The News Rundown

Canada's Olympic chief calls for sports funding boost as medal target missed

At a Games that delivered fewer medals than Canada hoped for, the country's Olympic chief David Shoemaker delivered a pointed message to Prime Minister Mark Carney: if the nation wants to remain a winter powerhouse, it must invest like one.
Canada's target at Milano Cortina was to surpass the 26 medals won at Beijing 2022. But they will fall short of that benchmark, with just 21, including just 5 gold, after losing both gold medal games in women's and men's hockey to the United States.
The celebrations of the US men's team with the current US administration has likely left a bad taste in the mouths of many Canadian's, but what we shouldn't feel bad about is the performance of all of our Canadian athletes at the games, many of whom exceeded expectations and made our country proud.
But with that, we need to realize that Canada wants to remain a winter sport powerhouse, it must invest like one. Canadian Olympic Committee Chief Executive Shoemaker said: "It was just a month ago that Prime Minister (Mark) Carney made international headlines with his inspiring speech at Davos. In that speech, he talked in large part about ambition, about the strength of Canada at home and the values we can and should project to the world. Through [the power of] sport, we have a real opportunity, if not a responsibility, to be ambitious about how we want to show up as a nation, both on the world stage and in communities across the country."
The COC, Canadian Paralympic Committee and the country's national sport organisations had hoped for a $144 million increase in funding from Carney's first budget on November 4 to offset two decades without a significant boost. Instead, the federal budget had no new money for sport.
Canada's performance in Italy was a far cry from the best-ever 29 the once mighty winter sports nation brought home from the 2018 Pyeongchang Games. Canada also finished top of the table in gold medals with 14 in 2010 in Vancouver and third overall with 26 in total. For most of this millennium, there has been a sound system in place thanks to Own The Podium, an initiative that was created in 2005 to boost Canada’s medal hopes at Vancouver 2010.
This wasn't seen for much of the Milano-Cortina Olympics. Canada's moguls legend Mikael Kingsbury finally delivered Canada's first gold medal on Day 9 of the Games, the nation's longest wait for an Olympic title since the 1988 Calgary Games.
CBC Sports’ Chris Jones reported that Italian athletes get paid roughly seven times what Canadians do for medals, making even Quadruple-medallist speed skater Courtney Sarault’s $65,000 earnings for her four medals so far seem paltry.
Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton CEO Kien Tran: “The fear is that this goes to a pay-for-play [model]. You don't necessarily get your best athletes — you get the ones that can afford it.”
Canadian long track speed skater Laurent Dubreuil is sounding the alarm about the lack of funding for Canadian amateur sports and the consequences it could have on the country's success at the Winter Olympics going forward.
Dubreuil said: "Things have to change. As long as athletes get good results, it kind of masks the problems. I can't speak for other athletes in other sports, because [the speedskating] federation is one of the best funded, but even though I've been on the national team for 16 years, I've noticed that with each Olympic cycle, there are fewer funds available than in the previous cycle."
Rather than returning home to see his loved ones and savour his Olympic triumph, Dubreuil chose to go directly to Heerenveen, a decision that allowed him to save on the cost of plane tickets. He's also moved in with a host family to save on costs. Dubreuil described his lifestyle when he is competing as "frugal."
To remedy the funding shortfall, Dubreuil used the example of Norway, which topped the medal standings at the 2026 Olympics with 41 medals (18-12-11), despite being a country with barely more than half the population of Quebec.
Regardless, if Canada wants to see more triumphs on the world stage, Olympic funding may be a critical part of that.
Supplementals:

