Power Struggle
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Power Struggle
Is Canada’s Clean Economy Strategy Failing? | Karen Graham on Reality, Resilience & What’s Next
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As chair of the Resource Works Advisory Council, Karen Graham brings two decades of experience in public policy, resource development, and environmental governance. In this episode, she joins Stewart Muir to dissect Canada’s “clean economy” — from the promise of BC’s early carbon tax experiments to the patchwork of federal and provincial policies that followed.
Graham breaks down the gap between climate ideals and economic realities, questions whether Ottawa’s approach has sidelined traditional resource sectors, and explores why public sentiment is shifting back toward pragmatism. From $350/ton penalties on gas to the return of pipeline politics, this is a deep dive into what worked, what didn’t, and what Canada must do next.
Is a simpler, "all-of-the-above" strategy finally on the table?
Can Canada balance emissions goals with energy security?
What does the $144B “clean economy” really mean for GDP?
This is a must-watch for anyone tracking the intersection of policy, prosperity, and public trust.
Watch now and join the conversation.
Learn more: https://resourceworks.com
The energy conversation is polarizing. But the reality is multidimensional. Get the full story with host Stewart Muir.
Reach out to us with thoughts, questions, or ideas at info@powerstruggle.ca
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Today
Introducing Karen Graham
SPEAKER_01on Power Struggle, we're joined by Karen Graham, the new chair of the Resource Works Advisory Council. Karen brings more than two decades of experience in public policy, stakeholder relations, and resource sector leadership with pastorals at the Business Council of British Columbia, the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, a major LNG project, and even the U.S. Consulate in Vancouver. She's someone who understands how policy, trade, and public opinion shape the future of responsible resource development in Canada. Karen, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much. Delighted to be here with you.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it's it's such an interesting time. You know, we're we're sitting here, it's the end of November 2025. It's been a momentous week. We'll come back to why that is. But uh I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time because for a lot of years now, Karen, you and I, we've we've connected in our conversations around energy policy, energy reality. What our uh speaker from a couple of years ago, Vaklav Smeel, the professor from Manitoba, came out and talked about how the world really works. He even called one of his books that. Because for a lot of years, people who understand how the world really works have been looking at public policy and kind of wondering, well, this isn't how the world really works. What's what's going on here? And I just want to trace the origin of how we got to the point where there was a a belief in a green, almost a nirvana, dare I say, of uh conditions that we were going to emerge into in our time. And let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_00Well, first of all, delighted to be with you. Um very pleased to be the new chair of the Resource Works Advis Advisory Council. Uh we look forward to contributing a very diverse set of um uh expert opinions and knowledge, technical expertise uh from across very relevant disciplines. And uh in the week that just has been, um, how much more relevant could all of these uh multidisciplinary experts on our advisory council uh be come to bear on uh on the work that you do and with the Resource Works team? So we're we're thrilled to be constituted and uh and off and running.
The BC Climate Turn And Carbon Tax
SPEAKER_00But uh to to look back, so I had the privilege of running Business Council of British Columbia's Environmental Policy Committee at the time that in British Columbia that Gordon Campbell, as Premier then uh decided to embark on uh climate targets, emissions reduction, GHG emissions reduction targets, and uh a policy setting that would first require uh large businesses, so they know who they are, considered large final emitters at the time, a policy framework that was developed partly in Ottawa, but also very much in British Columbia, that would uh encourage, incent, and require businesses in the natural resource sectors and beyond, those emitting businesses, uh, to reduce their emissions meaningfully and either voluntarily or not. Um, so the consumer carbon tax came in. Uh we saw quite a lot of um public policy intellectual exchange back and forth with California. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as governor of California at the time, was really leading the charge. The California Air Resources Board, very powerful entity down there, had done quite a lot of quite technical policy leadership. That became infused in uh the BC Climate Action Secretariat, as it then was. And so what we saw was enthusiasm, and this is now talking back two decades. Two decades, yeah. To uh to a framework where uh British Columbia and certainly Ontario to an extent and Quebec really wanted to drive this within Canada to pursue a set the conditions and requirements for a future where emissions would gradually or increasingly quickly decline from industry and all forms of economic tech activity.
SPEAKER_01For those who weren't around 20 years ago, what was going on in the wider world at that time that this came about?
SPEAKER_00I think, I mean, a desire. I mean, we the public polling has tracked this over decades. I think there was a desire at uh with across the public within advocacy organizations, we can really look back to that period where there was a meaningful shift from environmental concern, broadly speaking, to a real focus on the climate. And so that brought um, I think a real power uh among the advocacy organizations. They developed very sophisticated approaches, they they found the ear of the public, um, they certainly found the ear of policymakers, as we've seen over the last 20 years. Um, to the extent that, and we can dive into this or or diverge as you wish, but to the extent that the framing of public discourse and public understanding of how the country works, how the province works, has and has had quite a powerful overlay of environmental uh concern that was considered to be a priory or above or overarching other sets of decision-making about uh prosperity, resilience in the economic sense, uh, and facets of economic development that suddenly became uh verbotent to speak about in an honest way, let alone to pursue or be seen to be pursuing by many governments across the country.
SPEAKER_01We're talking in in British Columbia, you mentioned Premier Gordon Campbell, that's a conservative small c, the the BC Liberal brand, the amalgam of the center-right parties in British Columbia, bringing in this green vision into policy through carbon tax, industrial emissions pricing, and a whole host of other measures. In that regard, he was ahead of his time. And maybe not a coincidence that similar things were happening elsewhere on the west coast of North America, whereas they say, if you pick up uh North America and shake it, the loose pieces will wind up on the left coast. Uh may be true. And nevertheless, these policies were were accepted by the public. I remember that the the day that the um the carbon tax came into effect on gasoline, because it was January 1st. So New Year's Eve, everyone's wondering, boy, what's gonna happen that we're gonna have this uh huge explosion in prices for filling your car. And I remember that day because um we were talking about it a lot at at the uh newsroom where I worked, we thought this would be a big story, but it turned out to be a nothing burger because it was a very slow incremental change. So it wasn't really this big shocking thing to the public. And um besides, I think the public was ready for it. There wasn't it never became a public issue until a little bit when they decided that instead of recycling the revenue back into green measures, they would use that money for other things that government likes to do. And that really is where that side of it came unstuck. So can you walk me through what was going on there?
