Juno News - October 05, 2023


Alberta’s war against Ottawa’s net-zero scheme begins (ft. Rebecca Schulz)


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

173.75468

Word count

2,258

Sentence count

108

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Environment Minister Rebecca Schultz and Environment Minister Danielle Smith join me to talk about Alberta's campaign against the federal government's plan to eliminate net zero electricity use by 2030, and whether the people that need to see that message are listening.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 As I mentioned on the show yesterday, I am on the road this week, hence the unusual environment
00:00:13.400 from which I am broadcasting. I'm in the nation's capital of Ottawa. And after the show yesterday,
00:00:19.100 I decided to take a little bit of a walk around, went down by the Parliament buildings, and
00:00:24.360 I was there at the moment the question period had ended. And why that's significant is because I
00:00:30.760 was out in front of West Block in that building, which is, well, as the name suggests, on the west
00:00:34.800 side of the parliamentary precinct. And a bunch of members of Parliament were coming out, cabinet
00:00:40.320 ministers. Justin Trudeau, I think he snuck out a back door. But all of these people, these very
00:00:45.000 important people in Canada's government and Parliament were there. And when you come out,
00:00:50.620 you walk south towards Wellington Street, which you may be familiar with as the center, the
00:00:55.460 epicenter of the Freedom Convoy protests a couple of years back. But yesterday, there was a different
00:01:01.760 type of truck on Wellington Street at that exact spot, this serendipitous moment I snapped a picture
00:01:08.300 of. Let's throw that up there for those watching. Ah, yes, no one wants to freeze in the dark. That
00:01:15.000 was a truck being driven courtesy of the Alberta government, which has launched an eight
00:01:20.560 million dollar ad campaign opposing, among other things, the federal government's commitment to
00:01:25.280 net zero, a very aggressive pledge, which will have very real consequences for the economy. Now,
00:01:31.420 I don't know how many times that truck was circling the block, but he ended up it was a male. I'm not 0.99
00:01:36.200 I'm not being like gender bias here. It was a male driver ended up at that perfect spot at that perfect
00:01:42.020 moment, where we will discuss, among other things, whether the people that need to see that message are
00:01:48.200 listening. Alberta Environment Minister Rebecca Schultz joins us now. Rebecca, great timing on
00:01:54.100 that, by the way. I don't know if you were the ones like with the roadmap saying you got to turn on to
00:01:57.520 Wellington at, you know, exactly 302, but it worked. You know, we obviously didn't give that
00:02:04.120 specific of direction. But I mean, it is an important message for MPs from across the country to see,
00:02:11.740 especially those who are part of the federal liberal government, because Canadians right across our
00:02:17.620 country, not just in Alberta. But we're hearing this across the prairies in Atlanta, Canada, that
00:02:23.720 the draft clean electricity regulations, not only are they wildly expensive, they're completely
00:02:29.120 unrealistic, and they will risk leaving Canadians in the dark. This is completely unacceptable. And
00:02:35.660 that's why we launched this campaign. You know, one of the challenges here is that this is a
00:02:41.080 campaign that costs a fair bit of money. And I know that when you're dealing with provinces and
00:02:46.060 governments, the budgets are very large, but $8 million still not insignificant here. Why can you
00:02:51.980 not just pick up the phone and call your federal counterpart? Why can Premier Danielle Smith not just 1.00
00:02:56.720 pick up the phone and talk to the federal government the way you'd hope in a federation levels of
00:03:01.760 government communicate and cooperate? You know, unfortunately, what we've seen is that the federal
00:03:07.080 government has not listened to provinces. And they certainly haven't listened to electricity
00:03:12.260 providers on essentially why these regulations are so problematic. They say that they consulted. But
00:03:19.220 then when they came out with draft one of the clean electricity regulations, like very little, almost
00:03:25.420 none of that feedback that was provided by provinces or our electricity companies was listened to or
00:03:31.760 included. And so, you know, from here, I mean, we are in discussions with the federal government, we as in
00:03:38.500 Alberta, about these specific regulations and other pieces of legislation or regulations that the federal
00:03:44.580 government is looking at that would impact our economy, jobs, and the well-being of Albertans. But
00:03:50.840 specifically here, this is something that will impact all Canadians. And if the federal government,
00:03:57.140 you know, first of all, they've showed that they haven't been listening to the provinces, they haven't