Thursday was budget day in Alberta. A budget that produced a $9.4b budget deficit.
The budget sees no personal or corporate income tax increases and no major cuts to services.
The provinces debt continues to increase to $110.8b with the finance minister touting the province’s debt to gdp ratio of 12.9% compared to other provinces even though this is up from 7.2% in 2024-25.
This budget is largely predicated on the price of oil with a forecast price of $60.50USD per barrel causing the deficit. If the price of oil were to go up the budget deficit would not be as deep.
Education which was the focus around the teachers strike in late 2025 saw a 7.7% increase in spending while health saw a 5% increase in spending. This money was asked for by the stakeholders during the strike and the government seemingly delivered.
This amounts to $722m in new education funding and $1.9b in new healthcare funding.
The government again pointed to the amount of people who have come to Alberta as a primary culprit. Finance Minister Nate Horner said, “There’s a real appetite to just look across the system when you’re looking at Alberta, about who’s here, who’s paying taxes, who’s using the services.”
The Finance Minister also raised questions of the three levers of the budget: debt, taxes, and service cuts. He particularly felt that Albertans did not want new taxes nor service cuts so debt was chosen in this budget.
He also asked the people of Alberta to think of the tax structure of the province saying, “This is a novel time, but there will be lots of questions, no doubt, and there should be at kitchen tables everywhere: is this the right tax structure for the province?”
This has spurred the media into action asking Albertans across the major cities what they think of a PST.
While the knee jerk reaction of the media and economists sees the PST as fixing Alberta’s budgetary problems, Horner hinted there might be another way.
He said, “We have made some small changes in this budget around the tourism levy, increasing from four to six per cent. There’s a rental car tax addition. There is some challenges there, but I think it’s something we need to hear from Albertans.”
This signifies that the province before the next budget cycle will engage with surveys or referendums about the future of the taxation structure of the province.
Enacted during Ralph Klein’s tenure, there is a law that says that the province must ask the people by way of a referendum before introducing any provincial sales tax.
The government could do this.
They could also just ask about whether people would prefer a sales tax or service cuts and new user fees.
A more radical option would be to copy some American states. They have no income tax. Instead they have a sales tax of a sizeable amount. Though it’s not immediately clear if the budget numbers would make sense for such a proposal in Alberta.
Overall the budget walked a line where it sought to not upset many stakeholders.
Calgary and Edmonton got $2.35b worth of shared LRT investment over 3 years. $1.77b was delivered for licensed childcare funding. Investment continued in the electricity grid and many other sectors throughout the province.
The NDP’s criticism of the budget focused around spending so much and delivering so little.
Nenshi said, "The UCP government has spent so much money to deliver so little for Albertans. After seven years under the UCP, life is demonstrably harder for Albertans, and this budget doesn’t help. In fact, it makes life more expensive and doesn’t fix health care or education."
This is a decision that Albertans will make when they go and vote in the fall of 2027. Whether or not the UCP has delivered and done what they can to make life easier.
The UCP had passed legislation that requires budgets to be balanced and if they are not there must be a pathway to balance. This budget does not have that.
As a result, fiscal hawks have also panned the budget.
Much like BC this week the Alberta UCP have managed to deliver a budget that no one is really happy about but they did it with a smaller deficit and fewer new taxes.
Supplementals:

NDP set to weaken B.C.'s FOI law and keep public in the dark

The BC NDP's spring budget, introduced last week to much financial despair and wailing, was what has dominated headlines over the past week and a half. But what the NDP have been doing that hasn't been covered by much of the media may indeed be even more insidious than a huge deficit budget including tax raises and service cuts.
Amendments introduced this week would give public officials greater leeway to delay responding to requests for information and they could challenge whether the request provides “enough detail” to implement. Those same officials could reject requests altogether if, in their opinion, the effort to respond would interfere with the operations of the provincial government. This is part of a quiet plan to weaken the public access provisions of B.C. 's freedom of information legislation, which is a tool that the public and media can use to access government information, oftentimes things that the government would prefer to not become public.
Citizens’ Services Minister Diana Gibson barely hinted at those changes Thursday in introducing Bill 9, with its amendments to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, or FIPPA. The only hint at the clawback on access was a reference to the introduction of “practical efficiencies to how freedom of information requests are processed” and to “helping public bodies better manage growing volumes and complexity” of requests.
Even so, Gibson claimed, the changes would be implemented “without limiting people’s right to access.” She said: “These proposed changes will support more connected, people-centred government services while maintaining strong privacy protection.”
The B.C. Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Association, on the other hand, says that they have “serious concerns about the legislation, warning that it weakens it at a time when government has failed to meaningfully implement its own record-keeping law.”
The existing law says they are supposed to get back to the applicant “without delay.” The amendment changes that to “without unreasonable delay,” and makes the officials themselves the judge of what is and is not reasonable.
It also grants those same heads of public bodies “the authority to decide, in their opinion, whether the request provides enough detail, to enable an experienced employee, with a reasonable effort and a reasonable amount of time, to identify the record sought.” Again, the officials themselves will decide what is “enough” and what is “reasonable.”
A third provision allows officials to disregard requests altogether if, in their opinion “responding to the request would unreasonably interfere with the operations of the government of B.C.”
Imagine how that power could be abused to trash potentially embarrassing requests at a time of supposed fiscal restraint.
Reading through this legislation, it becomes readily apparent that the New Democrats are bent on restricting public access to information under the guise of efficiency and debt reduction.
Bill 9 is a piece of a larger parcel of changes for the worse, with the NDP also stifling independent oversight of government hiring, promotions and firing by abolishing the independent merit commissioner.
Meanwhile, the NDP are looking to already turn the page on its awful provincial budget, which hiked taxes for many British Columbians while also delivering the largest deficit in the province’s history.
But the damage to the NDP's reputation has already been done. For almost 30 years, the knock against New Democrats was that they simply could not be trusted with provincial finances. All the party knew how to do, its opponents argued, was tax-and-spend its way into economic decline—and occasionally, if caught, fudge the books.
That sentiment stuck in the public mind for almost 17 years, as voters repeatedly relegated the NDP to the Opposition benches.
Among those who lived through that rise and fall was staffer-turned-MLA John Horgan. When he became premier in 2017, he had a guiding principle for modern New Democrats.
Former Premier John Horgan recalled in his memoirs published last year: “We needed to demonstrate to voters that the mythology that we could not run a peanut stand was just that—a myth. When it came to fiscal matters, we had to be better than our opponents all the time. And we needed to instill that discipline in a fractious group of people—which the B.C. NDP has always been.”
Horgan made good on his pledge. Horgan left Eby an almost $6-billion surplus in 2022. Every year since, the Eby government has spent more than it’s earned. A growing deficit has become more and more entrenched. Last week’s budget saw the deficit balloon to a record projection of $13.3 billion for 2026-27.
As it turns out, the Eby NDP have brought back the whisperings that the NDP can't run government financially, after all. And at a time when we need information on what the government is doing most, they're trying to stop that from happening.
Supplementals:

Firing Line

Australia ships LNG 25,000 kilometres to Eastern Canada amid Asian slump

Canada’s east has a huge market for LNG or liquified natural gas. Where they’re getting it though may surprise you. Eastern Canada is set to receive its first shipment of Australian LNG.
Australia is looking to diversify its markets outside of China, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia.
The tanker from Australia travelled an eye watering 25,750km around the tip of South America and arrived this week in New Brunswick.
Saint John LNG is an import hub and received three shipments this past month.
There has been zero coverage of this unorthodox deal with Australia in Canadian media outside of Bloomberg and CTV New Brunswick.
For a bit of history, in 2015 the Canadian Energy Regulator listed four proposed LNG export terminals on the east coast. None were built.
The gas could flow to the east by way of western Canada but that was stifled for over a decade by the federal government.
But what’s more shocking is that New Brunswick is known to sit on an estimated 77.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas according to Natural Resources Canada.
That would fill the Maran Gas Hector (the ship from Australia) 20,000 times.
New Brunswick knew about these resources in 1859 and in 2014 an indefinite moratorium on fracking was put in place that would prevent the province from extracting these resources.
The lesson is that Canada needs to develop its export capacity and untapped natural gas resources across the country.
That lesson could be taken from Australia where the gas aboard the Maran Gas Hector came from.
Australia is not thought of as a petrochemical exporter but since the 1980s has been working to export LNG. As of 2026 Australia has 10 LNG export hubs and the natural gas pipelines to back them up.
Compare this to Canada’s one (1) LNG export terminal in Kitimat BC that just opened last year.
Both the Japanese and Germans came to Canada seeking natural gas in recent years and it was when German Chancellor Olaf Scholze was here that Justin Trudeau himself said there was no business case for export.
Put simply, if Canada is buying gas from Australia, given our resources, there’s no reason we should not be using our own or building export hubs.
In a time where Canada seeks to decrease reliance on southern export, LNG is a safe and proven technology that many countries have developed.
By not doing that in Canada we are accepting a future of decline to make environmental groups and ourselves feel better through virtue signalling.
Virtue signalling does not build a country and does not help us diversify our exports.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

"It was just a month ago that Prime Minister (Mark) Carney made international headlines with his inspiring speech at Davos. In that speech, he talked in large part about ambition, about the strength of Canada at home and the values we can and should project to the world. Through [the power of] sport, we have a real opportunity, if not a responsibility, to be ambitious about how we want to show up as a nation, both on the world stage and in communities across the country." - Canadian Olympic Committee Chief Executive David Shoemaker on Canada’s Olympic future.

Word of the Week

freedom - the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.

How to Find Us

Westerncontext.ca

westerncontext.ca/subscribe

westerncontext.ca/support

x.com/westerncontext

facebook.com/westerncontext

Show Data

Episode Title: Competitive Deficit
Teaser: Canada’s Olympic performance falls short of its target, Alberta’s budget includes a deficit, and the BC NDP try to limit freedom of information requests. Also Eastern Canada imports Australian LNG.
Production Code: WC-458-2026-02-28
Recorded Date: February 28, 2026
Release Date: March 1, 2026
Duration: 56:11
Edit Notes: None

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:X