The Ben Mulroney Show - Ottawa and Mark Carney must get serious and listen to the West

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Ottawa and Mark Carney must get serious and listen to the West with Guest: Kris Sims, Alberta Director Of The Canadian Taxpayers Federation -As Manitoba wildfires rage, premier asks more people to evacuate with Guest: Erik Young, Senior Climate Scientist at AISIX 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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through NCF conditions apply see nissan.ca for details. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show on this Monday, June 2, I hope everybody is gearing up for a great week ahead. And look, I have been very clear with the audience of the Ben Mulroney show where my biases lie, who I supported in the last election and why and You know, I think I treat my audience with respect and as intelligent people so you can take what I say and interpret it through whatever filter you personally have and I've been very clear that I fought long and hard for My candidate and my choice in the last election, didn't pan out for me. So I put my swords down because I don't think it is,

I don't think it's beneficial to, for me at least, to be on the offense all the time. We have a new government who needs to be given, which needs to be given every opportunity to succeed based on the vision that they got elected on. And the good news for people like myself is there's a lot of alignment, generally speaking, as to what I want, what I wanted in my government

and what this government is currently espousing. So I want Mark Carney and his team to be successful. And right now he is entering a very, well, it's pivotal. It's a pivotal moment in the fight for energy independence, Canada becoming this energy superpower and inter-provincial trade barriers. And that's where I wanna start our conversation today. Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday sat down

with oil and gas executives in Calgary. It was a closed door meeting. And this is significant. I mean, I'm looking at the picture that was posted on Mark Carney's Twitter. And he sat down with dozens of members of the oil and gas industry. It was him and just all these executives,

CEOs of Tourmaline Oil, Pathway Alliance President Kendall Dilling, President of Sinovus. And reporters were only allowed to hear a few of the comments from the prime minister before being asked to leave the room. So I have to, I'm a good faith guy. And I have to believe that Mark Carney didn't go in that room to try to word Smith

his way out of building pipelines. I have to believe that he sat with them to hear what they had to say and I cannot believe that this many executives would go into a room like that to be taken advantage of by somebody who was acting in bad faith. So this is a good indication that we could be moving towards a future where these pipelines of national importance are built, right? And if we, and not only that, I mean, they talked about a number of things,

38 CEOs of Canadian energy companies signed a letter congratulating him and I'm looking at the, I'm looking at how many people were in this room. I don't think it's 38, but it's pretty darn close. And you know, you know that on the table was lifting the tanker ban off the West coast and all of these energy project killing laws that were the stock and trade of the Trudeau liberals. You know, Mark Carney said he was a different kind of liberal and his government would be different from Trudeau's. Now is his opportunity to prove it.

A lot of people believed him when he said it, but then you have people like me who are demanding a little more proof, a lot more proof. This, if he comes out of these conversations with a commitment to start building, then I will be more inclined to believe what he said on the campaign. He's also going to be going into his first minister's meeting, and it's nice to see that the burden of working towards taking down all the inter-provincial trade barriers that slow down our Canadian economy by placing all sorts of regulations in one province that don't

exist in another. I'm glad to see that the entire burden doesn't rest on the shoulders of the federal government, but that the provincial leaders are taking matters into their own hands to speed up that process. And to that end, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and PEI have been striking trade deals on their own. So hopefully, when the First Minister's Conference starts, Mark Carney can do what he needs to do from a federal level to help harmonize these things and bring them down. Again, last week, I highlighted what I think will be a sticking point. The fact that he got elected by saying he's going to get rid of all inter-provincial trade barriers, but the supply management of the dairy

industry, that's not going anywhere. I don't know how you can square that circle, right? Now, if that's a sacred cow for certain parts of Ontario, but predominantly Quebec, how then do you convince all the other provinces that they're not allowed to have a sacred cow themselves? Which is sort of how we got into this. The reason we have so many inter-provincial trade barriers

is it just, it happened over time where somebody would say, a government in one province would have a priority that they would want to shepherd forward and so a regulation would be put in place saying okay I know that in other provinces you know car seats for example are made of a certain type of material well we don't like that material here in our province. So we are going to make sure that every car seat in our province is made with a different type of material. Now imagine that over every single sector,

over decades, if not centuries, and you have the mess of regulations and hurdles that make it impossible for a car seat to be sold between Ontario and Quebec. There you go. And so bringing harmonizing all that stuff is a huge deal. And I actually wrote in 2015 on Twitter, I said the prime minister that solves the two issues of inter provincial trade barriers and true reconciliation with our indigenous

