Listen to the entire debate as part of LiveWire Calgary’s ongoing coverage of the 2025 elections happening in Calgary
Hundreds of Calgarians spent their Sunday afternoon listening to party candidates from almost all of the major parties in Canada, during one of the few all-party debates in the city during the 2025 federal general election.
Candidates Beau Shaw with the NDP, Greg McLean with the Conservatives, Jayden Baldonado with the Green Party, Lindsay Luhnau with the Liberal Party, and Scott Fea with the Rhino Party attended.
Robert Hawley with the People’s Party of Canada was unable to attend the debate due to a scheduling conflict, said debate organizer Dan Allard, co-founder of Cold Garden Brewing, where the debate was held.
“We mean it when we say we want to be community partners, and we’ve got a nice platform where people tend to come here on a sunny Sunday already. So what better way to support the community than offering up our candidates in a candid environment, beer in hand, for some casual discourse to really hope that everybody gets informed on voting,” Allard said.
“Beer makes the world go around to put it simply, but I think, and honestly everybody immediately responded ‘yes.’ The People’s Party of Canada who just wasn’t able to make it based on a scheduling conflict, but yeah, an enthusiastic yes was immediate to our request to come and do the candidates’ debate, and I think it’s because it’s a bit more of a relaxed environment.”
The April 13 debate was held in two parts, with four formal questions previously given to candidates to respond to, and five selected from audience participation during a short intermission in the debate.
Despite a few hecklers at some of the candidates’ responses, the discourse largely was respectful for those vying to be the next federal representative for Calgary Centre.
“Things can get charged in these debates, or stuffy, one of the two. When it’s out at a brewery and you got dogs around, you know it’s gonna be a civilized discourse,” said Allard.
It was standing room only, filled to the fire-code maximum inside Cold Garden, and a lengthly line outside to listen to speakers.
The pre-given questions were about what each party had planned to reduce the cost of living, how could their party promote a balanced energy strategy that can be embraced by all Canadians, what was their party’s plan to diversity the economy of Alberta, and how could their party ensure that all Canadians have regular and timely access to a family doctor.
Candidates by and large agreed that more had to be done to support Alberta’s energy economy, while the mix and the blame of why that hasn’t been the case was given to various causes like Alberta’s United Conservative Government or to the federal Liberal Party of Canada.
Much of the debated centred on how to best address economic issues.
“We’re going down in our affordability, we’re going down in our lifestyles, and we’re paying more taxes, more interest to offshore accounts. This is something that can’t be sustained. So, the number one thing you have to do is make sure you get back to balance and stop writing huge deficits,” said Calgary Centre incumbent Greg McLean.
Alternatively, Green Party candidate Baldonado suggested that Canada’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, and a universal basic income is the solution to affordability issues.
“With a wealth tax, we can ensure that those hoarding all the wealth and keeping everyday, ordinary working class Canadians like me and you from prosperity,” Baldonado said.
Liberal candidate Luhnau defended her party’s work to support Alberta’s oil and gas industry, saying that it was the Liberal Party of Canada who built a new pipeline to market for oil and gas companies.
“Calgary can be recognized as a global energy leader in all things energy. We have the people smarts here. We have the technology and we have the innovation, and we need someone strong in Ottawa who is going to get funding and investment to Calgary for a clean energy transition,” she said.
NDP candidate Shaw said that the federal government under the NDP would provide support to train workers to transition them to clean energy, and to support the cleanup of Alberta’s orphan wells.
“There are new wind-harnessing technologies. There are new solar harnessing technologies that our government has yet to invest in, and I know that the NDP will be pushing for that level of investment,” Shaw said.
Many mentions of Trump administration and Mark Carney, little on Pierre Poilievre and none on Singh
One of the most provocative questions asked in the second round of audience questions, which drew gasps and some jeers, was a question about why their party leader was the best person to deal with Trump.
McLean said that voting for the Conservative Party was voting for a cabinet of leaders rather than a single leader—a separation from regular focus put onto Pierre Polievre, who has campaigned on becoming the Prime Minister of Canada.
“Canada does not have a presidential system where you’re electing one person to lead the whole country. You are electing a cabinet-level government,” McLean said.
His attacks on the Liberal party as part of his answer, rather than providing reasons to support Polievre as leader, drew hecklers in the crowd.
“I can tell you, after five and a half years of being in the House of Commons, the front bench in the Liberal Party is tired and worthless. I want to talk about who’s held up all of the projects that have been built that should have been built in Canada at this point in time, and put us in the position we are in,” he said.
“We are entirely dependent now on the United States for our trade relationships. We did not build our pipelines to eastern Canada. We did not build our pipelines for Western export of our natural gas, nor our oil. These were canceled by this Liberal government. Therefore, we are actually in a position where we are beholden to a trading partner that is putting his thumb on us.
