a lot of these mature neighbourhoods we’re dealing with lot sizes upwards of 50 feet wide that were single family sometimes duplex housing. Now there are cases where those same lots can be used for 4 or 8.
Granted 8 isn’t all that common but the pains are still present and visible with 4.
Most of the present city council is for the current zoning plan.
As an example, councillor Michael Janz wanted to explore architectural and design changes.
But those opposed including councillors Karen Principe and Jennifer Rice supported reducing the number of dwellings allowed on corner and mid-block sites but were voted down.
Tim Cartmell said, “I’ve been rallying against things like Blatchford for years. There are opportunities to actually meet a lot of the need and a lot of the pressure we’re feeling if we just get out of our own way when it comes to policies around those open spaces, those great big open spaces.”
Cartmell also announced this week a slate of candidates to run under his Better Edmonton banner including current councillor Karen Principe and former Edmonton Police Association President Michael Elliot.
Better Edmonton will focus on efficient public services, fiscal responsibility, and a safe streets policy.
Better Edmonton has the largest slate of candidates but other presently registered slates and parties include Edmonton First and the Principled Accountable Coalition for Edmonton or PACE.
We’ll have more about the municipal elections in Alberta later this year as we get closer to that event but in the meantime on zoning there is at least one group speaking out on the issues.
It’s not misinformation when people can’t use their yards. It’s not necessarily 8-plex buildings causing the problems, it can be the smaller ones.
A city council that doesn’t take this seriously will have their electoral fortunes impaired.
The people who pay taxes and live in these mature neighbourhoods deserve more of a say than the city or any developer, foreign or domestic, that comes by.
This issue will undoubtedly come up in the election and will offer Edmontonians an opportunity to shift from what has been a progressive angle for many years.
Supplementals:

BC communities disappointed as Eby rejects pipeline push from other premiers

This past week's first minister's meeting brought several interesting quotes to the public, who are eager to find out exactly what direction the country is going to be going in, under the newish management of Prime Minister Mark Carney.
One of the topics discussed was the idea of 'nation-building projects', a central theme of Carney's campaign, one where big infrastructure and energy projects are needed to bring the country together, boost the economy, create jobs, and reduce our reliance on the US market for our goods.
For many western Canadians, this was a moment of hope, as energy projects in the West have been stifled for the last decade under Justin Trudeau. Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario was also hopeful too, seeing that he was visibly excited about all the new nation-building projects that could now get underway with a supportive Prime Minister and federal government.
Ford had said heading into the meeting between premiers and Prime Minister Mark Carney that he was confident Eby and Carney would "work things out" regarding a second pipeline. Ford even went so far as to say that BC Premier David Eby would "change his mind" on oil pipelines and would eventually come to support another one.
Eby quickly responded, dousing water on that idea, however. Eby says in response to Ford's remarks on Monday that the publicly-owned TMX pipeline is already running through B.C., and the province doesn't support lifting the ban on oil tankers off British Columbia's northern coast.
He says it's not his job to tell Ford it's "extremely unlikely" there will be a tunnel under Toronto's Highway 401, or tell Alberta Premier Danielle Smith her "vision" for a pipeline connecting Alberta and northern B.C. is "many, many years off" with no proponent in sight. Eby says his job instead is to protect the interests of British Columbia by bringing forward "shovel-ready" projects, but did not say what those were.
Eby himself wasn't at the premier's meeting, as he's been in Asia on a trade mission for the past few weeks.
Interim federal Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer called B.C.'s premier a "radical" for not throwing his support behind a new oil pipeline through the province. Scheer said: "One way to deal with the Americans is from a position of strength, but now the prime minister is saying that he will not even approve a new pipeline unless there is consensus. This is already unravelling. The radical B.C. premier is saying no pipeline through his province."
Deputy BC Premier Niki Sharma, standing in for Eby while he is in Asia on a 10-day trade mission, said Scheer's comment isn't constructive at a time when Canada needs to stick together to fight Trump's tariffs.
If the BC NDP doesn't want to approve of another pipeline, they could try to delay efforts by the federal government to put one through, which would run up costs and make it unfeasible to build.
Joe Calnan, an energy security analyst with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, said the B.C. government could make it extremely difficult to build a new pipeline, given the control it would have over permitting. Calnan said that under the current regulatory environment, an east-to-west pipeline could cost between $60 billion and $80 billion.
Calnan said: "The federal government would probably need to provide something in return to the government of B.C. in order to make this happen. And so that's kind of the transactional nature of this."
Eby's resistance to the project has sparked dismay among some political leaders about his decision – in particular from the premiers of Alberta and Ontario.
According to Kevin Moutray, mayor of the district of Vanderhoof, the region received an economic boost when a work camp operated near the community for several years for the Coastal Gaslink natural gas pipeline running from near Dawson Creek in the northeast part of the province to Kitimat on the northwest coast.
Moutray said: “At one point, we had a 950-man camp here in Vanderhoof. And then, of course, there was the camp at Lejac afterwards. And I think we really saw that most businesses that pivoted to make sure that they were ready to take advantage of that business saw a lot of increased traffic.”
While Eby being on a mission in Asia to diversify our trading partners is a good thing, completely dousing any idea of nation-building is definitely not. Passing up the first minister's meeting is not helpful and stands to set our province aside from the West. British Columbia may already be isolated from the rest of the country geographically, and now thanks to the BC NDP, we may also be isolated politically too.
Supplementals:

