The Ben Mulroney Show - Dear Mark Carney.... signed, EVERYBODY in the energy sector. The urgent letter.

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

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Thank you so much for spending a little bit of your time with us today as we continue to build this show one episode at a time, one day at a time. Let's jump into, we're at day two of this new parliament. And I think a big surprise came near the end of our show yesterday when Bob Fife of the Globe and Mail announced that Christia Freeland who has been a long-serving member of, well, now two liberal governments under Justin Trudeau and now under Mark Carney, she is going to be resigning and she is going to keep her seat for a little while. And instead, she's going to be taking up some sort of an amorphous role as an attach special envoy to Ukraine. And we got a lot of questions about this. We've got a lot of theories about this. I posited yesterday that having served in the two, I would say, highest profile roles in the government, short of being prime minister, that is to say, minister of finance, as well as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

She's now transport and she has been Transport and the Minister of Internal Trade. And, you know, important. not the not the highest of high positions in a government and so it was a what else what else can she do what other portfolios are there what's the next hill to climb

in government short of being leader which she tried she's not going to get there and Mark Carney and Christia Freeland I have a longstanding personal relationship and I believe that even when they ran against each other I have to believe that they ran

against it. They were competitors, but they were not enemies. And I think that I have no reason to doubt that there's an affection and a warmth and an admiration between the two. And I think this was probably Mark Carney's attempt to give her an off-ramp from government that allows her to have the next hill to climb, that that next thing to do. What's the next challenge for her? and given Canada's staunch support from across the aisle on both sides for Ukraine, we need somebody in a position of strength who knows that file as well as anybody. And Christia Freeland is of Ukrainian extraction. She's also written about it.

She's stood up for Ukraine. This is something she can sink her teeth into. This is something, this is the next hill. This is the next mountain. and the fact that she's not resigning her seat just yet probably speaks to the government's belief that they need every vote they can get on the budget that should be coming in the next couple of months. So that's how I see it.

Let's remind you of Christian Freeland's time as MP. This is from McKenzie Gray of Global News. The Prime Minister naming the proudly Ukrainian-Canadian-Freeland as Canada's newly created its special representative for the reconstruction of Ukraine. I think that Krisha is a great Canadian who broke a lot of barriers. She was our first female finance minister. While she intends to stay on as an MP, Freeland's departure from Cabinet likely ends the political career of one of Canada's highest profile politicians.

Freeland's first big file negotiating the challenging Canada-EU free trade deal. Finalizing SEDA led Freeland to an even bigger deal, NAFTA. Months of tough negotiations caught Donald Trump's eye. We're very unhappy with the negotiations and the negotiating style of Canada. We don't like their representative very much. Ontario's conservative premier became close with Freeland during NAFTA. I talk to her almost daily, by daily, and she's a good person, and she'll do a great job over in the Ukraine. So, yeah, so she's been, she's been in public service, and I think 10 years is a long time for anyone to be in public service.

and she was going into her second decade in office. And, yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think she's acquitted herself well. I think she's, I don't agree with a lot of the policies that she stood for, but she's a good person and has excelled at every job she's ever been in. But a reporter asked Francois Philippe Champagne, the Minister of National Revenue, if there was a connection between Freeland's resignation,

and the upcoming budget. Maybe it's an onset of coincidences, but the last time we had a fiscal update from this country was also the day that Christopher Freeland quit. And then today, Christopher Phelan quit, and you chose to announce the date today. I wonder if there's a reason you've announced the date today.

There's no connection between the two. I thought it was, I've always said that we want to be transparent with Canadian to be up front. I'm not sugar-coating anything. I've said this is going to be a generational investment. We're going to have to make tough choices. we're going to be asking from Canadians to work together with us

because they understand this is a transformational moment. Transformational moment. We've heard a lot from this government about how we are in a moment unlike any other. And it was going to require lightning speed to transform this nation and build it from the inside to use our former prime minister's expression, build it from the heart outward.

And I haven't seen that speed yet. I've seen some work. I've seen some plans. I've seen some foundational moves. And one could argue that you have to do those things first before the lightning speed can happen. Otherwise, you're going to be all over the map. So I get that.

I get that. But one thing that I think, when you're talking life and death, you really should move as quickly as possible. And on this show, we talk, Every single week of somebody losing their life in the city of Toronto, let alone across the country because of the state of our justice system, our criminal justice system, how it seems like we prioritize the rights of the criminals over the rights of the taxpayer. And a lot of us are wondering, when are the liberals going to fix the mess that with all due respect, they had a big hand in creating? here's Sean Fraser, our justice minister,

talking about what he plans to do. The subsequent pieces of legislation dealing with bail reform, stiffer sentencing for serious crimes, as well as intimate partner violence, protecting kids online and supporting victims through the criminal trial process will come later in the fall.