00:04:00.840 been listening to companies. I think that hearing from Canadians is is one way that hopefully we can remind
00:04:07.820 them of who we're here to serve, and why these regulations cannot go forward the way they've
00:04:13.420 been presented. Albertans, Canadians, they do not want to see their electricity bills go up three,
00:04:19.740 four, five times, right, the cost estimates are up to $1.7 trillion. Canadians will have to pay for
00:04:25.400 that somehow on their taxes on their bills. We see other countries around the world, we see also places
00:04:31.380 like California, Texas, Germany, where they are actually facing rolling brownouts, blackouts,
00:04:37.600 rationing power, and going back to coal-fired generation. We don't want that. What we're
00:04:42.300 saying to the federal government is be a partner, let's have discussions where we put ideology aside
00:04:48.120 and use common sense, and put Albertans and Canadians and their very real concerns about affordability and
00:04:53.940 reliability first. Justin Trudeau yesterday said that Albertans are, quote, all in for what his
00:05:02.200 government is doing on this. Now, I would say, given the narrative that emerged during the last
00:05:08.000 election campaign in which your UCP got a majority, that Albertans are not all in for the liberal
00:05:13.420 government's approach to this, but how do you even reconcile that claim with the experiences that
00:05:20.040 you're seeing from your constituents? Yeah, you know, it's interesting that they pick and choose
00:05:25.260 facts, and they do misrepresent, I think, the feedback that they've been hearing from, especially
00:05:31.280 Alberta power companies. I mean, we've been meeting with companies over the last number of weeks to
00:05:34.780 understand why these regulations are so problematic. A number of those companies are, and their
00:05:40.100 representatives are actually in Ottawa, providing that very real feedback. You know, we saw Minister Guy
00:05:45.960 and Beau say, for example, Capital Power is fully supportive. Well, Capital Power also said that
00:05:51.600 they can't do this before 2045. So, you know, I think it's a little disingenuous, to be honest with
00:05:58.500 you. It's not 100% truthful. We know that the way that these regulations are written right now
00:06:05.500 absolutely cannot be implemented in Alberta, and even our independent system operator has raised concerns
00:06:12.100 about grid reliability. And what I break that down to is, I mean, I represent a lot of young
00:06:18.440 families, we have a lot of seniors, when we're talking about rationing power, think about that. In other
00:06:23.720 places, they ration power at areas of or times of high demand. So 4 and 9pm. When I think about that, I think
00:06:31.160 about families and the people I serve, picking up their kids from school, doing homework, trying to have dinner,
00:06:37.360 getting to kids activities, and doing that in the dark, while paying more for less reliable power.
00:06:44.460 I just don't think that that's what anybody wants to see. And you know, when we look at the criminal
00:06:49.840 code aspects that Minister Guy-Beau has suggested that there will be criminal code, essentially sanctions
00:06:57.380 under the Environmental Protection Act for powering our grid. That is a very real problem. And I don't think
00:07:05.940 that's what Albertans or Canadians want to see. You mentioned capital power, which I think raises an
00:07:10.960 interesting and important point here. Is your issue the timeline? Because the government has been on
00:07:15.720 emissions reduction schemes in general, very aggressive. And I think they keep rewriting the
00:07:20.160 timeline and giving the country and the provinces and everyone in it less and less time to do this.
00:07:25.500 But so is that the issue? Or is it the fundamental ask underlying it, irrespective of the timeframe?
00:07:31.240 I mean, first of all, of course, this is an area of provincial jurisdiction. So this is another
00:07:35.740 area where the federal liberal government is infringing on an area of provincial jurisdiction. And I think
00:07:42.440 the big issue here is that they fundamentally do not understand how power generation works in each
00:07:47.740 of the provinces. And they're not treating the provinces as unique. So where we're left is a
00:07:53.720 situation where their prescribed regulations are just, they're completely not feasible for a couple of
00:08:03.120 reasons. One, the technology does not exist. The standards they put in place have not been tested
00:08:09.160 or proven anywhere in the world. And we would have to develop them, test them, prove them and scale it up
00:08:16.180 across our whole system in just over 10 years. That is completely unrealistic. The other thing is around
00:08:23.560 the number of hours that we can run peaker generations. So that helps us, especially, you know,
00:08:29.580 think winter, it's cold right across Canada, not just in Alberta, throughout the winter months.