Revenue Neutrality And Policy Drift
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, a hat tip to to then finance minister Carol Taylor here in British Columbia. Um she brought in what what I think we would probably universally agree across Western democracies that began to do climate pricing from a carbon taxation perspective. There were other emissions uh trading schemes and so on that the Europeans had had come up with. But to her credit, she made sure to bring in a British Columbia carbon tax that was considered revenue neutral. And so what was done with that revenue was some of it, I mean, there was certainly, you know, arguments as far as equity, but uh some of it came back in the form of uh to some extent benefit to companies, those were her paying the tax, the consumer carbon tax was actually revenue initially in its relatively pure form. The policy was intended as an environmental tax shift. So you and I pay the price when we fill our gas tanks, and it comes back to us later as a tax rebate of sorts. So it was not meant to harm the public. It was meant to incentive us and encourage us to change our behavior. That was the purpose of an environmental tax of any kind. It's to change your behavior, raise your awareness about the impacts of your choices, your decisions having on the climate. Uh successive governments, including I think the Campbell government before they departed office, uh, had begun to receive some pressure from instead of recycling this back to consumers and making us whole, so to speak, to instead apply these measures to, or sorry, instead apply the revenue received to um green measures across a suite of types of activities. So in other words, to fund innovation. Um, the Innovative Clean Energy Fund was a British Columbia government uh invention, it it uh departed a couple of years ago. Um and so that is when I think as you alluded to, some of the some questions, additional questions started to get asked as far as who was deserving, uh, were the application of these funds to uh to initiatives to further reduce emissions to maybe further incent companies to uh research and do some RD and improve their emissions performance, were these the right things to do? They, if I remember correctly, the policy was also uh the rebate to consumers was actually not touched too much. It changed in format. Uh but then there was a question of the uh after about three to five years, when you could see the province's books, it became a question of, well, is this even appropriate? Because the rebates and refunds back to uh those who have paid the tax was actually larger than what was taken in. So is that good public policy? Did it even result in an environmental benefit as was intended?
SPEAKER_01Yes, and and did it. What was the environmental benefit?
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, so I think probably the best analysis of this was done um by uh I can't remember the name of the entity right now. Maybe we can backfill this. Uh Chris Reagan and his team. McGill. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Housed at McGill. So Chris Reagan and his think tank did some analysis and pointed out, after about sort of six to eight years, I think, of the uh of the British Columbia Carbon Tax, still at that time unique in North America, um, that they they found some evidence of a decoupling between growth of the economy and rate of growth of emissions, or or change in the amount of emissions. So the claim was then that uh that you can in fact have clean growth, you can separate that trajectory. Usually, you know, it starts low, rises a little bit, the more economic activity you have, uh, the more prosperity that uh you're talking about across the economy, by definition, by assumption, implies an increase in uh greenhouse gas emissions. And they were starting to find that uh about sort of six to eight years into British Columbia's carbon tax, that those th those were diverging, that in fact you could reduce emissions and not harm your level of economic activity or growth. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01So this idea was taking hold after that that study came out. Uh I'm sure people were talking about that. Right. And now we're talking the mid-20 teens. Right. And we had a new government. We had uh liberal government, uh Justin Trudeau. Um
Federal Backstop And Patchwork Risks
SPEAKER_01this is where the story becomes maybe a little more federal than provincial. So what happened with this idea of clean growth with the Trudeau government?
SPEAKER_00That's right. Well, fully embraced, um, I think it became really a whole of government um expectation that um, in addition to a couple of other um sort of filters that every public policy from Ottawa was expected to pass through, that um economic growth was was really, I would say, especially in retrospect, became a secondary consideration to are we meaningful reducing uh climate emissions. And so in companionship to the introduction, with huge controversy, as probably most uh listeners and viewers will recall across the country, that the federal government decided to uh introduce a federal backstop to what was by then British Columbia's carbon tax, Quebec's emissions trading scheme, Ontario had something that was also dependent on uh on provincial politics there. And uh, and then of course Alberta, the elephant in the room, right? Canada's largest traditional energy producer, suddenly faced with a federal government that required a minimum uh carbon, the equivalent of carbon tax or carbon price. And if any province uh or territory, but mainly geared towards provinces, fell behind or did not introduce their own scheme that was at least as stringent, so federal, you know, sort of standardized baseline level of carbon tax introduced at, I think it was $30 per ton, that if the uh the jurisdiction in question didn't meet or exceed that, then the federal government would step in and require and collect uh the carbon tax revenue to that emissions threshold. So, as we can imagine, I mean, over the uh several years that I've been studying the Federation much longer for constitutional and other experts, um, I would say our federation is increasingly, maybe up until very recently, loosening. I don't want to say weakening, but becoming more decentralized. So this was not um this was not popular with a lot of provinces. And so we started to see, not to mention, from my vantage point at the time, um, still involved with British Columbia business organizations and a couple of uh LNG-related proponents, there were many questions around those tables about, well, we operate an interprovincial pipeline. We produce natural gas in Alberta and British Columbia. How the landscape was changing so quickly and in such unpredictable ways, and I mean this from a public policy, regulatory, and cost perspective, that executives in most of the extractive industries, especially energy, were finding that they they couldn't properly plan their own balance sheets and their five-year strategies because uh it was, I mean, this was their word uttered many times, this was a patchwork of regulation on climate policy, and it had the effect of, in addition to global, I mean Canada, we are a trading economy, but we are price takers on every source of energy. So it just had a, I wouldn't say quite a freezing effect, but near-freezing effect.
SPEAKER_01Right. And this was around the same time that the oil sands pipelines became a much larger public issue that was almost impossible to ignore, no matter where you were. And at one point there was something The Grand Bargain, I remember it being called. And it it seems to me, a decade later, that that was an inflection point. And I don't know if you agree, but um what was the grand bargain? What was that all about? Well, I think who was involved in it?
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, so my my recollection of those of the time, the understanding, first of all, that so I'm gonna actually rewind a little bit to go forward here, and the reason I want to do that is during the conservative federal government, Prime Minister Harper uh and a couple of key ministers had seen some research that pointed out the impact of
Pipelines, Activism, And The Grand Bargain
SPEAKER_00U.S. environmentally funded foundations expending huge amounts of dollars uh and high proportions of budgets in their Canadian subsidiaries in terms of the environmental movement here to focus very specifically on uh curtailing the activities of oil pipelines. If you control and limit or prohibit the movement of oil that it stays in the ground. So fast forward to sort of the mid to late 20 teens, several things had already happened. Um environmental assessments, there was a better understanding by advocacy groups of what parts of that process could and should be exploited to delay the environmental process, the application process, and also uh lodge very significant questions in the mind of the public about uh the risks, the uh costs, and the wisdom at all, of extracting oil out of the ground, particularly oil, right, out of the ground in Canada for export. And so with the arrival of the Justin Trudeau government and by then what had become a falling global price of oil, there was just a confluence of influence, should we say, in Ottawa that um the conclusion was, well, we we we should cap Alberta oil production in terms of in actual quota as well as an emissions cap, and we should um go all in on green energy. And that meant a few things: a suite of public policies, so building on the federal backstop carbon tax, um, massive amounts of public investments, and or you might call subsidies, depending on how you view this, um, for everything from the uh advancement of electric vehicles in Canada to the requirements for clean energy production at the expense of traditional, so curtailing what they saw as sunset industries. And uh and various provinces sort of either fell into line, came all along if they were already, uh if their leadership already had that mindset, um, or in Alberta's case, has been pretty well documented by uh by many observers, um, they dug their heels in and said, Why are you trying to kill Canada's best uh most prosperous and most productive? We can come back to that, if desired, um uh industry in the country. At the same time, external to Canada, all of these signals were being sent out to the world unless you were in quite a narrow suite of uh clean electricity, clean generation, clean mobility. Mobility fields, FDI, not welcome, not applicable.
SPEAKER_01Right. And we keep using this term clean. I just want to momentarily pause to dive into what is clean energy?
Defining “Clean” And Letting Perfect Win
SPEAKER_00Right. Excellent question. Here's where I'm going to defer to and maybe foreshadow a little bit a piece of work that the Fraser Institute published at the end of October this year in 2025. I co-authored with Jock Finlayson a paper on called Sizing Canada's Clean Economy. And instead of trying to come up with our own new definition for what is clean, we followed StatsCan definition, which has been, has evolved maybe over the last decade or more. But in terms of what do we mean by clean energy, non-or low-emitting sources, I think the differential that StatsCan, and we did a bit of comparative research in with other jurisdictions, including Europe, the US, the UK, and national, or in the case of the EU, continent-wide definitions of what consists of clean and what should be counted, therefore, as part of the clean economy or producing clean electricity, clean power, differs a little bit. The Canadian standard definition that we followed from StatsCAN is that clean, the clean economy, and that includes the production of clean electricity and clean energy, as well as the services associated with, must demonstrate an environmental benefit, but is not required to be purely for that purpose. So the European, the EU official definition as far as what constitutes clean energy or what comprises the clean economy, sort of one nested within the other, is that that activity may only be counted if its core purpose is to reduce emissions or reduce impacts or advance an environmental benefit. So in the Canadian context, it's actually relatively realistic in that. So a mining company, if you look at, there's a very detailed schedule that has been published by StatsCan as far as what qualifies. So if you take a mining example, there are parts now that are counted as a clean economy activity. I know this isn't quite clean energy, but a clean economy activity may include a technological innovation or process addition that either limits, say, emissions or takes care of a byproduct and limits it and removes it from the environment. That counts in Canada. That might not count in Europe, for example. So there's a bit of realism that comes into the definition. What I find a challenge in terms certainly of the way that Ottawa and some provinces have approached their definition of uh the clean economy in over the past sort of eight to ten years or so, is uh they tried to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If it wasn't perfect, if it couldn't demonstrate zero emissions now or soon, then um it was uh it was shuffled to the side and really not to be counted.
SPEAKER_01So it was the a case of the lines being drawn around that time. But it you know what sounds pretty good. We're gonna have this clean economy, no emissions, and we're gonna have a great life just like we do now in a wealthy country like Canada. And you're gonna have both of those things and it'll all be good. Is that basically the the promise? That's what I'm getting.
SPEAKER_00It probably was the promise.
SPEAKER_01So voters probably feeling pretty good about voting for a clean economy. Um there were some other things happening at that time through the late 20 teens. Do you want to talk about those a little bit?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think uh Canadians were starting to feel um that we weren't at the end of the month, we weren't feeling uh as economically resilient. And as we pursued quite a narrow path of uh what we understood to be desirable economic development in the country, a number of other things were being left to the margins that uh no longer were deemed to be an acceptable part of Canadian life. And to the extent that um hewers of water and drawers of wood, shall we say, and we're talking now about across industries, so forestry, uh mineral extraction, certainly traditional energy extraction and processing and use, um were like there there was such a social divide created about, you know, that a lot of people had to hide the badge on their uh their work suit before they went into a public space because there were there was blowback.
SPEAKER_01So it turned out this clean economy vision didn't have room for what was viewed as maybe the dirty economy. Clean versus dirty is what divide I think was. That wasn't a promise, was it? Initially, it was just the clean part. You get the clean part.
SPEAKER_00Right, right. And everyone's everyone's happy and well. Um the cracks were starting to show, right? So the uh there was a commodity cycle downturn. Some of it was coming back up, depending on you know what you're specific, whether it was copper or other metals and so on. Um, the rise of uh the electric vehicle and um semiconductors and processing massive amounts of rare earth minerals and other things were being demanded. And I would say I'm fast-forwarding a little bit here, but it's very clear now uh that China has stolen a march
Net Zero Targets And Economic Trade‑Offs
SPEAKER_00on pretty much all of the rest of the world. So while we in Canada were proceeding as though pretty much any kind of mining was not really desirable, uh certainly extraction and use of traditional forms of energy were to be sh ignored, uh tamped down, and only those, as we used to call them, independent power production, clean energy, renewable energy, and electricity applications, uh, there was a price disconnect. Uh consumers were starting to see that. You could see on your bill, you could elect to have either renewable natural gas or everything uh electricity uh provided on your bill if you were lucky enough to have that option. And then you started to see: well, already my cost of living is skyrocketing because of other pressures in life, especially in Canadian cities. And then suddenly all of the basics that I care about, I need to put gas in my tank, to drive my kids to school and go buy groceries, and I need to heat my home in the winter if I don't happen to live in an extremely temperate part of the country, which is you know a pretty small part in the winter time. Uh, I think that there was an emerging realization by um by citizens that something doesn't square here. And I think it was the dream of the clean just wasn't balanced.
SPEAKER_01But we were hearing about 100% renewables. You can have everything renewable. We were hearing about net zero. And wasn't that passed into Canadian law? Yeah, absolutely. And what is net zero?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so net zero is uh net zero fifty, twenty fifty uh was official policy of the government of Canada for the last 10, 15 years. COP, uh the Council of the Parties at the um in Paris, 2023, I think I have their probably might have their year wrong, uh, was probably uh the high watermark for UN giant gatherings to chart our climate future and to make commitments. At uh I think there was one prior to that where uh our then Canadian environment minister uh surprised most people by uh adding her voice to, well, emissions can't grow above 1.5% globally.
SPEAKER_01Degrees.
SPEAKER_00Sorry, degrees globally. What is uh what does that mean for Canadians' day-to-day life? What's certainly what does that mean in terms of economic activity? Um, and are those, this was always the question from our earlier comments about California and the the targets that were uh loudly um promised and widely reported on from California to British Columbia, and I'm thinking of the era of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gordon Campbell, uh, that we can get there from here. It never struck me that um that a hard target was the right way to go, and that when you do the hard work of looking at public policy and what it would take for all of our industries in this country to bend that curve to meet that target uh meant, and as we've learned, I'll foreshadow also a little bit some of the analysis that has been done within British Columbia on the current government's plan would have meant that our prosperity and our prospects for economic growth would have, we would have deliberately made ourselves poorer.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so we had a series of environment ministers in the federal government in Canada who became quite widely known as banner carriers for 100% renewables, for this green transition, for the clean economy, and were very much in the public eye. The first of those, of course, was Catherine McKenna. And then she was succeeded in 2021 by Stephen Gibot. Stephen Gibot was truly an eco-warrior. I mean, he repelled up, was it up or down the CN Tower, one of, and then he was arrested for doing that, and he became quite notorious as a as a campaigner in the kinds of stunts he was pulling. But that was not a disqualification to become environment minister in the in a Trudeau government. And that's where things started to get really interesting. I mean, it it seemed like the pitch of public discourse around that time, 2021, and we were in the pandemic by that time, was just growing and growing. This sense that no, we have to do this now, we have to get off fossil fuels now, because if we don't, this calamity will happen. And this was not just Canada, it was around the world. So do you feel that there was a sort of peak coming in the, you know, voters demanding that there be something happen, or when did that happen?
SPEAKER_00Two things happened in that case. So with um Stephen Gibeau as
Fracking Gains Vs Regulatory Knots
SPEAKER_00Minister of Environment, um, he was very clearly the vessel of uh the environmental movement's access straight into the prime minister's office. And so during the pandemic, I mean, the shrillness and stridency with which um the echo chamber of environmental advocates and our federally elected leaders on, well, we have to more than step changes, and we have to do it now, because uh, if we don't now, then you know tipping points and and all sorts of other rationales were used. Um interesting work has been published around this time and reflecting back to this time that says there's a great study actually by um Morgan Stanley, and it was entitled Heliocentrism. Objects are further away from the sun than you than they appear. So, what we're talking about here, and as the federal government in those in those years, very recent years now, were shoveling money out the door to hurry up, getting towards this to meet our 2020 and 2030 targets. There was, I mean, looking back, and it all it for those of us who were still living in the real world at the time, it seemed uh divorced from reality. I think for most people now, looking in the rearview mirror, it felt that this stridency and this ignoring of other real world phenomena that uh that were threatening Canada's uh certainly economic resilience, let alone will come to maybe sovereignty, uh, that that this narrow-minded, strict focus, this drumbeat, was had exceeded by quite a lot what the what the public and voter demand actually was. Felt to me, we were talking a little bit about the 2019 to 21 period, in the 2021 election, the liberal minority government in Ottawa, it was very clear that uh they took that election to be, after all of this buildup of environmental necessity, they took that election to be an environmental mandate by the entire public, never mind that they had been granted at best a minority government, to pursue their version of uh environmental and climate policy to the extent that that would continue to reshape Canada. And I think that was uh a massive mistake, as I think we're seeing a bit of a lot of a sea change in retrospect now, but also um this this sowed some very recent seeds of uh not only Discord, but these are economic own goals that we're now waking up to. And we have some catching up to do.
SPEAKER_01So over those years we saw a lot more regulation. And was it working? Was it succeeding in lowering emissions?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think by that period, no. No. What we were talking about as the economy was continuing to try to move along, although you know, Canadian growth and productivity, which some friends at other organizations have been studying for especially through the period of time we're talking about, um, emissions were growing. Economic activity was not growing at the same rate to make Canadians feel they were just even keeping up, let alone getting ahead.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell, but there were sectors of the economy that were pushing down emissions or and emissions intensity. Right.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Yeah. I mean the so the natural gas, so a couple of things happened. I mean, we're rewinding a little bit further. The uh the innovations of uh fracturing and horizontal drilling meant that natural gas extraction and use uh as a fuel source and as an as a feedstock was suddenly the most efficient way to I'll bet the environmentalists were really celebrating. Well, do we need to talk about carbon molecules? I mean, natural gas is considerably less climate uh uh unfriendly than, of course, oil, let alone coal. However, um so certain certain customer companies, customer industries uh that rely very heavily on uh on carbon-based fuel sources, so the cement industry, for example, is a very good one. The ability to shift to natural gas and other fuel sources, yes, drove down emissions, yes, reduced some costs, I think. Um British Columbia, certainly Western Canada, uh became a net beneficiary very much of this era of uh production of uh natural gas. Suddenly, without disturbing the surface of the earth, you could access previously very difficult formations uh in various basins in northeastern British Columbia and northwestern Alberta. There was a mismatch, though, between the tightening regulatory setting at federal and provincial levels and the uh revolution of uh of fracturing and uh and horizontal drilling meant that we still were not looking at optimization. This is a word I've been thinking about a lot in in recent months. Has have those industries, have the has the production of energy been optimized? For the companies that are project proponents putting hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in, are they able to do their best work and are and this is not about loosening environmental standards, by the way, this is taking a realistic and pragmatic approach to have we gone too far in taking a regulatory approach that ties an industry up in knots, ties project proponents up in knots before they can, you know, a decade before they can even put a shovel in the ground. And as they are operating an increasing patchwork of regulation that um that constricts their their best operation, both for Canadian customers and in the case, as we're talking about natural gas, for export markets. Canada has lost a huge amount of ground over the past decade. We can come to LNG, but even pipeline gas uh exports to places that um that need it, uh we are now in a place of almost being shut in until the LNG revolution.
SPEAKER_01So we we have this trend. Um more regulation, more government spending on the clean energy boom, nirvana expected around the corner. Um recently you took a look at the history, the cost, you studied the economic uh impact here, and you measured what the the cost of all of these things we've been talking about, the the new Canadian green economy, and you looked at the uh benefits from that. So let's talk about uh your study.
Sizing Canada’s Clean Economy
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So uh early this year, um my colleague Jock Finlayson and I uh produced uh some research based on uh Statistics Canada's annual data dump, if you will, and produced a piece for the Fraser Institute. And here's where I should make my caveat that the conclusions Jock and I came to are our own uh opinions about the press, if they're in the paper very clearly, they are our opinions, not necessarily those of the Fraser Institute. What we concluded, so we looked at 10 years' worth of data across several dimensions. So, in sizing the clean economy, how much has the clean economy produced? What does it make? What is the dollar value? What is the contribution to GDP? What does the employment picture look like? Are we exporting a lot? Are we importing more than we export? And what we concluded uh there has been over a 10-year period that uh the size of the and of the clean economy has indeed been growing from 2014 to 2023, when the data period ended for a study. The level, the contribution of those sectors to Canada's gross domestic product also marches in lockstap in the band of about 3 to 3.6 or 3.7% of Canada's GDP each year. So in 2023, uh Canada's clean economy, as measured and uh defined by StatsCAN, produced about $144 billion in goods and services in four categories environmental goods, environmental services, clean tech goods, clean tech services. So as defined. That represents about 3.6 to 3.7% of Canada's GDP. Over that decade, Period, you can see this march of has the clean economy had a breakout as promised and as spent heavily on by federal governments in terms of programs, policy, subsidies, incentives, to uh see a new world with uh only Canadian clean green products and energy sources. Well, in fact, uh the clean economy, the green economy, has formed roughly the same percentage of GDP out over this entire time. So it has grown in lockstep with the growth of the Canadian economy generally.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell So it hasn't expanded beyond its that that share.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell No, that's correct. I mean, what we say in the paper is this is a respectable but small share. And we see, based on studying the 10 years of data, uh, we see no reason to, despite the billions uh committed by federal and provincial levels of government, no reason to conclude that there will be a a breakout as a share of the economy, as a share of employment in the near future.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Now 3% is nothing to sneeze at. What would that be equivalent to if it was like comparable?
SPEAKER_00I think tourism forms uh about a 5% share of Canada's economy, has historically. Um I I don't know the the most recent uh figures. It's respectable, and we say simultaneously uh demonstrates a maturity whereby it probably doesn't need sector public policy supports that it has enjoyed over the past decade, given many other pressures and priorities.
SPEAKER_01But it was supposed to be growing to replace parts of the economy that were not wanted on the voyage.
SPEAKER_00That's correct. That's correct, yes.
SPEAKER_01But it didn't do that.
SPEAKER_00It has not done that. Right. So, you know, even uh I would say, you know, most policymakers would be, in looking at it from today's perspective, would be delighted at sort of a five to seven percent rate. That seems aspirational still. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01But Karen, all the way along, we were hearing every year these magnificent reports about how the clean economy was was uh bringing us forward. It was just it was gonna make all this change.
SPEAKER_00And you're saying it didn't really we found no evidence that that uh that breakout change. I mean you had referenced uh Vakalov's meal at the beginning. This is this is, I think, his central thesis for his research over many, many years, has said economies, advanced economies in Western countries, two things, require energy. At the end of the day, we we talk about energy as a sector in its own right, and it is, but we have to remember that energy is what allows us to do everything else. So every other sector of the economy is a customer of the energy of energy.
SPEAKER_01Let's suppose clean energy means not hydrocarbon energy. Right. Um so if if you've got all this clean energy, no problem, right? Right.
SPEAKER_00Well, and so this is the thing is the way that StatsCan counts the uh the clean economy. We're lucky enough to live in a province where uh where large hydropower uh supplies 92 to 94 percent of our uh electricity needs. As it turns out, the clean electricity share of what is counted as the clean economy accounts for, I think it's over 60 percent. Because it's a, I dare I say, legacy industry. It is something that British Columbia and Quebec and Manitoba have tended to enjoy for many decades.
SPEAKER_01So it was clean before it was cool to be clean.
SPEAKER_00It was called, it had to be called clean, right. And so we are already joining enjoying those benefits. Do we need to see a s a radical change in the proportion when in British Columbia we're you know, things are already pretty good. We are not a heavily hydrocarbon-based energy source province for heating and home use.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Right. But wasn't it British Columbia that decided somewhere that we had to be the cleanest in the world? It wasn't just that we had to be relatively clean, say, against provinces or states in the U.S. Right. We had to be the cleanest in the world. I think the term was climate leadership was the what what was that idea? What is that idea? Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Basically turned British Columbia into a giant laboratory. Trevor Burrus, Jr. An example for others to have the that demonstration effect.
SPEAKER_01Well, did was the lesson learned of uh did it have the intended effect?
SPEAKER_00Not clear. Not clear. I think uh I think the jury is out in the sense for I say this for a couple of reasons. I think it's it is in a tr in a time of tremendous uncertainty, uh weekly change. We're just living through a m a monumental week now. I think it is it's an appropriate time to actually have a measured response to this and not to say, well, that was a complete failure. I think it was always unrealistic for British Columbia to call itself uh the place where climate leadership happens as an exclusion to everything else. That was not helpful to the diversification and growth of the British Columbia economy. However, um we have seen, uh, on the positive side, in this province, we have seen helpful developments uh with beneficial effects spread around, say, communities, indigenous communities for sure, um, in terms of the uh step out of say diesel generation for remote communities, andor um how how companies, customer industries, uh have their own uh set of objectives that their boards have set for them in terms of sourcing the cleanest power possible, realistically. And so a new clean
Hydro’s Dominance And “Climate Leadership”
SPEAKER_00call for power that the British Columbia government has issued this past year, this is a multi-layered thing. We're not just talking about, okay, well, we're back to the Wild West uh independent power producer days of uh of say the Campbell era and so on. There are reasons that it makes sense to maybe put out another call for uh independent power, but it is layered on top of another set of challenges that I would say are made in BC that we still have to get ourselves out of the yeah.
SPEAKER_01So over these past years, there has been a sense that the the energy transition has been this kind of steady growing story. And if you ask questions like, well, are emissions going up or down, there would be all kinds of arguments on the fringe of that. We're not sure. But you've got this public narrative that it's going in this direction. But 2025 looks to me like the year when what's going on in the world caught up with what people were saying was going on in the world, because I'm looking at, you know, this is the year that Bill Gates, who quite famously was going all in on emissions reduction, using his personal fortune and great influence, to say, well, why don't we focus on mitigation, focus on disease that people suffer from that produce their health and enjoyment of life? And you also have seen uh countries in Western Europe that uh are suddenly using fossil fuels after years and years of condemning, wagging their fingers, I felt, at Canada for daring to be a producer of hydrocarbons that the world seemed very happy to want to buy and use. And now suddenly Europe is either uh uh watching its industries decline or it's going to import LNG from Texas or maybe one day from Canada. So you've got um You've got China, which uh is a confounding example. On the one hand, it's an example for the renewables advocate. They can say, look at all the solar, look at all the wind, look at the leadership electric cars. And that's perfectly true, I think. But at the same time, China is building those components using probably coal, fired, and electricity. They spent half a trillion dollars on drilling for oil and gas in China's borders over the last five or six years. So the idea that they've gotten off petroleum it's very difficult to show. In fact, the new Transmountain pipeline is mostly supplying China now. So China definitely is growing its appetite. So you got both these things happening and uh and and there are arguments over which is true, but they're both true. I mean, i i it it it it seems uh like we are in a period where things that the public was was assuming to be true for a long time uh aren't proving out the same way. What's going on?
SPEAKER_00We I mean 2025 is the year where uh reality crashed into the very carefully constructed narrative um that had been the accepted wisdom promoted by the federal government and many provincial governments over the years. So we are finally realizing, thanks to you know some challenges with our southern neighbor, that uh to be resilient actually is to we actually have to think very carefully about what we are producing for ourselves. We have to remember, as a small open trading economy, we only grow the pie as helpful as it is to buy Canadian. And I subscribe to that. I do it as much as possible in my personal life. There is a big rationale for doing that among our corporate networks and companies and across the economy generally, but we only get better when we export. In terms of the mix, so you raised you mentioned China and Europe, I think they they are encountering their own uh reality, of course, Europe for different reasons. Um I think the Chinese have been pragmatic all along. It isn't all of at least they they have been quite clear about what they were doing and why. The answer that we're coming to here, and I think we were seeing the signals from uh from Prime Minister Kearney's government this week, it has to be in all of the above strategy. Different energy sources, uh with a bit more of an agnostic approach to where they come from and how they are used. That should actually be for the market decide to decide. And so we're seeing, I think the you know, an image I come back to over as far as what's happened in the past few months is the scales are falling from people's eyes. We're realizing uh how much poorer we have made ourselves in terms of productivity and per capita prosperity across the country by deliberately shutting in the type of activities that are most helpful for the Canadian economy as a whole and most productive when they are used in other things or exported. And here I'll I'll just raise um, I think, very relevant research that uh that was conducted by our friend David Williams over at the Business Council of the BC study he he spoke to later in October. Productivity is probably a pretty difficult concept still for people to get their heads around. But the numbers don't lie. So if we take the US uh economy as a whole, benchmarked at 100 tends to happen, right? Index, you put your benchmark at 100. So Canadian as a cross across the whole economy, can the Canadian worker on a per hour basis generates $62.
2025 Reality Check: China, Europe, Markets
SPEAKER_00This is all in US dollars per his analysis, $62 for every $100 of uh activity generated by the average American worker across the American economy. He then broke it down by sector. The mining industry in Canada generates an average of $300 in terms of productivity per hour worked. In the oil and gas industry, it's $1,000. So if I'm Mark Carney sitting in Ottawa, and as his former role as governor of the Bank of Canada, he would have had access to all of this macroeconomic and maybe even more granular data. So as Prime Minister, and he's realizing he the pressure for diversification of activity in Canada's economy, both as customer industries to the energy industry, but very much the energy industry itself, why would you take something that is that productive and a dominant goods export goods uh source and constrain it further or continue a policy of deliberate constraint when we are stagnating, have stagnated as a country in terms of our economic productivity, how how prosperous, how well do you feel when you have to go to the grocery store? And we can talk about inflation as well, obviously plays a very significant role. And so juxtaposed with these pressures, you then see uh in terms of real-time public opinion uh that has been studied over years by, I'm gonna uh source uh Nanos, Nick Nanos, as well as Polster, as well as uh just uh a day ago, the Angus Reed Institute also does public polling and other types of research, that uh Canadians have in the month of October, Canadians have public attitude or have attitudes towards uh energy production and use in the economy, as well as benefits of the export of oil and gas to improve energy security and uh security of supply around the world, we're now talking about levels of about 84% of Canadians view that as a positive, not just today, but as a key component of Canada's future economy. So, and the Angus Reed Institute uh polled this week yesterday specifically on uh what if a theoretical mooted pipeline from Alberta to northern British Columbia was built as contemplated in the MOU just signed by Canada and Alberta? What are British Columbians' attitudes to that? Well, they are actually above 50 percent. They're in the high 50s to 60. All right.
SPEAKER_01So, Karen, a whole generation has been trained to believe that the uh clean prosperity we we crave is coming. Is the idea of a pipeline being built aligned to that? Do people think, well, this is great, this pipeline is going to be safe because we've seen new pipelines recently built in Canada, Trans Mountain, Coastal Gas Link. They don't seem to be causing any problems. So I I I wonder if that's what's going on, that that people are saying, hey, I accept this, I'd like another one because that that's consistent with uh everything I've been told. This will be part of our clean future.
SPEAKER_00I think it might be more subtle than that. I don't know. I mean, you'd have to poll specifically on that question. I think a clue is in some of the uh maybe the sub-questions that um that Nano's research asked on that. I think it's less um a belief that these projects that a pipeline project and the uh production, transmission, and export of oil forms by definition a part of the clean economy. That may not be the case as Canadians have come to understand the clean economy. What I think is happening is the reintroduction of pragmatism as far as this makes sense for us, it can be done safely. Canada has an incredible track record, um, among the best in the world. Not only of, and this is where we come back to, let's not lose some of the better parts of public policy that has been introduced over the past couple of decades in terms of uh not so much hard emissions caps, but per capita emissions basis, taking an incentive-based approach rather than uh sort of a carrot as opposed to a stick. So we can now go out to the world and say, and I think this is resonating with Canadians to get it in answer to your question. It's not to say, well, this nest obviously this forms part of the clean and green economy. Probably Canadians wouldn't say that, but what they would say is we understand that we have industries to be proud of, a world-leading safety record and innovation record when it comes to applying technologies and processes to limit emissions. And uh we now have a it's okay to say again that uh that this resource or set of group of resources can make us economically resilient, we can be proud of them again.