First Nations will be viewed as one of our great prime ministers in history. I said it in 2015 in the hopes, the hopes that Justin Trudeau would be that guy. And he absolutely disappointed on both of those files. You'll remember last week, the drama, the drama of the Liberation Day tariffs where a three panel, a three court, sorry, a three judge panel in the United States ruled that all the liberation day tariffs were unconstitutional and the president had 10 days to lift them. And then another court saying, no, you don't have to lift them while you are appealing.

So they're still in place. You'll remember that Donald Trump was told, though, that his other tariffs, the steel and aluminum ones, those were okay. And our prime minister came out and sort of gave his opinion. He was glad that they were taken down. I didn't think much of it. But upon reading his words again, I got to wonder whether that miffed Donald Trump just a little bit, because he stood up in front of a crowd and said he was doubling these steel tariffs,

wherever the steel imports come from, doubling them from 25% to 50%. And for context, the US imported $31.3 billion US worth of iron and steel last year, Canada was the top source of iron and steel shipping 7.6 billion worth to the US. So 7.6 billion, that's over 10 billion Canadian. And now that is getting slapped with a 50% tariff. I also have to wonder whether part of his arithmetic is he's hedging because he's worried that his liberation day tariffs will eventually be cast down, that power will be taken away from him. And so he's looking to, I don't know, increase the tariff revenue from someplace.

And seeing as how that three judge panel didn't take issue with his steel and aluminum tariffs, he's looking to get more money from that source. I don't know. I don't know. We'll have to see. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue have to see. Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.

Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. Thank you so much for spending some of your Monday with us. This moment for Mark Carney's Liberal government, it's an inflection point. He got elected on the promise of building Canada into an energy superpower. What that means, however, and how he gets there,

if in fact he does, that's what matters. And he, over the weekend, met with Premier Danielle Smith. His tweet reads, I had a constructive meeting today discussing what matters most, building one united Canadian economy, including getting big things built and major infrastructure projects off the ground in Alberta and across Canada. Sounds good, but the one word he didn't use was pipelines. Here is the woman opposite him at that table, Danielle Smith, talking about the revenue lost from unbuilt pipelines.

One of the numbers I've been saying, and this is a game to put into context why Albertans are so furious that we've been stymied. If we built Energy East, that would have been a million barrel a day pipeline. If we built Keystone, that would have been about a 900,000 barrel a day pipeline. If we'd built Northern Gateway, that would have been about a 600,000 barrel a day pipeline,

two and a half million barrels per day. At today's prices would generate $55 billion worth of 600,000 barrel a day pipeline, 2.5 million barrels per day at today's prices would generate $55 billion worth of revenue, of which about $17 billion would go to governments. So when you think about what we would be doing with $17 billion of additional revenue each year, the hospitals, the schools, the ability to hire nurses and doctors, it is not just an academic argument when the federal government gets in our way of building those pipelines. It has a real impact on our economy. So in the short term, yes, we've got a bit of a pinch, but in the long term, if we can address some of those issues, then I think we'll be able to have the revenues to keep up with growth. Yeah. So this is one of those moments

where we are going to get to know exactly who Mark Carney is, what kind of prime ministry is, and what his values are based on what comes out of these meetings. And joining us to discuss this is Chris Sims, the Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Chris, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much, Ben. So you wrote a piece in the Toronto Sun over the weekend that said, what's the title of it?

Otto and Carney must get serious and listen to the West. So I think we're both saying the same thing. You know, he's saying a lot of the right things. He took a meeting with a ton of oil and gas CEOs. It was a closed-door meeting, so it wasn't for performance sake. I'm sure they talked about a lot. Are these good and positive indicators or is the fact that he's not even willing to tweet the word pipeline concerning? It's very concerning. He won't say like the term oil and gas. He won't say pipeline.