Firing Line

The Strong Borders Act

The Carney government this week announced the Strong Borders Act or Bill C-2. It amends a flurry of other Bills with the idea of securing our borders, combatting fentanyl and organized crime, and combatting money laundering and terrorist funding.
First and foremost the Bill has sections aimed at reducing the load on our immigration system.
Asylum claims made by people who’ve been in Canada for more than a year (i.e. students and temporary residents) won’t be referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.
People who also enter Canada between points of entry and make a claim for asylum after 14 days would also not be referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.
These changes make it harder for students, temporary workers, and those who enter the country illegally to stay here under the guise of asylum.
This has long been a problem that we’ve faced since the early days of the Trudeau administration.
Secondly, the Bill addresses security in broad strokes from allowing Canada Post to open mail for inspection more broadly and would allow for CSIS, the police, and other law enforcement agencies to receive information about internet subscribers without a warrant.
The bill would allow such a demand without a warrant if there were “reasonable grounds to suspect” that a crime could be committed.
The entire discussion in the Bill comes down to Lawful Access. This is something that governments have tried to get access to since 1999.
In 2010 a lawful access Bill was tabled that would’ve granted customer name, address, phone number, email address, Internet protocol address, and a series of device identification numbers without court oversight.
In 2014 the Supreme Court ruled that there was a reasonable expectation of privacy for internet subscriber information.
In 2017 the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security recommended against introducing reforms.
Last year the Supreme Court expanded on their 2014 privacy safeguards in the Bykovets decision ruling that “if section 8 of the Charter is to meaningfully protect the online privacy of Canadians in today’s overwhelmingly digital world, it must protect their IP addresses.”
Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa’s Canada research chair in internet law, said, “The Supreme Court, I think, has been pretty unequivocal about the reasonable expectation of privacy that internet users have in their subscriber information and IP addresses, and because of that, that means you need a warrant… It seems to be entirely possible the court is still going to insist that there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy with even that information, and so it similarly still requires a warrant.”
The Bill also uses a new term, electronic service provider, which is designed to extend beyond telecoms and internet providers be including the likes of Google and others. The ramifications for this are on par with legislation seen in the UK where the government can access logs and data from ISPs easily.
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree told reporters he was open to changes and his spokesperson said the government was responding to a “long standing request from law enforcement” and that the Bill would help combat the fentanyl crisis as well as online crimes against children - the same line the Conservatives used in 2014 that drew fire from the media.
At this point we get to why this story is covered here at Western Context: the Bill says it’s about the border but the broader issues of privacy are left to the wind.
The UK has one of the largest surveillance and censorship regimes of any democratic country. The Supreme Court has put in place the idea of reasonable protections of consumer data but the government is trying again.
We’re left to ask the uncomfortable question if Mark Carney and his government is trying to make Canada more like the UK.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

“[Santa Carney]’s coming, and his sled was full of all sorts of stuff. Now, he’s taken off back to the North Pole. He’s going to sort it out, and then he’s going to call us.” - Ontario Premier Doug Ford at the premier’s meeting with Mark Carney.

Word of the Week

Nation-building - constructing or structuring a national identity using the power of the state.

How to Find Us
Westerncontext.ca

westerncontext.ca/subscribe

westerncontext.ca/support

twitter.com/westerncontext

facebook.com/westerncontext

Show Data

Episode Title: Building Our Nation
Teaser: The Premiers meeting shows hope for the future, zoning bylaws divide Edmonton’s council, and David Eby rejects any notion of a second oil pipeline. Also, the Strong Borders Act may be more about internet privacy.
Production Code: WC-421-2025-06-07
Recorded Date: June 7, 2025
Release Date: June 8, 2025
Duration: 59:11
Edit Notes: Strong Borders Gary Anandasangaree

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX