The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Heather Exner-Pirot on Canadian Energy Policy and What Canada NEEDS To Do To Next | The CBP

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

FRIENDS AND ENEMIESToday we're joined by Heather Exner-Pirot. Heather Exner-Pirot is a Senior Fellow and Director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, Special Advisor to the Business Council of Canada, Research Advisor to the Indigenous Resource Network, and Global Fellow at the Wilson Centre in Washington D.C.She has twenty years of experience in Indigenous, Arctic and resource development and governance. She has published on Indigenous economic development, resource politics and policy, energy security, Arctic human security, regional Arctic governance and the Arctic Council, Arctic innovation, First Nations equity and own source revenues, and more. She obtained a PhD in Political Science from the University of Calgary in 2011.Exner-Pirot sits on the boards of the Saskatchewan Indigenous Economic Development Network and the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation. She is a member of the Canadian Defence and Security Network and a Network Coordinator at the North American and Arctic Defense and Security Network. She is the Managing Editor of the Arctic Yearbook (an international, peer-reviewed annual volume), a member of Yukon's Arctic Security Advisory Council, and the former Chair of the Canadian Northern Studies Trust.She has published over 45 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and edited volumes, and presented at over 100 conferences and events nationally and internationally, in addition to authoring dozens of op-eds in Canada’s top publications.______Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠Discord:   / discord   A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetworkThis show is sponsored by: easyDNS - https://easydns.com EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. With DomainSure and EasyMail, you'll sleep soundly knowing your domain, email and information are private and protected. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for 25% off fees FOR LIFE, and start stacking today.

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Welcome back, Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. Friends and enemies, welcome to the CBP. Want to be better informed. Listen to Levin Joe E. Spots is taking care off right off the top. Oh, Bitcoin and EZDNS, the media is feeding a slop. It doesn't matter. matter what topics discussed quality entertainment and information you can trust uh that's being planned or at least

discussed you know we're not going to allow the entertainment and information you can trust send the guys some value boost them with some stats bitcoin is the scarcity asset i mean it's just a fact geopolitical national down to the local friends and enemies welcome back to the canadian bitcoiners podcast joined tonight by heather exner perot I think about what I'm going to write in the show notes for the guest bio and I look at a few things and, you know, I went to the, I went to her bio on the MLI website and it's like three, three pages of show notes. So I can't put it all there, but we're going to let Heather introduce yourself in a second. We have a lot to discuss on energy, on I think the gaps between what it means to be pragmatic and what it means to be, we'll call it energy. energy conscious these days, especially in Canada, talk about some of the Western alienation we've seen. Obviously, we just had Stockwell Day on a few weeks ago. He had a lot to say

about it. I'm sure Heather will as well. And then, of course, we're going to talk about data centers, Bitcoin mining. And I think, you know, where does Canada need to go as far as energy production and specifically baseload power, which is obviously near and dear to all of us in Bitcoin. In an energy environment that's evolving, probably for the first time in a long time, Just in this crazy non-linear fashion, both in terms of demand and in terms of potential sourcing, it's, you know, we seem to be falling behind, honestly, in a lot of ways. And we'll see if we can get to the bottom of all that. But first, as always, the sponsors, Easy DNS, Mark is your friendly neighborhood, domain registrar. So if you have a website and you didn't use EasyDNS to buy it, I don't know why.

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Bull Bitcoin has that same payee for you. You can't beat using Bitcoin. I think our code is CBP, but you guys know it anyway. We see the volume coming through. If you haven't signed up yet, use the code. You get 25% off your fees for life. Heather, people who listen to this show are sick of being gas lit about energy. Sorry, wait, am I allowed to say gas lit? Is it windmill turbine lit now? Is that the terminology we use? Hard to say. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming. What's going on? Tell us a bit about you because my guests will, my listeners, I should say, will not be super familiar with you, even if they are familiar with some of your stances. So give them some history here. Tell people who is Heather. Yeah, great. Well, thanks so

much for having me on this show, my first Bitcoin show. But, you know, a lot of this stuff is about energy at the at the back end. So I'm the director of energy, natural resources and environment at the McDonald-Lore Institute. That's a thing tank that's based in Ottawa. However, I'm based in Calgary. And also a special advisor to the Business Council of Canada and an advisor to the Indigenous Resource Network. So, you know, I guess, you know, I grew up in Saskatch. I'm from Saskatchewan. I was always passionate about development as, you know, girls my age. You know, I always say before you cared about climate change. You cared about international development and did all those things.

And then came back to Canada and saw some of the issues there. Did Arctic development, northern development. That was always indigenous development. And that was always resource development at the end of the day. And so I kind of came into resource development from that end. And just since, I would say, since Russia invaded Ukraine, since the cycle, the commodity cycle has has picked back up since probably 2022. There's just been a lot of demand for analysis on it.

Yeah, that's probably selling it a bit short. Look, there's so much to talk about Heather because like you mentioned, their commodities have become front and center in a lot of ways. There's been just this, it seems to me, like bizarrely focused effort from a number of global players who, you know, cannot get in line on anything. They seem to get in line on what energy we are. allowed to use what energy will be taxed and you know what energy will go into your car or it you'll be able to heat your house with or whatever this has always seemed strange to me

and here in Canada we're obviously in terms of available resources available energy a powerhouse but we are at the moment in a lot of ways inert and so I think the best place to start maybe is how did we go from potential energy superpower to completely inert energy superpower just kind of limping along here in a lot of ways what what happened what is the origin of that problem yeah great great question so we're obviously you know second largest country just by by any you know as as as a way of having it you have all the minerals you have the hydro you have the forestry you have the oil you have the gas any country our size you know there's not a lot would have a similar endowment although i think we even hit even above our weight

because we have kind of the trifect of oil gas and uranium even russia doesn't have that Australia doesn't have that. The United States doesn't have that. China does not have the trifecta. Anyways, so we've always had a lot. We are hydro-rich, and that's given us cheap, about in electricity for a very long time. We'll get into electricity later. And we always had, you know, oil and gas.

Actually, I think the first discovery was in Ontario, but obviously some big discoveries in Alberta in the 20th century and was ticking along and doing pretty well. And then we had the, why I'm getting to this is because we had the oil crunch. 2008 people probably don't remember. I think about all the time oil hit $147 a barrel and that was in dollars at the time which would probably be with inflation something like $200 a barrel and you can imagine what that would look like on politics on economics on interest rates all those things that's when you had you know the green revolution financial crisis you know so things were bad oil was $147 what happened the shell revolution happened and why to say that is because

because a lot of money was pouring into commodities also was the era where China was growing at 8, 9, 10% a year. So the maximum China growth output, which was also a result of its demographic dividend. You get the one-child policy in the 70s and 80s. That means you get maximum working age in the 2000s and maximum growth. So money was pouring in. It looked worthwhile to unleash the oil sands, which was kind of a remote, you know, technologically difficult, geographically difficult place. But at $100 a barrel, there was money to put into it.

it. At the same time, you get the shell revolution. You get that kind of innovation that unlocks of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. And that was very terrible timing for the oil sands because just as you're unlocking the oil sands, it was a Stephen Harper said in 2006, we could be an energy superpower. And it was looking like we would be. Shell gets unlocked and the price of oil and gas crash. And it averages, you know, in the 50s and low 60s for, you know, for many years. At which point, oil sands is almost uneconomic. I got the time would have been economic, but this pushes a lot of pressure on the oil stands producers to get much leaner. And so you did see 100,000 people laid off in Alberta oil and gas industry

around 2015, but the oil stands kept ticking and they kept getting in better such that we are now a low-cost producer. And the break-evens, what's it? You tweeted, so the investment break-evens, they will keep producing to about $45 a barrel. It depends on the producer and the quantity, but on average and they will break even i.e. they will not lose money, even though their investors won't get any until I think about $27 a barrel. So now much more competitive than Shale for the first time in a decade. And so now we're seeing this new world where shale peaked, Permium has peaked, the big prolific American basin has peaked. We expect to see some decline. The rigs are dropping off like flies in American production. That's poor bullish for Canadian production because we just have over

100 years of reserves, oil sands will never end in a sense, not in any way that matters to you and I. And so it's, so now we have this opportunity. And lo and behold, the rest of the Canadian public is starting to see that maybe having the money from oil and the power from oil would be a useful thing. Do you think they're actually starting to see that? Like we just had that election and Uncle Mark is parading around Canada, Europe and a bunch of other places talking about how we need to be a, you know, diverse energy superpower, right? I still see, you know, like, and like there's still premieres who think that they have power of veto. I think probably they don't.

I suspect to agree over things like new pipelines. We have a minister of basically parks, I think, who's suddenly going to start trying to put picnic tables on oil fields. And I worry that the public actually doesn't care as much because they have this, you know, specter of Trump, you know, looming over them at nighttime, like a sleep paralysis. analysis, ghost, and they don't think about anything else. So, like, you know, in your work, maybe before we move on, do you, like, what is the sort of, what is the feeling of the public? What are you, what are you seeing in your research, in your, in your commentary? Because to me, I don't know, like the, the oil and gas party really just lost in, in the spring.

So tell me, am I wrong, am I right? No, you know, in the end, the word in the street in Calgary is cautiously optimistic. and I am too, and I'll tell you why. You don't have to trust the liberals, but you can trust public opinion. You know, we live in a democracy, and politicians are removed by public opinion, and public opinion changes create space for them to make particular decisions. So a year ago, I would never have thought that Northern Gateway would be back on the table. You know, I would have thought that was dead.

No one was going to revive it. And now it's a real live issue. In fact, Carney has said it's very, very, or highly, highly likely, you know, that will be on the list of nation building projects. This is, you know, this is a 180 for the government stance from a few years ago. And I joke that, you know, if we do build a Northern Gateway Lake Pipeline, we should call it, you know, name it after Trump somehow. Because that's the only way we would have ever done it done.

And then we've seen this is in the polling since, again, high since, you know, November election or at least January inauguration, support for pipelines over 80%, support for oil sands, you know, 2 to 1 ratio to support against. So the public opinion has switched. And where are we seeing it on the ground is, frankly, B.C. Not so much on the oil side, but absolutely on the natural gas side, on the LNG side. And it is true. You know, LNG was always a great opportunity for B.C.

But for the first time, you are seeing NDP Premier say, oh, we have this great LNG, we're the most reliable, the best, you know, best supplier you could possibly have. We're going to supply more. we want, you know, Evie's going to Asia to try to get those investors assuage to get a final investment decision, FID, on LNG Canada Phase 2, on Solisums. So I'm actually seeing it in BC, which is the place where you kind of, you need to see it. And I'm actually seeing it with Carney and Hodgson. Now the question is, can you get the rest of his caucus and cabinet on side? I don't know if he cares, to be honest with you. It seems to me that he doesn't really have a

great relationship with him. That's my personal view. I'm speculating. I'm the body language doctor when i watch him on tv no one here needs or wants him to have a crazy no i don't think so i don't think a lot of people want that i'd prefer he run the place like brookfield you know as true as that maybe uh okay so i think one of the things in the bitcoin space that we're often concerned with is this you know it was creeping for a while heather but now i think it's really rolling downhill this government uh overreach in terms of like my day-to-day life um they tell me what i can and can't eat what I can and can't post it. You know, if you live in the UK, that may come here at some point.

I think there's some bills in legislative process that may influence that as well. And, you know, I know you've written about this. And I think a lot of people have talked about this, whether they are pro or against oil and gas and sort of, you know, petrochemical energy, let's say. The idea that we have to reduce emissions in Canada. And I think, you know, there's been more public debate about this in the last year or so because people now are starting to look at data, Given that it's so widely available, it's hard to miss on Twitter and probably other places too. You know, in between AI slop posts on Facebook, you might see something like this. I have no idea.

But most people now, I think, realize reducing emissions in Canada does not reduce global emissions. In fact, it might even make them worse because we are a cleanish producer, one of the cleaner producers of these chemicals and refining these chemicals. And our colleagues and counterparts overseas, not so much. And so, you know, one of the things that we talk about often is, you know, what the rationale that we hear is about reducing emissions, but we're actually increasing emissions. So what, in your opinion, is the rationale for some of these legislative barriers? And that's putting it gently, by the way, to really unlocking some of the stuff that Canada could be doing in terms of domestic energy production. Because it can't be global emissions. So what is it?

Yeah. No, I mean, this is a very fair question. I think about this, as you know, a lot. So there is a term for this phenomenon where a good Western democracy reduces their emissions and it ends up, you know, just going somewhere else and increasing global emissions is called carbon leakage. And that was a fundamental flaw, I think, of kind of the Paris Agreement process, was not to anticipate this. How it has manifested, and this is all we think and talk about, geopolitically, is degrowth and deindustrialization of the offshore of manufacturing from the Western democracies, mostly to China. you know, maybe a bit to some other countries and some other authoritarian countries, but mostly China has been the beneficiary of this trend, such that we are now at a huge

disadvantage on our defense industrial supply chain, that we don't have the critical mineral supply chain, we don't have the components that you need, we don't have, you know, we can't process the things, and then we can't build them, and then we don't have the energy to build them if we did want to build them. And so, and that is what's motivating Trump, and that's why I think he has a lot of the Washington establishment behind him on the foreign policy side. And that is why the EU has to make bad trade deals with the United States is because they have no cards to play. Canada has some cards to play.

That's, of course, our oil and gas are uranium and our critical minerals. But that's a different question. So this trend has happened. And what has been behind it? This is a question that we do need to ask. We need to reflect that it did become so intolerant of diversity, a patient. that there was very much a line that you had to tow was difficult, still difficult, I would say, in academia, across the West, to, you know, to question some of our policies. You're immediately accused of being a, you know, a climate denier, even if you're not, I absolutely believe in climate change.

And I think we should reduce emissions. It's just that there's a cost and there's tradeoffs doing so that we need to discuss. And so, and a lot of it manifested just in kind of a Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-oiling gas, that a lot of it was not about emissions. about stopping oil and gas capitalists, for one. And so, and so again, where have we been successful? Ask yourself, has the world been successful with the trillions of dollars we have put into the green transition? We haven't even been successful in reducing emissions. And then we've had all these negative consequences on the side of the de-industrialization, of the degrowth, of the shifting of power to China. And so it's been a pretty bad, I think, outcome for most humans. I think it obviously needs a rethink.

When you talk about degrowth and de-industrialization, the thing we often hear in Canada especially is that, well, people don't want these jobs anyways. Whether it's a factory job or an oil field job or whatever, people don't want these jobs. I don't think that's true. But have you done any research on, what is the likelihood that bringing some of this industry

back on shore would actually lead to Canadians taking these jobs? Obviously, there's some other moving parts here. We've seen immigration spike and now, you know, significant decline in the last few months. Is there something there? Is there a there, as the saying goes, that we could actually, you know, ramp up employment and ramp up all these other things? Or would this be, you know, sort of a dangling carrot for new employment and then just automated away to, you know, basically what we've seen overseas as well. Jobs are not being done by humans anymore. They're being done by machines.

And so this industrialization, well, it does help GDP, doesn't necessarily help. let's say quality of life for people who need that work. Have you guys thought about that at all? Have you thought about it at all? Well, so the way I thought about it all is, you know, I'm an advocate for energy and natural resource sectors. And there has been certainly an intellectual line of thought for a long time. Sometimes it's called Staples Theory, you know, it's the core periphery, but this idea that

in the trajectory of economic development, you move from the primary kind of sectors and, you know, viewing of water, hauling of wood, resource sectors. move into, you know, added value manufacturing and into services. And it's been a source of embarrassment, I think, for people in Canada, some people in Canada, urban Canada, in the East in particular, that we are still a resource economy, that there's a sense that this is a 19th or 20th century economy and we need to move, again, you know, into coding away from oil and gas, you know, we need to drop, you know, sustainable transition away from those bad, you know, jobs that are going away towards, you know, coding. And of course, what we're seeing in 2012

125 is, and we still know, oil and gas jobs are the highest paying in Canada. It's the highest paying sector for average wages. Mining is close number two. Utilities are all quite up there. We know that the most productive jobs in the country, that the amount of GDP that each worker in the oil and gas sector earns per hour of work, you know, is an order of magnitude and more, can be more than the average Canadian worker. And again, about 10 times more between oil and gas and auto manufacturing,

which is the one that people say we want to retain those auto manufacturing jobs and that there's a high demand for trades that we don't know that we'll have enough trades and that there's a lower demand for coding because AI can do a lot of the coding. All of which to say is, you know, I don't worry with Canada's aging demographics and resource dominated economy as we go into commodity cycle that we won't have enough jobs for people to go around. Very good. We should talk about uranium. You mentioned the trifecta of resources we have here. One of the things that's been difficult for me to get my head around, probably difficult for you to get your head around, and many other people who are, I think, looking at these things honestly and without bias is the reluctance to deploy nuclear around the world.

Canada is not so bad with that. Canada, obviously, the Kandu is competing on a global stage with some of the other monolithic energy producers. But we're not doing it enough. There's still some resistance to new plants. there's some resistance to the waste that's generated by nuclear facilities a lot of people don't realize that and you can maybe tell me if i'm wrong about this you'd know better than me the the really dangerous half life for nuclear waste in a power production capacity i think is like less than 100 years right so i think after seven years submerged in water right so so we have this down what what has been in your opinion the largest roadblock to continue deployment of nuclear power

Given that the, you know, real resistance to oil and gas has been pollution, fallout, emissions, all these things from its use. Nuclear power seems to solve many of those problems, but still resistance there, especially from people like, you know, even Stephen Giebeau and others in the cabinet over the years. What's the problem? Yeah, well, great question. So as I remember, we really, you know, got tremendous civilian nuclear infrastructure in the 60s and 70s and 80s. And just at a huge pace, a hockey stick pace, you know, I think, you know, getting 100 gigawatts in just over a decade. I think the United States alone. And across the world in France, obviously, you know, doubled down.

And this was a lot of this also in the wake of the energy crisis, which started in the early 70s when OPEC did that first embargo with the Yom Kippur War. So there's energy crisis, nuclear offers a bit, you know, good baseload, a bit longer, longer term planning. You know what I mean? It doesn't require a ton of material input. You know, you do need the uranium. and you do need it enriched if you're not using a can-do, but there's not a ton of input that you need compared to, for example, natural gas. And so we built out a ton and then Chernobyl and Three Mile Island happened.

And that really, you know, that really quashed kind of public case. And there was environmental, you know, a lot of the environmental movement arose around opposition to nuclear and also its association with nuclear weapons and the fear of proliferation. So especially after Chernobyl, regulations change across the West to make it very expensive and also natural gas generation got cheaper. And so I think, you know, for both economic and regulatory reasons, nuclear was not a great choice.

Now they kept building nuclear out in the east, you know, in the post-Soviet states in China. So nuclear did not go away, but it went away to a large extent in the West. And I think we stopped building in Canada, our last Can Do's in the 90s, early 90s. Now what's changed is another energy crisis. So kind of the 70s gave it a lot of state. stimulus originally, and then this most recent energy crisis with Russia invading Ukraine, the natural gas energy crisis in Europe after they had been shutting in a lot of nuclear. Also in the wake of Fukushima, people thought, and also the need to have clean baseload.

Well, there's only one answer to your problem, and that's nuclear. And so we have what we're calling a renaissance. We're seeing that in uranium prices, Kamiko, the big Canadian urine producers hit record highs, all-time record highs. And so there's, you know, an excitement of SMR. It's just new technology. It's just new better technology. It can't melt down the way Chernobyl melted down.

We're hoping to modularize it to get the cost down. Now it's really about the regulation and the capital. Help me understand. You've mentioned this a few times now, and I didn't consider this coming into the show. But it seems to me like every time we make a good decision is driven by a crisis. You know, we're talking about naming pipelines after DJT. We're talking about we only did nuclear because people can't afford oil and gas. like that what what I mean you do policy work you know people in Ottawa what are they

thinking you know the other 365 days a year when there's not a crisis to most people this stuff is pretty obvious and you mentioned there it's it's not obvious because of academic you know you know mental masturbation type exercises with nuclear it's obvious because we've seen it work France for example in Europe the lone sort of bastion of sense in terms of energy production in Europe they double down and they have a great energy system there now thanks to thanks to nuclear meanwhile its neighbors Germany and others you know just falling on their sword over and over and over again to the point where now the meme online is that Europeans hate air conditioning because they can't

afford to run it all day their baseload won't handle it what why are our politicians here in Canada unable to see that this is an obvious thing and and not be driven by crisis moments not be driven by, you know, political urgency, let's say. I realize they're political animals. I realize they're on, they're on terms. But these are things that are pretty obvious and, you know, would immediately improve the quality of life for their constituents and lead to, you know, continued, continued power, more pensions for their MPs, right?

Why are they not able to see that until there's a crisis? I don't know, but how I've observed, and a lot of people I'm sure have observed, you know, how did we find ourselves in this mess in Canada in 2025 was, a huge complacency and in some ways we were just such a lucky country that we are we are so energy rich that you could take it for granted we did take it for granted because it was always there you know and we were secure that we did have the united states as our best friend and neighbor until a few months ago and we did have norad and we were under the under their nuclear shield no one was coming to north america it was fortress north america and we can say things like you know there's no

political, you know, Trudeau saying no one in Canada will let us spend 2% on defense. You know, that's not even this bare minimum threshold was something that he thought he would, he would not do and could not do. And now we're, and now, you know, I think he's Jason Kennedy, said, you know, that was a vacation from history. Canada had a nice vacation for history in the post-World war or post-Cold War period. And that, and that period is over. The world is, is not on a vacation from history more that the world is experiencing history. We are experiencing history every day. And so now we've been shaken. I always say we've been shaken out of our complacency by Trump. And in many ways he did us a favor. And how bad, you know, it's too bad it

had to turn into a crisis. Probably could have been a worse crisis, frankly. But we're still on that trajectory in many places with electricity and with energy that maybe some public opinion has switched. But the building of infrastructure has not taken place. We're not building at the pace we need. We're seeing a lot more demand come from AI and air conditioning. I'll get into that. and it's straining our systems and you still have i was just in washington state in seattle you know two weeks ago um you know again where there's still dead set on the renewables and it's hard to talk about natural gas we're still putting in place building codes that won't allow natural gas uh into homes and and and so i do so in the back of my mind i do wonder how much of a crisis is it going to take

is it going to be blackouts um i think it's going to be blackouts i don't think we will change the extent that we need to change until people are really facing a personal crisis in their household. That's unbelievable. That it's going to take people not being able to turn their lights on, you know, because there's not enough baseload before they realize that we need to make a change. I don't know if you read, because you mentioned Fortune North America a few times here. I don't know if you read Duneberg or not, but Duneberg went out on a limb. At least what was a limb three months ago when Carney won the election and said that

everyone from Carney to Giebo to Danielle Smith were playing a role. in this, you know, this act. And the plan the entire time between Carney and Trump was to unleash Canadian energy and sort of create this fortress, North America, completely independent in terms of energy from anywhere else in the world. They just didn't need anyone.