And we can't bank on word games. He can't say we're going to build big things. Are you talking about a string of big windmills? I'm not kidding. Are you talking about like an entire hallway, you know, across Canada of solar panels? Because that's not funny. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Are you talking about like an entire hallway, you know, across Canada of solar panels? Because that's not funny. Yeah, like we actually need full capacity for our natural resources. We did the math, Ben. You've probably heard the term since 2015. We've lost out on revenue from natural resources since 2015 to the tune of like $670 billion

over the past 10 years. You add that to the energy cap coming from Ottawa. Ben, that is the entire federal income tax bill for the populations of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba for 10 years. Like this is real. No, I get it. I get it.

But I guess I look at his meeting with all of the executives, the picture that was on his social media, but it was a closed door meeting. So I can't believe it was a meeting for performance sake. And I can't believe that that many oil and gas executives would show up just to be paid lip service. So I have to operate in good faith and I have to believe that he was

there to listen to them. And I just I got to wonder, you know, at some point those voices aren't they going to find purchase? I hope so. I'm trying to stay kind of blue pilled on this issue. You know, because there's been a lot of black pills rolling around, especially since the election. I will say though, when it comes to big oil executives, you got to be careful because they'll often love hearing lip service.

Because, for example, they love things like industrial carbon taxes. And when Rachel Notley slammed Alberta with a carbon tax of her own here in Alberta, she had oil executives up on stage, hugging and kissing her, because they get to play around with these credits. What matters here is for real people with real jobs and real income. And so we really hope that the person that Carney is listening to in the room is Premier Smith. Yeah, so at what point,

what's the drop dead date here in your mind when we as a nation need to understand what he's talking about when he talks about one United Canadian economy, big things built, major infrastructure projects. It's vague, it sounds good, but that doesn't mean it is good. At what point is the rubber gonna meet the road?

I think it's this summer. I'm here in Lethbridge, Alberta, okay? I can see the border to Montana. It's right at the center of, I would call it the freedom movement out West. There are meetings all over the place, Ben. There are meetings every weekend for Western sovereignty. I'm not kidding. And when this thing gears up over the summer, over the rodeo circuits, and people

are having chats over the fence post, like they've got to have serious commitment. If he would get rid of Bill C-69 and scrap the energy cap, those are two huge pins he could pop in this balloon. That would help immensely. And look, I don't want to be an alarmist. And I'm not trying to put out put something out into the universe that doesn't belong there. But I'm I'm concerned that Donald Trump one day in an effort to change the channel from some bad news he's having, let's say he's in Canon Ascas, and it's a beautiful summer day in Alberta, and he gets in front of a microphone and

says, You know what, I thought I needed all of Canada to be my beautiful, cherished 51st state, but I'm thinking all I need is Alberta. And I can promise you no more equalization payments. And all you got to do is build some more pipelines, which I've already authorized south of the border. We'll take care of everything and we will send back trillions of dollars into your economy. I don't know what that does. I mean, if, if, if Carney can't get ahead of that, I think we've got a real problem in this country. You're right. And that's a serious thing. I've seen flags all over the place with the shape of Alberta with 51st state.

And just imagine imagine him saying you'll automatically be on the US dollar. Yeah, you'll be you'll be paying world prices. Nothing. You're going to be world world prices and you'll be living with the US dollar. Again, no equalization payments ever again. And what we're gonna be sending back to you, we're gonna make you one of the richest places on the planet. It's unlike the Quebec separation question of 1995,

it's not about building, the question on the sovereignty ticket isn't about building some amorphous potential relationship with Canada a real live Deal would already be on the table with the Americans. I Don't want that to happen, but it could the thing that people are asking each other at these very serious meetings with serious people at them is if you were offered to join Canada under this deal we have right now,

would you? Yeah. I mean, I've heard that I've heard that thought experiment before and it's so but Mark Carney has the option to get ahead of it. He has an opportunity to get ahead of it. And he could he could, like you said, stick a pin in the balloon that is growing of a Western alienation. Yes. And he could practically do it. And he could, like you said, stick a pin in the balloon that is growing of a Western alienation. Yes, and he could practically do it. This is not some pie in the sky thing. And I gotta clear something up. We don't mean for taxpayers to build pipelines. That would be horrendous.