00:08:34.920 Now, if we only have 18 days of peaker capacity, where, you know, the wind isn't blowing, the sun
00:08:40.980 isn't shining, renewables are not generating the base load that we need, and you need natural gas
00:08:45.560 peaker capacity to come in and essentially provide that base load natural gas. 18 days does not get us
00:08:52.920 through the month of January. That is wildly unreasonable for, again, not just Alberta,
00:09:00.700 but right across the country. And system operators across the country are saying, this just isn't
00:09:06.840 feasible. And so, you know, I hope that this campaign urges on Canadians to tell the feds, tell
00:09:14.160 their MPs why this is so problematic. And, you know, I hope that MPs are looking at those ads,
00:09:21.220 are hearing it on the radio, and then are hearing from Canadians just how concerned they are.
00:09:26.720 Are you getting support for this from other provinces?
00:09:30.280 You know, here's what I would say. We've had provinces right across the country articulate
00:09:34.920 why these regulations are so problematic. I mean, yesterday, you know, not necessarily specific to
00:09:42.760 clean electricity, but the Nova Scotia reports around energy poverty, right? When we talk about energy
00:09:49.940 reliability and energy poverty and why people are at risk because of the federal government's
00:09:56.660 ideological goals, you know, reading reports of people asking, how do I keep my home? How do I
00:10:02.460 keep my home? How do I put food on the table? How can we afford this carbon tax? That is a problem. I
00:10:08.160 mean, we've seen Ontario system operator also essentially say that the current draft regulations
00:10:14.120 would be problematic for their grid as well. We've seen it here in Alberta. I know Saskatchewan
00:10:19.280 is opposed. I think a few months ago, Manitoba also had some concerns. And so what we're asking
00:10:24.260 for, I think, as provinces, is some common sense. Let's not use ideology. Let's listen to Canadians
00:10:30.680 whose top concerns right now are affordability, the cost of living, obviously, the carbon tax is driving
00:10:36.580 that to a huge extent, of course, in inflation. But let's listen to those very real concerns and
00:10:43.280 make sure that, you know, when when a mom wakes up in the middle of the night with baby, that wasn't,
00:10:48.440 you know, too long ago, I remember what that was like. And could you imagine that mom waking up in
00:10:54.920 the middle of the night and not being able to turn on the lights? Like that is the reality of what the
00:10:59.600 federal government is putting forward. I am encouraging the federal government, we are here across
00:11:04.920 Alberta, encouraging the federal government to actually think about the Canadians that this would
00:11:10.460 impact, how it would impact them, and what that would mean in their day to day lives as at a time when
00:11:16.100 cost of living is already a top concern, increased electricity bills for less reliable power. That just
00:11:23.100 isn't something that I think Canadians want to see. But and I think you're very right when you point out how
00:11:29.220 all provinces and certainly a few in particular have a shared interest in this. But in terms of going to
00:11:34.460 the extent that Alberta is, you know, maybe not necessarily with an ad campaign, but really
00:11:39.100 asserting provincial jurisdiction here, are you seeing the support from other provinces that you
00:11:43.680 need or would like? You know, I think that we are. I mean, we hear other provinces across the country
00:11:49.160 saying that this is just unreasonable and unrealistic. I mean, I certainly felt like this campaign was
00:11:55.960 something that was needed to make sure that the federal government is hearing those concerns,
00:11:59.800 concerns, and that we're focusing on, you know, what's really at the heart of the issue, which is
00:12:05.680 the people that we are elected here to serve, and their very real concerns around affordability and
00:12:09.600 reliability. And, you know, I think what we're seeing out of Atlantic Canada, and of course, across
00:12:14.500 the prairie provinces shows that this isn't just from Alberta, this, this is an across Canada issue. And
00:12:20.040 it's also why I think the federal government really needs to respect provincial jurisdiction,
00:12:24.340 and take the feedback from provinces on what makes their systems unique.
00:12:30.220 Well, I think the last few years has shown that you can certainly make a point by bringing a truck
00:12:33.820 to Ottawa. I know you're doing a different type of truck on Wellington Street there. We had that
00:12:38.300 image. It certainly was noticed by people, whether they'll heed the words on it. And in the radio ads
00:12:44.940 and billboards, time will tell. Minister Rebecca Schultz, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on
00:12:49.940 today. You as well, anytime. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by
00:12:55.280 donating to True North at www.tnc.news.