They have everything on board, on the continent, no problems. I don't know if we're quite there yet. I mean, you've mentioned a few times in your interviews, that you're cautiously optimistic. You mentioned it here tonight. And I think I'm with you on that. If you had to guess, Heather, like stuff like we're never going to build another pipeline or we're never going to allow for further exploration or, you know, every indigenous tribe and every premier is going to be able to say no, no, no, we're not doing it. Do you think it's more likely we air that direction or more likely we err toward the Duneberg thesis that we're actually going to go full fortress North America here and try and build out what's going to wind up being an incredible energy grid across the border?

Yeah, so I did read that Duneberg piece. And the one thing I'll disagree with is, and I don't know the extent, you know, it's the plan. It's happening. I don't think, I don't think there's, I don't think there's an elite with the wherewithal, you know, in the foresight and the capability to do these things. Probably not. Yeah, probably not. You know, incompetence is a better explanation, you know, than conspiracy in most these cases. So I don't think there's a plan.

But the reason, you know, sometimes I say I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist. Why do I think we're going to build another pipeline? Because I'm a realist. Because we have a tremendous oil sands resource worth trillions of dollars. And there's only so long that a nation or a people or a community is going to say no to that. And we're looking, we're confronted now with the options. If Canada doesn't, if Canada doesn't want the oil sands, then Alberta will separate.

And Alberta will take the oil sands. If we'll order that, guess what? The United States will make us into a 51st state. And the United States will have the oil sands. The oil sands will be developed. And whether we're burning it, to the extent we're burning it to a, it's a phenomenal resource. It's a molecule. It's a hydrocarbon that can be used for many things.

And if you think there'll be a human civilization in a thousand years, you must also think that there will be hydrocarbons that we're using to sustain that civilization, whether it's for carbon fiber or synthetic graphite or transportation fuels, whatever it is. You know, it's a tremendous resource and we'll use it. So for me, it's a matter of time before someone wants to take that power and that money. but it's human nature to want power and money. Do you want to talk a bit about why the oil sands are different than other provincial resources? Because I don't think a lot of people know that there's a bit of a difference between the oil sands and the other stuff around the country. I think there is, right, in terms of like the legality of who owns it and why they own it. Yeah, well, I can tell you a bit about it.

I don't know how much it's different other than it's just maybe a more phenomenal resource. It's our best, most valuable. It's our most valuable resource on an economic basis. and I would also argue politically because oil is the most important component in the world still to this day. But in general, people should know that, you know, all non-renewal resources are under provincial jurisdiction. And so the oil stands, so Alberta gets the royalties. Now Canada does get corporate taxes, but Alberta has the exclusive jurisdiction to exploit, to manage to conserve. And of course, the federal government overreaches into that all the time, which is, you know, with a huge source of

are of our issues is they're trying to manage and conserve our resources they don't have that right but but it really it's the quality of the resource again where you have a hundred you know we're you know five million barrels five and a half million barrels we could do this for well over a hundred years uh and you're already the world's fourth largest produced or third largest exporter and there's just no end in sight and it's different from for example shale or the permian or conventional uh where usually you you drill you quickly comes online you get your best stuff for a couple of years and probably, you know, certainly with shale by year five, you're on full and decline.

You don't have a lot less. You have to drill again. And they've ran out of what we call tier one inventory and they're into tier two. But the oil sands is, you know, just kind of, you just keep plugging along. Saskatchewan has great resources, potash, world's number one producer, potash, and uranium, where it's just world class, phenomenal resources. And then after that, like, we have some good gold. We have some good metallurgical coal.

You know, we have some good nickel. none of them are the best you know in the world none of them have the same sway as as potash oil and uranium and to some extent natural gas even then I would say like we're we definitely have good resources but you know Iran um uh Russia would have probably better natural gas resources but it's tremendous resource we have over 100 years of that too so so it is all the provinces and which is why you know BC is all in on LNG because they get royalties from natural gas and why they don't care so much about oil, because that goes to Alberta. It's an interesting tango that's sort of happening between federal and provincial,

and obviously the separation issue is another problem that Alberta is basically putting on the forefront saying, look, we're being unfairly treated. It's affecting our quality of life and the Canadian quality of life, I think, in a lot of ways. And people may agree with that or not, but there's only one correct answer there. And it's becoming more obvious. It's a good segue to what I will call. I will, Heather did not call it this, I will call it this, the federal censorship regime when it comes to energy. You know, we've talked on the show over the, over the years about

some of the attempts made here in Canada and abroad to correct the record, let's say, on certain issues. You may remember during COVID, there was attempts on Twitter when it was still owned by Jack Dorsey and run by, you know, let's call it what it is. It was a leftist. group of management there trying to say that inflation wasn't as high as Twitter users were using data to prove it was or that Joe Biden was fit for office or that you know whatever you pick your your story here in Canada we haven't seen quite as much at least not that obvious but we have seen a few things pop up over the last two years that I think should give Canadians concern the one that I'm thinking of in particular was I think there was an

attempt federally to ban and add a fine to any positive coverage of oil and gas in the country for a time. And then obviously the one that I want to talk about with you is this greenwashing kind of, you know, you can't say certain things about oil and gas because even if they're true, they're misleading. This is all very strange language, by the way. I think it's purposely vague. Like it's purposely, it's a purposely wide net that they're able to cast from Ottawa over oil and gas producers and specifically, let's face it, over Alberta in their attempts to promote their self-interest.

Tell me a bit about this. Tell the listeners a bit about this because I didn't know about this and it's endlessly fascinating to me that this stuff goes on and someone as terminally online as I am, I had never seen this before. So tell me a bit about it. Yeah, sure. So, so I call them Engos, environmental NGOs, and, and nothing against, you know, a lot of people are just good people that just want a better environment and who amongst us doesn't want that. But there certainly has been an organization just around blocking Canadian fossil fuels. Again, it seems to be directed much more internally, domestically, than another, you know, emitters and that kind of thing. And how some ways it has manifested, I think the first one you refer to is NDP, MP Charlie Angus at the time had, you know, was trying to pass a fossil fuel advertising ban. There's been a few municipalities that have frankly passed that kind of ban where they won't allow fossil fuel advertising on their buses or on their billboards, yes. And so, and some complaints around that. And of course, that would have been unconstitutional or private members bill, never passed. And it was always, well, this is like tobacco, you know, where you could,

you could ban tobacco products. So we're going to ban fossil fuels or bad for your health. Of course, 81% of our energy comes to fossil fuels and we would all die in one winter if we didn't have fossil fuels if not before but anyways so it's not a great comparison to tobacco but that was the idea of course that failed would have been unconstitutional so what they did was was even more you know underhanded i would say and it's the and so people heard c59 or the green washing bill that's what i'm talking about and so where it came about was in the big omnibus bill an omnibus bill is when there's several pieces of legislation all cobbled together usually with the budget and so no one we have to pass the budget otherwise government breaks so you stick things in

the ominous bill it's hard to get it changed hard to get it out if the government has the votes which they have then it gets passed so it was stuck in the fall economic statement omnibus bill this greenwashing amendment again to introduce some some some restrictions you would call censorship on talking about environmental benefits that's that was what it is any environmental benefits and they would call it greenwashing. So you would have to substantiate in a much better way, your environmental benefits. So if you say in the Targetless Pathways Alliance, you know, they will hit net zero by 2050, that's bad, that's greenwashing.

And had some language in the amendments. No one liked it. It was going through. And then dramatically increased and changed the language after second reading before this omnibus bill passed, you know, within weeks of the end of the session. And that is the part which I absolutely believe was strategic. You know, I looked in the paper I wrote at, you know, some of the Ngo's, you know, meeting with, you know, dozens of MPs in the weeks leading up to this.

So, which they have to record on the lobbying act. So it's clear who was talking to who and about what. And passed it after second reading, which means that there's no witnesses or there's no committee review, that you're not having any hearings about it to get some stakeholder feedback, for example, from industry on why I was wrong. So this greenwashing amendment C-59 passed under the Competition Act. Usually the Competition Act is usually between businesses and businesses, competitors, or consumers and competitors. Now it opened up that you can't talk about environmental benefits to not just business activities, but any activities,

not just selling things, but any activities. So now it's about your stakeholder, your annual report, your communications with shareholders, your communications to governments, your communications to indigenous communities when you're consulting on these things. Now, the target was obviously the oil sounds, but the way it had to be written and drafted meant it just applies to everyone that makes any kind of environmental claim whatsoever. And the ones hardest hit are the ones in Clean Tech because no one buys oil because of its environmental benefits. You buy it despite the environmental benefits.

Now these guys just make no environmental claims. They don't say they're going to hit net zero. They're paying millions less in ESG. You know, they aren't giving out ESG reports. they aren't paying some to do their ESG inventory. It's the clean tech providers in Canada that now can't say, this lithium battery may do this, this hydrogen cell may do this, because they can't substantiate it.

So what does it say specifically? I'll give you the four points, and I'll let you jump in here. That makes it solar volume. One, it says you can only make claims that they have an internationally recognized methodology to test them. And for most innovations, there is no such thing as an. internationally recognized methodology. It doesn't say who it is, how they determine if it's internationally recognized, no real, nothing in the legislation. So it's just very vague. You don't

know what it is or if it's recognized or if they'll count it. And the next thing they did is put a reverse onus. What does that mean in law? It means you can make a complaint and the onus isn't on you to prove your complaint about me. The onus is on me to disprove the complaint that you made in the first place. And what does this do? even if an oil sense company can justify their complaints or, you know, a pension plan or a bank. Now, I'm having to lawyer up every time you make a complaint. There's almost no cost to you to make that complaint. So this is opening up the door to mischief and it's costing me money.

Who can make those complaints? So this is the third thing that this bureau is at. Now they've added private rights of action, whereas before the Competition Bureau should be about competitors and consumers. That's who should be able to make a complaint. now and there's the competition bureau that would you know decide if it was justified or what now we have private rights of action that means individuals and of course environmental NGOs the angos can make those complaints and trigger that process and then the icing on the cake the fines whereas you know you know a couple thousand i think you know with volkswagen was the biggest one i think there's

a couple of million curate coffee pods i think was a couple million now they changed the fine system so that this is literally the the wording if you're if you if you are if you are if you are if you're fine at this it's a 10 million dollar fine or 3% of gross global revenues whichever is more so now you're looking so and if you're an oil sands company do you want 3% of your it's a lot it's a lot more 10 million for sure so for ambridge cnr else knows that's a billion dollar fine so are do you think their lawyers are suggesting to them that they should in the gray zone and they'll probably be okay. No, mom's the word. It's not only oil sense companies that pulled their ESG reports. Now the big banks have done it. Now the Canadian