“Pierre Poilievre has had policies for how long now to change that situation for the entirety of this liberal government, get these pipelines built, get oil and gas developed, get our economy working.”
Luhnau, for her part, said that she would not be running as a Calgary Centre candidate if not for the selection of Liberal Party of Canada leader Mark Carney.
“I never would have thrown my hat in the ring six months ago, but we have the chance to have a brilliant Prime Minister lead Canada through some of the worst economic turmoil that we’ve experienced in a long time.”
“Lucky for us, he was also appointed by a Conservative government as the Governor of the Bank of Canada to lead us through the 2008 financial crisis. In addition to that, as the Governor of the Bank of England, he led the UK through Brexit. So we are well positioned with the leader in Mark Carney to weather the storm against Donald Trump.”
Shaw, referencing recent polls, said it was not realistic that the NDP would form a majority government and did not mention NDP leader Jagmeet Singh in his answer.
“I think Canadians can be honest and say that there will not be an NDP majority in this government, right? But our country functions most effectively with a minority government. It’s how we got our universal healthcare in the ’80s. It’s how we got dental care, pharma care, and universal childcare. That’s how we function as a country when our voices are represented more fulsomely at the table,” Shaw said.
Canadian electoral reform and future of CBC were also up for debate
The future of Canada’s first-past-the-post system was also a question posed to candidates, with Shaw speaking for the majority of candidates agreeing that proportional representation is the preferred form of electoral reform in Canada.
“We do not have enough Senate representation in Alberta. We don’t have enough representation in Alberta. I would love to see anything beyond first past the post. The NDP has long advocated for a referendum to be put to the public to decide on a voting system that works for everyone, where one vote counts for one vote,” Shaw said.
Luhnau said that despite her party’s inability to fulfil a campaign promise to deliver on electoral reform, she would be personally pushing the Liberal Party of Canada to reconsider the issue.
“When I was seeking the nomination here in Calgary Center, I did get to go through an interview process with the party, and they asked me if there was any previous Liberal policies that I did not agree with or would want to champion a different stance on and I said, being from Calgary, being from Western Canada, many of us gave our hopes to the Liberals in 2015 anticipating electoral reform so that we could have a voice at the table,” she said.
“It broke a lot of our hearts that it didn’t go ahead. So, I will be an advocate within the party to bring back proportional representation. I’m not sure how much support I’m going to get, but that is my stance on it.”
McLean attacked the inability of the Liberal Party to fulfill that promise.
“2015 Liberal problems. 2017 rejected. So there’s a pattern here whenever there’s a promise made for a certain change, and that doesn’t happen after they’re elected,” he said.
“We’ve got to get a better representation in the Senate. Take a look at Australia’s model. Australia moved their Senate from an elected Senate to a proportional system of record representation in the Senate, whereas their House of Commons is still first past the post. It’s an evolution that’s actually working in some respects,” he said.
His response to a question about the future of the CBC, and whether it should be funded by the Government of Canada, drew heckles of “coward” from the Cold Garden audience alongside loud boos.
“My party’s position on this is defund the CBC. Let’s look at what that means,” he said.
“Let’s look at what we’re talking about with CBC. How many Canadians watch CBC Television? Four per cent of Canadians watch CBC Television News. However, the radio, 40 per cent of Canadians, Calgarians in particular, listen to the radio. So the radio is a service that is actually serving Canadians.”
And while that figure referenced by McLean is numerically correct, it references the share of viewing hours that Canadians view in total for CBC news programming via CRTC figures, the total number of Canadians that watch CBC news programming nationally is 16.9 per cent. Across all CBC categories, 88.7 per cent of Canadians during a week watch some form of CBC content on television, according to the same figures.
“People like the radio, so let’s continue to make sure we have CBC Radio. People need the services in remote parts of this country. We need the indigenous language services, and we need Radio Canada, which frankly provides, gets a lot of coverage in Quebec,” said McLean.
“So these are things where we’re going to continue to make sure we have some support for the CBC, but find different ways of delivering the programming the CDC does right now to English Canadian television.”
The other candidates opposed McLean’s position, with Shaw saying that there was a quorum in support of the CBC from a cultural and sovereignty standpoint for Canadians.
“We’ve got quorum here at the table. We all support the CBC. I listen to CBC Radio every single day, and I’ve listened to CBC every single day since I was a child growing up in Thompson, Manitoba. It was the only exposure I had to global issues in my small town in rural Manitoba. I’m really, really grateful for CBC programming,” Shaw said.
“It made me question a lot of things in my local area, and it really opened up my mind.”