The bail and sentencing piece likely in the month of October. You know, October's only next month. But with each passing day, I know by this time next week, we will be reporting on another story of a criminal out on bail who escalated his crimes and killed somebody. I know it's going to happen because I have eyes and ears and I'm 49 years old and as sure as I'm sitting here with my hat on backwards, I will be reporting on that this time next week. Someone will die in the city of Toronto. Someone will die somewhere across this country

because somebody out on bail killed somebody. And so if there's ever something, that we should be focused on today, not two weeks or three weeks or four weeks or five weeks from now. It's this issue. And we always like to say, you know, those people who criticize our politicians when the house is not sitting. They say, well, they're still working.

They're still working. They're just back in their constituencies. Okay. Where was the groundwork on all of this over the course of the summer? Why wasn't this introduced on day one? Everybody knows this has been an issue. It was an issue that the conservatives tried to bring up in the last election. And the liberals didn't bite because they knew they didn't really have a like to stand on.

But they get reelected, start working on fixing the problem that you guys broke. And you could have introduced a piece of legislation yesterday and would be working its way through the parliamentary system right now. But let's be a little generous here and say, how are they possibly going to be? going to get everything done on day one because there is so much, honestly, that has been messed up. I know. And I can see that. And I said, like, yes.

Some foundational work was done because we really have so many problems. You probably need to like, okay, let's reestablish, let's level set, let's create a new set of systems so that we can then work within this new system. I get that. I'm fine with that. But over the course of the summer, the big brains that work over at justice could have been working on a piece of legislation that we could be talking about today. Well, I mean, clearly they did take the summer off.

Did they? I mean, they said it was their summer vacation. It's not summer vacation. They were doing work. I get it. Important work was done. But this, again, to go back to the argument I was making, somebody is going to die this week. Of course they will.

Somebody's going to die this week at the hands of somebody who should have been in custody. Probably a youth. We know that eight of the 31 murders in Toronto this year committed by, youth. Yes. So that's all I'm saying. Why not day one? Because again, what we're saying, it's not day one for you. You were working through the summer. Your staff was working through the summer. We didn't get to anything else I wanted to talk about. But that's okay. A lot of it's Evergreen. Don't go anywhere. A letter to the PM signed by the energy sector. And when I say the energy, pretty much the whole thing. The whole energy sector. We're going to dig in next.

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the globe. With Wise, you can send, spend, and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Plus, Wise won't add hidden fees to your transfer. Whether you're buying souvenirs with pesos in Puerto Vallarta or sending euros to a loved one in Paris. You know you're getting a fair exchange rate with no extra markups. Be smart. Join the 15 million customers who choose Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit Wise.com. Tees and Cs apply. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. In our previous segment, we were sort of trying to figure out

how best to describe what's been going on with this government as it trying to square the circle between the lightning fast need to transform this country and what seems to be a less fast pace. And, you know, I argued that maybe, maybe the work that's being done is foundational. Maybe it's necessary, but possibly insufficient. And I use those words very specifically because our next guest co-signed a letter on behalf of the oil and gas CEOs from across this country, an open letter sent to our prime minister, giving him mixed reviews after six months in office, praising his improved tone and creation of the major project office. office, but calling his actions, as I just said, necessary but insufficient. Now, the letter itself is measured, and it's from a specific perspective, but what is really telling that should ping on everybody's radar is, the letter is, it's a letter, but it's signed by 95 people.

95 people. It, I don't know, would you say it's five or six times as long as the letter? The signature pages? Well, this, I was scrolling and scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling. Is this? It didn't end. So, so to discuss this letter, we're joined by one of the signatories, Adam Wattress, the chairman of Lyricon Capital Limited. Adam, welcome to the show. I've been nice to talk to you. So I remember before the election, I was, I was tasked by a number of very significant corporate leaders in this country to, to share a number of their letters that they wrote about what they want to see coming out of this, from the campaign. A lot of them were supporting Pierre

Poliev. That did not come to pass. So now we are focusing all our attention on getting the attention of the chief decider in charge, Mark Carney. And so what was the, you guys gave him mixed ratings. Where has he excelled thus far?