pension plan has done it. No one, you know, agricultural producers, paint producers, no one can make environmental claims in Canada. We covered the CPP IB talking about how they were abandoning their ESG stuff. And at the time, you know, we just were kind of dunking on them. them, Heather, to be honest, because obviously I think that stuff is ridiculous for the most part. And I think most people do and it's overdue and all these things. But what I didn't realize is what you just said, that part of the reason they dropped those initiatives is because the liability is just, it's too much to bear. And it's weird to me that the government of Canada would put these policies in place under the, like really under the radar, like you said, they're on the

bus bill in second reading, no feedback, no stakeholder consultancy, nothing, and just expect that industry would be okay with it. The worst part to me, yeah, I think the worst part to me is that industry can't really run a public awareness campaign about this, can they? Because is that against the rules that are set out or laid out in this policy? Or is it really just about data and they'd rather not poke the bear? Like, why not if you're an oil and gas company say, look, this is what happened? We can't run anything about this now. you should be aware of this as the public. Everyone does this otherwise, right?

Everyone who's got to beef with the government, whether teachers' unions, nurses' unions, but oil and gas can't do it. Is it because of this that they can't do it? Well, I think they do say it. If you've heard of C-59 or greenwashing, it's probably because they've said it. It's on Danielle's list of her nine demands of things that have to go back. You know, a cynic, and of course this was so stupid in the first place for environmentalists, a cynic would say, these guys don't want to hit net zero.

They don't want to do ESG reporting. Now they have an excuse not to, for some of them anyways. And now, you know, the worst actors, I don't know if they have environmental goals. I don't know if they're reducing emissions. There's no way for them to communicate that to me. There's no way to hold them accountable. Is the government allowed to say that they aren't caring about the environment, that they aren't trying to reduce emissions?

Because that's the other problem, right, is that there's an infinite, you know, the critics of oil and gas now have basically infinite defensibility in their claims because they can say whatever they want. And as long as it's not being said by an ONG company, basically, there's no, there's no possibility for pushback. That's one problem. The other thing you mentioned there, the competition committee or competition bureau, who is on that? Yeah. Well, I honestly don't know, but I'm sure there's some competition lawyers, maybe some people in industry. And they may have, you know, they may be. able to say this is a stupid claim. You know, we're not going to hear it. But no one is going to

risk that fine on on whether or not the Competition Bureau Tribunal, you know, we'll slide their way or not. Anyway, so, but what was your, to go back to your first. Yeah, like, it's infinitely defensible because like if, if an MP stands up in, in QP and says, uh, you know, to an Alberta MP that the industries they're defending or promoting are destroying the environment. The industry that's being questioned or the company has been questioned, like, I mean, they can't respond. So this is where the tables are going to be turned. So the competition bureau changes were written in such a way, again, that they're so vague that it's a problem for industry. And I think, you know, you know, I wrote a paper on the emissions cap. I had co-authors

from, you know, experts in the oil and gas sector. Their lawyers had them pull their names. They published it through our American subsidiary instead of McDonald's, too, because our lawyer advised us to that I couldn't write about the emissions policy I just there was one of the things the lawyer said was that I was quoting the parliamentary budget officer and I could not prove if they had used an internationally recognized methodology it's their data like what their assessment of the emissions cap anyways all which to say is the tables are now being turned that environmental NGOs have used lawfare against development against oil and gas companies against first nations against everyone and have often given false claims about the benefits of renewables about the

problems of gas and there is if people want to go and make complaints is private rights of action now go to an angle website see the claims they're making see if you think that they could prove every claim they're making for example if you don't need to us we will we will mitigate you know we'll help address climate change there's no way for them to say that they're going to address climate change you want to say that you know you want to have a zero emission electric vehicle there's no such thing as a zero emission electric vehicle in the production you were emitting or if you if you use electricity with natural gas it's emitting so now they've opened this pandora's box and if people wanted to be jerks about it

i've thought about it my better angels have you know you know stop me but go make complaints about everything angles did and my colleagues at resource works did just that I think the David Suzuki Foundation had some advertisement against the Montany, against Fort St. John, I think, and natural gas. They used pictures of Wyoming gas wells because they looked nastier. And so the complaint is, well, you deliberately falsely advertise. Like you said that this was BC, Northeast gas, and it wasn't. It was Wyoming.

So the door has been opened. And again, I don't think it's the oil and gas companies that will be hurt the most because no one was buying their product because they were environmental claims. People are only donating to Angos because they think they're going to make a difference on the environment. I like that. I think, Heather, you should call EVs from now on external combustion engines. We've been calling them that on this program for a long time. I think everyone should call them that because that's what they are.

We have about, well, I'll say 10 minutes left here. I want to talk about data centers, Bitcoin, all this stuff. In Bitcoin, one of the things that we, you know, we're not really having trouble with it now, but we did a few years ago before government started to embrace this a little bit, especially in the United States, obviously, this idea that bitcoin miners make it difficult to run a grid because there's too much demand and what they didn't realize in the policy sector and you may know this or you may not i don't know how much you know about bitcoin mining but you know there's a demand response element to bitcoin mining um outfits so if you have a warehouse of uh machines hashing out you know mining

and the municipality says to you look we're hitting peak demand here uh people are going to turn the air conditioners on we want you to uh you know start your demand response process, you can gear down those miners fairly easily. And that way, municipalities don't have this problem where they have tons of baseload and no buyers, tons of baseload and no one to sell to. Tons of baseload, they have to export it for cheap. It's all bought there by the miners. And the miners do a good job in terms of turning that energy into money or Bitcoin in this case. We don't have that problem anymore because, like I said, people seem to understand that there's value here. And I'm wondering, you know, in your

research and your travels and your expertise, whether it's Bitcoin miners or data centers, what is the huge sort of thing on the horizon in your view that people who are considering renewables as part of a base load equation don't seem to understand about the demand these things are going to bring or the speed at which they're going to start to expand or the speed at which they're going to proliferate in Canada and other places. Is this something that should be on the burner for every government right now? Or is this something that should be a little bit down the list or whatever? You tell me, where are we on all this stuff?

