Bubble Pop with Rachel Gilmore - January 20, 2026


Rob Ashton on what the NDP should do about pipelines, the oil tanker ban (and that AI oopsie)

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Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

161.25

Word count

640

Sentence count

19


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 It's healthy in our democracy to have a third option.
00:00:03.820 In Canada, federally, that tends to be the NDP.
00:00:07.080 And if you want to have a say in who's going to be the next leader of that party,
00:00:10.940 you have to sign up within the next two weeks to actually vote in the leadership race.
00:00:15.880 So I have been speaking to all of the leadership candidates
00:00:18.720 to make sure that you can decide if that's something you want to do.
00:00:22.020 And on today's episode, I spoke to Rob Ashton.
00:00:24.900 He is the worker's worker.
00:00:26.780 He's a union guy through and through.
00:00:28.860 and his platform reflects that. It is super focused on workers' issues. I asked him about
00:00:34.400 some of the more divisive issues within the NDP, particularly between the federal NDP and the
00:00:39.860 provincial parties, like pipelines and the oil tanker ban. And here's what he had to say.
00:00:45.300 Are you open to lifting the oil tanker ban? And more broadly, are you open to more pipelines in
00:00:52.740 Canada? We do not need, currently from the information that I have, any new pipelines.
00:00:57.340 there's no proponents so it's not even it's just there so that danielle smith can run around
00:01:04.640 screaming the sky is falling the sky is falling canada hates us right if a proponent emerged
00:01:10.600 though would you support it it would have to have free prior informed consent from all the nations
00:01:17.280 that the territories go through the community groups across the routes they would have to be
00:01:24.040 in full support of it and the provinces would have to be in full support of it because they're
00:01:29.380 the ones that matter me sitting in ottawa it's the people that matter and and as for the tanker
00:01:35.980 band i'm from british columbia i got members that work up and down this coast
00:01:41.700 the people of bc have spoken the tanker band that's not being lifted anytime soon rob has
00:01:50.860 also had sort of one of the only scandals so far in this race at least from any of the front runners
00:01:56.460 when it came out that a member of his team he said use generative ai to answer some questions
00:02:02.460 on a reddit ask me anything threat i pressed him on this issue and he had this to say about it i
00:02:08.900 didn't use ai or whatever programs using chat gpt um i'm not a fan of it i don't support it
00:02:19.300 If you're going to write a letter, use your brain and your hand.
00:02:28.800 Unfortunately, like I was answering some of the questions, I had a couple of other staff people helping me out, and I would have eyes on their answers.
00:02:39.240 And we just got overwhelmed.
00:02:40.780 Like, I wasn't expecting 150 plus questions, and we had a volunteer that unfortunately thought they were helping me.
00:02:49.300 helping out, got overwhelmed a little bit, and used a type of, I don't know if it's
00:02:55.480 chat GPT or another internet-based system, and thought they were doing a good thing,
00:03:02.100 and unfortunately did that. We have made steps to rectify the situation. I had a chat with
00:03:09.880 the young, with the person, and I just explained to them that that's not something we stand
00:03:16.000 for it's not something you want to do we have made internal messaging about the subject
00:03:24.720 it'll never happen again
00:03:27.180 it was it was tough but as a leader uh as any leader should do is it happened on my watch
00:03:40.600 so yeah i'll take i take the heat for it there's a lot more to my interview with rob ashton so you
00:03:47.900 can go and check it out wherever you like to listen to your podcast it's also on patreon
00:03:52.360 substack youtube yada yada yada so go check it out then come back here and tell me what do you
00:03:57.360 think of all this