SPEAKER_01Right. Well, I think you're saying it sounds like rather than being overly concerned or greatly concerned whether this is or is not the clean path that was the retail offering of some political parties for a time, rather it is Canadians for themselves deciding, well, you know, I think we have to look around the world and and we have to make decisions as to what will support what we think is possible, and and maybe it's that more practical individual decision that's driving this.
SPEAKER_00I think so. I think that there's um, I mean, the uh a pragmatism, as as we've said. I think that there is um a very adult appreciation of trade-offs. We were told for many years that we didn't have to trade anything off to have what might be considered a green dream. Well, there are trade-offs and we've now experienced them. So I think um I think there's also an impatience with um the dreaminess, maybe, of some some previous policy. The answer um, I think, as I say, lies a little bit in some of those sub-questions that were asked by Nanos. Do you think that Canada's oil and gas resources should be developed in the face of opposition by parties? And the three parties that uh were defined and that uh survey respondents were asked to opine on provincial governments, communities, and indigenous groups. And
Grid Stress, AI Loads, And Reliability
SPEAKER_00it is not to say that we should go back to old ways of just blasting through because it's the right thing to do. That's not the case. But I think that the it was over 50% in each category said, well, in spite of opposition by the three parties mentioned in the survey, these projects are worthwhile to pursue. So I think that there's maybe a new or maybe rediscovered approach to what pays the bills and a much more nuanced approach by Canadians for, well, we need to do this now to secure or soon, to uh secure economic uh resilience as well as demonstrate our sovereignty and connect with, especially if we're talking about a potential new oil pipeline to the Northwest Coast, or to boosting the Trans Mountain pipeline, um even projects that have been mooted and discussed, pulled off the shelf again, perhaps in Eastern Canada and the Maritimes, an understanding that Canada should play play more of a role with the rest of the world and maybe have focused a little less on the United States.
SPEAKER_01There's still this lingering sense I've got that troubles me, which is that, okay, if this is the direction we're now going to go in, more practical, that just means that we've turned our back on the environmental values. Those don't matter. And you know what, if we pollute a little more, mmm, so what? Um But I'm not satisfied with that because a lot of people, I think, are feeling that too. It's like, well, wait a minute. You've been telling me for 10 years that I have to get an electric vehicle because that's a pretty Perfect form of transportation. It has no consequences. If you want to get a hybrid vehicle in Canada, you will be punished, so to speak, by the tax regime as much as if you were acquiring one of the dreaded internal combustion cars. Now, these are the the only ones made in Canada are RAV4s from Toyota, I happen to know. And there is no encouragement for that. So we could very well lose that part of probably the clean economy. I I wonder if those hybrid cars were part of that 3% number. I don't know where they fit in. So that one. And then you look at the realities of our energy system. You know, right now we live and probably we always will live in a cold country. We have real winter here. The energy planters in Western North America talk about this thing, the January 2024 event. It's when a vast area, including in British Columbia, was 40 below 40 degrees Celsius. And that triggered some near catastrophic events. Mostly, people just froze and didn't think about the further consequences. They knew it was cold, but they didn't know that the energy system was near collapse. From Oregon to British Columbia to Alberta, this whole vast system, 25 million people was near the brink. And part of it in the studies that have come out since then is indicating that we we have been changing the electricity distribution system. There is a push away from natural gas, and that has created dependencies. And we also have this increase in AI well documented. So suddenly we have a situation where maybe the next time there is a cold snap the system could fail. Now, no one was left in in a home at minus 40 below who who couldn't be helped. On that occasion. But if it happened on a mass scale, can you just imagine the and and the thing is here that uh in in British Columbia we are legislating uh natural gas out of the municipal systems, out of uh commercial buildings, very uh $350 a ton uh penalties for using natural gas to keep buildings warm. Um that's a lot of money. And I I I just wonder whether this is one of those policies that is going to be subject to greater scrutiny. That's one example. What when when I look at gasoline cars, um I I actually pulled a lot of numbers and did a little study. I'm just I was curious, and I found that over about uh a 10-year period, the the um fuel performance of a traditional car was improving at an astonishing level for a whole bunch of reasons. Lighter cars, better technology, yeah, materials and sure. Yeah, things like that were a lot of it. And and uh maybe people accepting lower horsepower cars. And I'm thinking that's pretty good. If you if you project that line to 2050, you would actually get to the same point as EVs get us. Now, I'm not saying that you could definitely uh keep that line of progress going, but but no one was even asking the question. And I've I've been curious about that. So there's a there's a whole bunch of things where I I I wonder if I'm alone in thinking over these years that, well, yeah, there's this clean economy that you're if you believe that's where we have to go, you're a good person. If you are skeptical, you're a bad person. That that felt socially wrong to me. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_00We could say this now. It's very un-Canadian, right? We don't tend, I mean, wedge politics being what it is, um, and and too many Canadians I think have been uh subjected to that. Um it is un-Canadian for us to take that stridency uh if opposition in terms of good versus evil, I mean sort of this binary look at life. So um there's a lot to unpack there, but uh a couple of comments come to mind. One, uh, as we've already discussed, too many governments were letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And good was therefore bad, because only perfect was good enough. So, in terms of which uh which vehicles that use combust less uh oil and oil byproducts or renewable gas or whatever powers them is are not eligible because only 100% uh electric-powered vehicles, presumably including the electricity source, so a lot of discussion still needs to happen about the upstream, right? So um my colleague on uh the Resource Works Advisory Council, Jerome Gesseroli, has done uh a couple pieces of quite useful research on this, on the public policy impacts of uh having blanket policies about, first of all, which electric vehicles are deemed appropriate and eligible for, say, uh public subsidy programs. He has a lot to say on uh on the effectiveness and the uh whether that's good public dollars spent on climate uh emissions mitigation. What he also pointed out in a particular study I'm referring to, actually a preceding Fraser Institute piece that Jock and I wrote, uh, was when you took a look at uh by province, their conditions meant that, and their so combination of the conditions in which vehicles have to operate and the uh source of electric power meant that, um, and the prairie provinces stood out as being in the in the end, a hybrid vehicle was uh actually more efficient and had a better proportionate impact, especially for the subsidy that was applied, then for an Albertan to go and purchase a full electric vehicle made less sense than that for them to drive a hybrid.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00For the the purpose of the environmental benefit. So I think, you know, in terms of this disconnect that you're pointing to, the businesses had to operate in this, you know, somewhat alternate reality that was required by government, as well as the way Canadians responded to it and the our own operating parameters as individuals, um, I think that just that recognition now that it was and always will be less feasible, less it it's difficult to try to find that right balance. I don't want to be facile and just say, as I already have, in the in the context of our energy supply. I mean, this was an Obama comment as well. Uh it's an it has to be an all of the above solution. And so should we in 2024, I mean, I have the dubious privilege perhaps of saying that I lived in the Okanagan uh at a time during that January 2024 deep freeze, my furnace stopped working. And I had the also dubious privilege of being in um in Portugal in early 2025, I think April 2025,