What happened to Trans Mountain was a joke. That was supposed to be a private company spending about six billion of its own dollars. The Trudeau government foot dragged so long, the company threw up its hands and walked away. Taxpayers were on the hook for 30 billion. That is not the way to go. What we're talking about is get rid of these laws that are restrictive and get out of the way. If he just got rid of Bill C-69

and scrapped the cap on energy, a lot of this would go away, Ben. Well, look, we're paying very, very close attention. And look, I want to be somebody that is a responsible steward of the environment. And all of these things are possible. All of these things, we are capable of doing all of these things, but this government needs to put down the sort of the ideology

and look at what is practically happening on the ground and address these very real imminent problems to put down the sort of the ideology and look at what is practically happening on the ground and address these very real imminent problems that if they don't, they're gonna have a whole new basket of issues to deal with. Exactly. One of the best ways to reduce global emissions

is to sell cleaner burning natural gas to places like India. Yeah. That's the smart way to go about it, man. Hey, Chris Sims, as always, love having you on the show. I hope you have a great week ahead and look forward to talking to you again soon. Thanks, Ben This is the Ben Mulrooney show and as always you listen to us on the chorus radio network You can listen to us on the streaming app

But you can also find us on Spotify Apple music and Amazon and now we are in video form on YouTube I say welcome and thank you for joining us. I do a lot of work with a number of companies outside of radio and podcasting. And I would never talk about one of those companies just to talk about it. I want to always let you know in disclosure that I work with them,

but this is a company I wanna introduce you to that is doing some incredible work because there are vast swaths of this country that are on fire right now because of wildfires and climate change. And there is a company with which I have a professional relationship called AI6 Solutions.

They have predicted some of these wildfires in the past. And we always say, oh, if we'd known then what we know now, well, we are getting to the point. We are close to having the technology to know then what we know now. And so let's welcome the Senior Climate Scientist at AI6 to the conversation, Eric Young. Eric, thanks so much for joining us

on the Ben Mulroney Show. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So let's talk about what AI6 does and the example of one of the cases where we actually predicted it earlier on. We predicted where an evacuation would have to take place and where a wildfire took hold. Yeah. So, I mean, at AI6, we do a lot of things,

but really what we do is we look at climate hazards, hazards that come from processes on the Earth's surface, such as wildfires. And we really wanna identify where they might cause risk for communities and organizations in Canada, or really anywhere where there's demand for that. And what we do is we use the knowledge we have about that and expertise that we have in using really sophisticated computer models to get a clear picture of that. And as you mentioned,

we're able to create data sets that have a clear picture of risk in Canada and get insights from that. With respect to what's happening right now, I mean we never set out to determine the risk for any specific community in Canada or really any subset. What we do is we model millions and millions of fires and when you do that patterns begin to emerge. You can see places where you might have a really high likelihood of wildfires. When a hotspot like that intersects with a community, for example, what we're seeing and what we identified as really high risk with Swan Hills, but really, unfortunately, many communities in Northern Canada right now, that's that intersection between community and that hotspot is really where the risk is located. That's where people live. That's that intersection between community and, and that hotspot is really where the risk

is located, right? That's where people live. That's where people have families and homes and businesses and also things. But yeah, that's, that's what we do. Yeah, it is crazy. Yeah, I want to point out that it was in the winter that AI six put out an alert that said that, that AI6 put out an alert that said that, amongst others, Swan Hills, Alberta, was at a higher risk of wildfire, and Swan Hills now is currently under an evacuation order. No one would suggest that the technology's at a point now where we have a 100% certainty of a wildfire happening

and being able to predict it with 100% certainty, but that information is all the more important today to let general areas know, hey, the risk is higher to you now than it otherwise would have been. And so what kind of work does a company like AI6 do with various levels of government? does a company like AI6 do with various levels of government?

