The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben discusses unlocking our energy sector with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Ben discusses unlocking our energy sector with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Alberta premier, Danielle Smith. Premier, welcome back to the show. Hi Ben, happy to be here. So we know that a lot of people's plans for the inauguration got scuttled due to the change of venue because of the cold. But how was the event for you? How was your time in Washington? Well, it was great.

I mean, we had a plan to be at the Canadian embassy and it was packed. There were lots of Canadians down there, obviously, everybody trying to make contacts with the new administration. We've got some big issues I think we need to solve in the coming months in order to avoid tariffs. And I was just pleased to see such a strong showing of Canadians down here. Well, you bring up a very good point because a lot of Canadians were holding their breath yesterday.

We knew that there was going to be a flurry of executive action by the president. He signed 100 executive orders yesterday. Canada was not among those 100, but he followed that up quite quickly by saying, at new deadline of February 1st, what does that signal to you? The fact that he's given us a little more runway, a little more breathing room? When you look at the executive orders, he's given direction for a review of all of the trade agreements, and he's given actually a deadline of April the 1st. So I don't know if he misspoke yesterday but it does seem to me that what he put in writing was gives us a little bit more runway than that but it's pretty clear

what they're going to be looking at is whether any of their existing trading partners are engaging in unfair trade practices as well as ensuring that the issues around border security are addressed. I think that we saw pretty clearly with the declaration of the state of emergency on their southern border, he is singularly obsessed with addressing issues of fentanyl, drug trafficking, human trafficking. And to the extent to which we can address

those issues in Canada, I think that that will demonstrate some good faith and hopefully be able to avoid terrorists. But I think we do have a little bit of runway to make that case. You know, you've been spending time with the premiers. I'm sure you've had many conversations with the federal government.

From an outsider's perspective, it looks like we've had a flurry of activity from provincial leaders, and it feels at least that there has been an absence, a vacuum of leadership or a feeling of motivation. The fire has not been lit in the federal government the way I think a vacuum of leadership, or a feeling of motivation, the fire has not been lit in the in the federal government the way I think a lot of Canadians would have wanted. You know, I just read that we bought a bunch of

drones from China that we can't use and we always seem to have a plan for a plan. What is your assessment on leadership at the federal level? I think unfortunately we've really taken the relationship, the trade relationship with the United States for granted. And there's a lot of relationship building that needs to be done now with the change administration. Keep in mind, yesterday if we'd talked to the administration, before this wearing in, we would have been talking to Biden officials. Today, it's Trump officials. And so now I think the relationship building can begin in earnest and we can really get to the bottom of why it is we have these trade tensions and what we can do to resolve them. But this is why I've been calling for a federal election.

The federal government is clearly distracted. The liberals are distracted. Within 48 or 47 days, there's going to be a new prime minister. And then if the threats of the opposition party are to be believed Within another 40 or 50 days, we're going to have another new prime minister because we'll have a general election So that isn't the kind of environment that you have for firm decision-making And it seems a bit unclear about even who the chief negotiator should be from the federal government That's why I think you'll see the provinces take a greater lead in trying to

develop that out ourselves, to try to put some issues on the table that we think are going to be persuasive to the federal government in Washington. We know with the emergency declaration he signed on energy that there's an enormous opportunity for us to talk about building new pipeline infrastructure, new electricity infrastructure, critical minerals infrastructure. So I think Canada, every single province, is a great case to be made. And I think you'll see the Premier's making it. And I think we have to take this as an opportunity to start being forward thinking. But I've been trying to figure out what ails us as a nation. it just feels like we are we are governed from we are we are so reactive in everything we do we're not we're not proactive we we haven't been building the pipelines we need to build we haven't diversified

our ability to get our our incredible natural resources to market from coast to coast to coast we've effectively turned ourselves into a landlocked nation despite having access to the globe. And I don't know how we change that perspective, but it seems that we are constantly reactive. Very little of what we do is proactive. And I don't know how we change that. We have to accept that if whether it is the traditional energy economy or the new energy economy, you have to be prepared to do major industrial projects. You cannot get lithium and cobalt and copper and uranium,

which are going to be necessary for the new economy, without having a permitting process that allows you to dig up the ground and make sure you're taking care of environmental issues along the way. But these kinds of projects can't take five and 10 and 20 years to be able to permit and get done. And so there has to be a rethinking of what it is that energy security looks like and be realistic about what we need to do to develop some of these resources. And I think that that's the lack of realism that we've had over the last ten years is that I think that we've got a federal government who believed that the entire world could be powered on solar panels and wind turbines with batteries but but never talked honestly with the public about where steel comes from,

where those solar panels come from, where all the components for the batteries come from and that's I think the recalibration that happened yesterday is that energy security matters, affordability matters and we are that is at the basis of a productive economy. And so I think we've had a 180 degree turn and we've got a federal government that hasn't pivoted in the same way. And so we're gonna have to

because the Americans are going full steam ahead. And if we wanna maintain the integrated trade ties, we've gotta do the same. But we also know that we can provide a service to the rest of the world and our allies by getting more of our resources to the west coast, more of our resources to the east coast, and be able to diversify our markets and be able to support our allies that way too. So I don't know that this current administration in Canada is prepared to make that pivot, but I think that's

what the next election will be fought on. Premier, when I hear you say that, laying out a vision for economic security and turning Canada into the energy superpower that we are capable of being, I hear a vision from a premier for a strong, global power of Canada. And so what does it make you feel that there are people out there banging a drum that you're only in this for Alberta?

What I think maybe I came to the conclusion sooner than anyone else about the fact that we needed to do this pivot. I mean, keep in mind Alberta is part of a sedimentary basin that has a trillion barrels of oil in reserve with 200 billion recoverable, 500 trillion cubic feet of gas, basically inexhaustible, expansive pore space for CO2. We had a federal government that was prepared to just write a pathway that would shut all of that in, as opposed to developing it for our benefit and for the benefit of Canadians. Then you talk to Saskatchewan and you see that they, with their uranium resource, provide

20% of the world's need for uranium. The Americans right now are getting it from Kazakhstan and Russia. Why wouldn't they want to get it from us? Then you talk to British Columbia. With China saying they're no longer going to export germanium, guess where they can get it from? BC. They can get antimony from Ontario.

They can get gallony from Ontario. They can get gallium from Quebec. These are the kind of cases that we need to make is that while China has been going around locking up the supply of rare earth minerals, we're here as a solution for America so that they have the supply chain that they need to continue to grow their economy. I believe that we can play not just a supportive role, but we can jointly be able to say that North America is an energy superpower, a resource superpower, and I think we should be proud to play that role. Well, I want to thank you for your time, Premier. And you know, this could be an opportunity

for us to reimagine what it is to work together, break down inter-provincial trade barriers and start doing what we can do for Canada to be the fullest expression of itself on the global stage. I want to thank you very much for your time and I hope you come back to the Ben Mulroney show soon. Will do. Thanks, Ben. She has partial retrograde amnesia.

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