Public Opinion Swing And New Pipeline Talk
SPEAKER_00when the entire Spanish, most Portuguese, and a little bit of the Southwest French grid ceased to operate in some places for 10 hours. And so this gets to you know your comment about how do we rebalance for what we would call it grid stability. Um I think the Spaniards have learned quite a lesson in that. And I think that there are lessons in there, for sure, in British Columbia and other provinces. Um, first of all, I think a bit of a sidebar, but we need to improve our entertize for commercial use as well as resilience. That's a whole episode by itself. That's a whole other thing, exactly, and it should be. Um but uh but also the the recognition that as we run uh headlong towards targets that have been set for uh energy efficiency and certainly power generation, where that comes from, are we risking everything for citizens by uh losing sight or maybe improperly analyzing the risks that can happen to the entire system when natural shocks or other types of shocks hit hit the system? You mentioned AI. I mean, we can just uh make a bit of a comment on that. I mean, the I'd referenced uh British Columbia's recent renewed calls for for clean power. And the reason I wanted to be a little bit soft, not necessarily on that particular policy choice or the way in which the provincial government is trying to incent activity, but to me that's a a reason for just taking a balanced analytical approach and saying, okay, Site C, all of the electrification that has happened in the Northeast, uh utilization by other sectors, now in the Northwest, as we have a major LNG export terminal, obviously the prospect and the desired um uh final investment decisions for for more of the same, the preference incented in policy in some places and in various ways to electrify as much of their operations as they could, their cooling systems, et cetera. Um, and the stated desire by most provinces, I think, to do a couple of things: extract more minerals for uh advanced applications, as well as host more uh AI and advanced data centers. We need to power them. And we need to power them safely. And that British Columbia government right now is actually telling all of us that they are going to pick winners and losers as far as who gets safe power and who doesn't, um, we still have some more answers that need to we need to be squaring that circle in a better way than I've heard so far.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we want the innovation economy. Oh, by the way, no AI centers here because we don't have enough electricity for them. This is the week when a memorandum of understanding and MOU was signed between the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, and the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, where the headline news was a pipeline across British Columbia to the salt chuck so as to take Canadian oil to the rest of the world. That isn't the USA. And this was accompanied by, we've mentioned the name Stephen Gibot's departure within a few hours of that MOU being announced. Leaving Cabinet. And I think the stated reason has to do with things like the emissions cap. He wore that baseball hat that said emissions on it in Dubai. I was there. A lot of people uh thought he's really boasting about that emissions cap a lot. And uh now there's no more emissions cap. And some other policies have been been replaced. I mean, some of the commentary is well, you had this stacking up of policies over the these past few years. Wouldn't it make sense just to go with the one that was meant to be the only one? And that's actually what Mark Carney is proposing to do. Go back to one. Maybe it's gonna be a little more aggressive, but I don't think anyone's you know complaining about that right now. Right. So this is the week that we're sitting in here, Kieran. Yeah. Just a final thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think it's a good week for the country. I think it was uh politically courageous, genuinely politically courageous, by the Prime Minister and by the Premier of Alberta. Um, Alberta's large final emitters are now going to face a higher emissions tax, effectively. We we may as well call a tax a tax. Uh that is a remarkable thing for the Premier of Alberta, who uh has staked her political, both legacy and future, I would suggest, on the ability to get her largest uh source of economic activity back in the game. To have respect from Ottawa. I think that's actually a legitimate concern. Um as far as the separation question, that's not for me as a British Columbian really to comment on, but I think it's helpful that the federal and Alberta governments have gotten together, and I haven't read the text of the MOU, but of the elements that are in it, this is beneficial for um not just, I mean, the headlines, we'll only talk about pipelines, one supposed pipeline. There's way more to it than that. And I think that there's more going on as uh in terms of national unity, which is badly needed in these times, uh, which had begun to fracture. And I think that the most, if I leave one final observation in terms of the significance of that this week, is that it's a signal, whether or not that pipeline ever gets built. That will be up to a private proponent to decide whether it's in the interest. Um, the biggest thing that I take away from that this week is the deliberate signal that I think the federal government is trying to send to the rest of the world, which is to say we not only know how to do this, we have legitimate ambitions to optimize our systems and our resources to be that energy superpower, trusted partner. We aren't just saying we're open for business. We, I hope in my lifetime I never have to live through the German energy minister in the face of a Russian attack on Ukraine and gas pipelines being closed, coming to Canada and saying, please can you help us, and being sent home empty-handed. That I hope won't happen. And I think that there's a recognition by the federal government that um, and perhaps Gilbo's departure is emblematic of this. It's a bit of a coda of the perfect era. And we're now in a realist era again. And I think it's very helpful. Um the signals I think will be seen from Singapore to perhaps uh the Gulf and uh and certainly customer potential customer countries like India and other places that Canada wants to and will fulfill is doing everything it can to fulfill its potential to supply the world with what we do best.
SPEAKER_01That's all we have time for today. This has been Karen
Pragmatism, Trade‑Offs, And Next Moves
SPEAKER_01Graham, our guest at Power Struggle. I'm your host, Stuart Muir. You may be watching this on YouTube, you may be hearing it on one of the streamers. Please like it, share it, whatever you can do, comment on it. You can check out more information at our website, resourceworks.com, and we hope you tune in again. Thanks.
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