Yeah, I mean, really, what we do is, like I said, we try to develop these tools. And it's it's very technically oriented, right? We do a lot of modeling, and well, science to do that. But these tools are giving us a clear picture of where risk might be located across Canada, for example. And not just today, but also, as you mentioned at the start of the show, with climate change, these risks are evolving, right? A place that is low risk today might not be so low risk in the future. And that's kind of the first step is these types of tools, and there are different ones available, to try and plan for that. So in terms of the work we're doing is just really working with different people in different

sectors to try and understand what their needs are. Every time I have a conversation with somebody who's working in wildfire, what you find is they have specific needs based on their specific problems that they're trying to solve and understanding those nuances. You know, that lets us do what we do better, make the models a little better and try to account for all that. So that's really what we're trying to do. Yeah, you make a good point that if you believe that climate change is real, and I do, then you believe that there are places that are safe from wildfires today that might not be safe in the future. And having sort of an advanced alarm system like AI6's predictive modeling technology

can allow a municipality or a community that really doesn't have an emergency preparedness plan for a wildfire. It allows them to start preparing for that eventuality, to have a company like ours to come out and say, hey, look, you guys are fine today, but that might not be the case in a few years. And you need to start getting your ducks in a row because there are things you can do

to mitigate the damage of a wildfire. You can start today so that if and when it does happen, the risk to your community is significantly less. Yeah, I totally agree. I think I mean, a big part of it is like you said, getting our ducks in a row, right? It's taking any information that's available and, you know, having an idea of what's possible. Yeah, I think that's the first step. Give me a sense of sort of the leap in sophistication between what existed

before in terms of data sets and, and their, their accuracy and what a company like AI six is providing today. Yeah. I mean, there's wildfires are extraordinarily complex, right? And every time I learn something new about them, what I find is they're more complex than I previously thought. And so what we do and I think what, you know, there's different ways that wildfire scientists go about assessing the risk associated with fire. But what we do is we try to sort of break it down as much as possible. We think, you know, what are the ingredients you have to consider before

you even start to have to think about the fires themselves to have a really comprehensive picture. So we consider the forest. I mean, you're in Canada, it's a big country. There's a lot of diverse ecosystems and each one of those will respond to fire differently. The terrain, the weather, and we've seen that, you know, hot and dry conditions, winds, they can make a fire go from being something normal and transform it into something disastrous. And once we look at all these things where the fires will start and so on and so forth, then we start modeling because we now have this sort of computational power to be able to model, like I said, millions and millions and millions of fires. power to be able to model, like I said, millions and millions and millions of fires. The idea being not to look at any specific area, but just to consider what, you know, the hazard might look

like across Canada and then start to think about, you know, where is the risk? And like I said earlier, that's really where people are, where people are leading their lives and might be exposed to that. Yeah. Eric, a lot of hay was made last summer over what, I mean, it was a political hot potato, but there were a lot of politicians who looked at the burning down of Jasper and said that was something that we all could have seen coming

had we paid attention to it. Did AI6 have Jasper on their list last year? Well, we did not have any lists out last year, to be perfectly clear. I think, yeah, I mean, the last thing I wanna do is venture into the blame game, right? No, no, no, no, I'm not suggesting we blame, no, I'm not trying to make it a political thing.

I'm just saying, there are certain things that we can always do to be safe. It looks like not everything was done to be safe last year. And I was just wondering if those things are taken into consideration when applying a model. Yeah, of course. I mean, again, you know, we try to consider as many things as we can, right?

The idea is to, you know, have a solution that takes into account anything that is available that might make the model better, which means the results more useful to people who are dealing with these sort of community-changing events. So, I mean, yes, we try to integrate it to our model as many things as we can to try and capture things like we see happening every single year at this point. Well, Eric Young, I want to thank you again. There's nothing more devastating than sort of the fear of losing your home,

the fear of losing your community. And I'm just very proud to be associated with a company that is actively working to help mitigate those risks in an ever-changing world where the likelihood of one of these things is rising. So thank you very much for everything you do and thanks for joining us on the Ben Mulroney Show. Yeah, thanks for having me. To celebrate the Days of Our Lives 60th anniversary, W Network and StacTV invite you to enter for a chance to win the

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