Well, Ben, I, sorry, you mentioned 95, you know, Maybe it would be helpful for your listeners to have research on the background, like, how does this come together? And so what happened is way back in January and February during the leadership race for the Liberal Party, Mark Carney was talking a lot about, hey, he was really keen to build energy infrastructure, you know, oil pipelines, LNG. And it was going to be clearly a big topic during the election by, you know, we're going to

all the candidates. So what a group of us decides to do is essentially give a roadmap, a guide to the federal leaders for the campaign that, geez, if you want to build energy infrastructure, you know, these are the steps that you have to go through. But these are say, hey, I want to, you know, I'm in favor of women and children. That's kind of interesting, but, you know, what do you actually have to do? Yeah. So anyway, so we, the, my fellow CEO, the 10, the CEOs of the 10 largest oil and gas companies and the four largest pipeline companies, the 14 of us, wrote this letter and provided it just before the start of the election campaign and we addressed it all four leaders. So we'd say, hey, you know, these are the things that you

could, you know, talk about during the campaign and, you know, compare notes and see what people wanted to do. Anyway, and I think that really helped, I think, shape. the national dialogue, and it was non-partisan, but I would call out that Pierre Pollard during his campaign accepted all the recommendations. Right, and let's talk about those recommendations, because I was listening to the hub.ca, which is a great news source, great podcast. Sean Spear is the editor at large for them. And his issue with these announcements that came out was that Mark Carney was very, one of the loudest

voices in favor of breaking down the overburdened regulatory system for the natural resources development in this country. And it's not just about how long it takes to get through. It's about how it is designed to keep foreign investment in our natural resources at bay. And so if you want if you want that money to flow into the country, you have to deal with that. And Mark Carney seem to be open to that. But as Sean Spears said, he said, he hasn't touched that system that makes it, that makes foreign money allergic to Canada. Instead, he has overlaid that terrible system with this new system that, that, where the

government picks the winners they want, and they get the benefit of this new expedited system. But everybody else is still dealing with a nightmare that Justin Trudeau, either by design or through incompetence, created. Well, your comment about investment, this was really about how to attract investment to the energy sector to build energy infrastructure. Because, you know, the CEO types, we're always wanting to build stuff. The reason we're not building stuff is we can't get the money. Yeah.

And I mean, the investors won't give us the money. It's not because, you know, you know, we're grumpy. We just can't get the, we can't get the money. So essentially, to be very specific, what the CEOs called for originally was a C. series of steps to deregulate the energy sector, which was first and foremost, scrap C-48, which is the tanker ban off the coast of British Columbia. The next was to either repeal or radically overhaul C-69, which is the environmental impact assessment, which is sometimes that's referred to as the No More Pipelines Bill. Sometimes it's the No More Projects Anywhere

bill on it. We wanted the federal industrial carbon tax. to leave it to the provinces to determine what the industrial carbon tax might be. Eliminate the hard cap on emissions, get a hard deadline on product approvals to months, not years, and also provide indigenous loan guarantees. I quote you would say none of this was the industry looking for handouts. No, no. These are all spoke to pens. Now, what's also important is that all of that regulatory and policy work, Ben, have been put in place in the last. six years. I mean, this wasn't like, oh, hey, we want to open up the Canadian constitution.

No. No, we want to go back to the way things were six years ago. Yeah. So this is not, this is not a, this was not what I've described as a radical change. So anyway, we put that out. It was certainly, and as I said, during the campaign, Pierre Pauly, I've accepted all the recommendations. And the other leaders were comparatively silent on it. Yeah. So then upon the completion of, the campaign immediately after uh and we now have new prime minister carney um we sent another very similar letter uh from the CEOs to now these prime ministers well now that you're here now here's you know here's real map very similar recommendations at that time we we got 38 signatures of

CEOs and now you're at 95 i don't want i don't want to yeah adam i don't want to rush you but i have a couple more questions for you sure people listening at home might ask themselves what do i care about corporate fat cats sitting in their big offices saying they want to be able to make more money talk to me about what if you're able to get your way if he listens the prime minister listens what does this mean for the everyday Canadian

well the oil and gas industry is the largest industry in Canada it's the industry that is most insulated of scale from tariffs It's the one that we have the easiest way to be able to access international markets, you know, to be able to diversify away from the United States, meaning there's a very high demand for the product.

You know, there's a demand for oil. Don't know what we'll make the investments. Our investors will take that risk. We've got lots of supply. This is an entirely government-made problem that is restricting the business. Now, now, this is obviously most of the energy. where it's obviously based in Washington, Canada, but make no mistake, you know, this here in Alberta, the premier has a goal to double oil and gas production. Now, if, you know, if the business

doubles oil and gas production over, say, the next 15 years, they'll strengthen the entire company, meaning country, meaning Toronto will look like Dubai if we double oil and gas production. Why is that? Where's all the money kind of come from for the financing? from Toronto It's all worked for the banks And that's something We're going to end it here And I'd love to have you back on

If this story develops further For those people who think it's all about money For those big corporations Just remember those corporations pay taxes Those taxes then build cities And they build infrastructure And they help those who need it most So we don't have to then

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