Because this is fairly new stuff. The last two, three years, let's say we've started talking about this in Canada. And we've seen a ton of growth in electricity demand. And people didn't know for about 20 years, electricity demand was pretty flat. Part of it was that we all shored a lot of manufacturing. So that left some excess of electricity. Part of it is because a lot of our appliances and other things, were got more energy efficient.

But now, for the first time in a while, we're starting to see electricity demand grow, which is why all the Western nations are kind of scrambling, that the infrastructure we built in the 70s and 80s is no longer adequate. And I think maybe we thought a few years ago that EVs would be, that maybe Bitcoin and then EVs were going to be the things that kind of tax the system.

And now it's very much, no, it's obviously data centers and AI and it's happening in real time. And why governments need to think about it. I don't know that they do, maybe not in Canada, I certainly do the United States, is if AI is power, then you need energy. If you want to compete in AI, you're going to compete with energy. It's going to be impossible for Europe to have the same computing power. I always say there's no amount of coal, China won't burn to win the AI race.

There's no amount of natural gas that Texas won't burn to win the AI race. And where's everyone else at, is it really going to be a situation where just China and the United States have all the AI power and can just have that much more compute? we better start thinking about in Canada, where we are energy rich, where we can provide some balance to that. Are we thinking about it that way? No. I think Alberta is to some extent, and part of it is that they have an unregulated electricity market, unlike the other provinces. And so it is easier for a private company and a data center to come in and set up shop here. But there's still very much right now the sense that even though we've all been thinking about it, the policy is not good. We're going to miss our chance. There's such a supply chain leg on everything for energy, for gas,

turbines for data centers for AI. If you're not on the game now, it's going to be too late. It's going to just go where it can go. And you're going to be 60 months in the supply chain waiting for it to go. So right now, I would say electricity is absolutely a bottleneck. They want, you know, AI will pay to get that 99.999% reliability because because they get a grid value from that electricity. They make a lot of money out that electricity and data. Customers, residential customers probably won't be able to compete with AI for that. you know so so we need to create systems right now right now the default is they're not going to have AI and all the provinces i would say with the regular electricity markets they can't accommodate that

we'll just not have enough AI and in alberta you know i think they're trying to figure out some things but i don't think they've figured it out yet you know this the three giants i think meta amazon and uh i want to say meta amazon maybe one of the company i forget microsoft i think they've all well they've all purchased google maybe too actually they've all purchased, if not outright the materials to build a nuclear facility near data centers, then they're thinking about it. They're building, you know, or they're buying real estate to make these moves and make these plays. Does this not concern, I mean, you've already basically answered the question, but I'll ask it anyway. Does this not concern our government

that the monsters are moving chess pieces around the board? And, you know, we're over here talking about whether or not, you know, we should, you know, get rid of wind turbines, EB the other day talking about how wind turbines are going to be the future of like it's just we're so far behind like we're not one or two pages behind like we're on the first book in the trilogy here still in a lot of ways does this should this this should be front and center for them it's not obviously why why are you not talking about it and do we even have a minister of AI now I think is it Evan Solomon the earth oh my gosh Evan Solomon the earth and I don't know that I've heard him talk about energy and that's all he should be thinking about and this does concern the bejes

out of me in a way we should we should be with winning on this should be Canada's time. We have energy abundance. You know, the United States talks about North American energy dominance, American energy dominance. They import from us, you know, and we have more than we need, and they can only be energy dominant with our energy. That is a true fact.

We could be energy independent on our own. We don't need to be the junior partner. And yet we're sitting on this. And the specific law, Joey, to your point, is the clean electricity regulations. They're still in place right now. They're unconstitutional, almost certainly unconstitutional. And they are preventing investment in new natural gas generation. Absolutely.

Because with that plus the emissions cap, you just don't know that you're going to be able to make a profit if you build new natural gas generation. And so, and the cost, we have the industrial carbon price still. It almost triples the cost of natural gas. What? Triples? So if your, if your eco price was about $2 with natural. with the industrial carbon price, it was $6. And so at $2, wow, Canada has the cheapest natural gas

in the world, we're so competitive. We have a colder place. You could set up your shop here, you'd be less cooling, less natural gas use, cheap natural gas, but oh, it's the industrial carbon price. You're gonna go to Pennsylvania and Texas. That's the answer to that question. And that is what has happened.

So there's so many ways in which we have made it difficult to quickly build power generation, which means that there's no way to quickly build Data centers, which means that we're going to lose the AI race. And I just can't believe it's mid-20205 in what we've just seen in the last year and how, you know, geopolitics plays out and how might makes right. And we're not doing anything about this. Believe it.

Heather, you've been a great first-time guest, okay? For people who are watching on video, you've seen Heather waving her hands around for the last hour or so. But if you're on audio, you haven't seen the passion. You can hear it. But I can also see it. And so I appreciate that when our guests get into a hand-waving move. Heather, tell people before you go, a bit about MLI, where they can find your work, how they can support you, read you.

The floor is all yours. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So if you go to McDonald-Lore Institute, you can just type in my name as an expert or go to our energy site. All my work and the work of our senior fellows on the topic are there. I have my own little website, which I'll update now, I guess, where you can just kind of see all the things I do, not just for MLI. But anyways, yeah, not too hard to. And Twitter and LinkedIn.

I'm pretty prolific on social media. Easy, peasy. Thank you, Heather. Thank you everyone for listening and watching, and we'll see you next time.