Juno News - February 27, 2026


Canada buys LNG from Australia while ignoring Alberta


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

158.89914

Word Count

2,806

Sentence Count

200

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Well, Canada ranks among the top 15 countries in the world when it comes to natural gas reserves,
00:00:11.260 so it may strike some as rather strange we're importing LNG from the other side of the world.
00:00:17.520 Atlantic Canada is set to receive its first shipment of liquefied natural gas from Australia.
00:00:23.500 You can read the story at JunoNews.com.
00:00:26.620 It will be shipped more than 25,000 kilometers and will have taken a month to get to the port of St. John, New Brunswick.
00:00:35.660 Now, we could be buying it from ourselves.
00:00:37.760 Alberta has vast, high-quality deposits of LNG and is only 4,000 kilometers away, but there's no pipeline to deliver it.
00:00:46.000 The Liberal government killed the Energy East project back in 2017, in part over environmental concerns.
00:00:53.280 Well, the trip from Australia will burn the CO2 equivalent of 3,300 passenger cars over the course of an entire year.
00:01:02.840 If it all sounds crazy to you, well, you're not alone.
00:01:06.020 This post by Conservative MP Melissa Lansman.
00:01:09.540 Canada is sitting on one of the world's largest natural gas reserves, yet we're importing from Australia.
00:01:15.860 This is strategic negligence.
00:01:17.880 Since 1988, Canada has imported more than half a trillion dollars' worth of energy, enriching countries like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Russia, all at the expense of our own country.
00:01:32.560 And then people wonder why so many Albertans want out.
00:01:36.700 And we are joined by Jocelyn Bamford today, coming to us from Toronto.
00:01:40.460 She is founder of the Coalition for Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada.
00:01:44.860 Welcome, Jocelyn.
00:01:45.580 Welcome, or thank you, Mark.
00:01:49.020 Happy to be here with you, as always.
00:01:51.180 We're glad to have you on the show, as always, as well.
00:01:53.880 We have to talk about the fact that we're now importing LNG from Australia.
00:01:58.720 It's bad enough that we're importing any LNG, let alone from the other side of the world.
00:02:03.220 This doesn't make economic sense.
00:02:05.000 It doesn't make environmental sense.
00:02:06.980 And yet, here we are.
00:02:07.840 Yeah, and this should have all the elbows up environmentalists hair on fire.
00:02:14.980 They're transporting liquified natural gas that we have right in Alberta, all the way around the globe to get to eastern Canada.
00:02:23.040 I don't know, how about we build a pipeline so we can get our own liquified natural gas to the other side of the country?
00:02:29.160 That would help not only jobs and prosperity in Canada, but would help the environment.
00:02:33.720 Which tells me, Mark, that they really don't care about the environment.
00:02:37.360 Because if they did, they would be outraged right now.
00:02:40.300 But they're not, so it's not really about the environment for them.
00:02:44.100 No, I think it's at least in part about Alberta hatred from the eastern part of the country.
00:02:50.620 I mean, let's face it, right?
00:02:52.260 It's almost like, yeah, sure, everybody benefits.
00:02:55.900 All Canadians benefit when Alberta does well.
00:02:58.800 All Canadians do well.
00:02:59.700 But they hate Alberta so much that they would rather buy their LNG from, you know, the other side of the world rather than helping Alberta.
00:03:10.180 You know, it's just beyond silly.
00:03:14.020 It's ridiculous.
00:03:15.280 But I hope the rest of the world is laughing at us right now because we deserve it.
00:03:18.840 And it also talks to the economic lack of knowledge for Canadians, especially those that in the boomer era that maybe spent their whole life either in the public sector or an NGO or some component that is government funded.
00:03:38.980 They have nice pensions, they have nice homes, but they have a lack of understanding of economics 101 and how actually private enterprise supports public enterprise and a lack of understanding of the realities of how important our resource sector is to Canadians.
00:03:59.560 Not just to Alberta, as you said, but in Ontario, back in the heyday when we were heavily involved in the resource sector, there's almost as many people in Ontario that work to support the resource sector as did to support automotive.
00:04:15.120 But again, Canada has no manufacturing strategy at any level of government because, again, they think money grows on trees and there's a magic tree in everyone's backyard that grows money that funds the public sector.
00:04:29.560 Well, we know that the Liberals killed the Energy East project back in 2017.
00:04:34.520 They also killed Northern Gateway.
00:04:36.680 I mean, Canada has paid an enormous price for electing Liberals back in 2015.
00:04:44.760 I mean, we would look very differently right now.
00:04:47.720 I mean, our health care would be in better shape.
00:04:49.520 Our education services would be in better shape because there'd be more money, you know, for all sorts of things that we don't seem to have now.
00:04:57.660 And so I just wonder if people really understand that, to your point earlier about whether Canadians get it.
00:05:06.820 Do they or don't they?
00:05:08.860 No, I don't think they do.
00:05:10.620 And as Dan McKig for Canadians for Forable Energy tells it, there were 17 projects on the books.
00:05:17.880 All those 17 projects were killed by the federal liberal government.
00:05:22.260 Imagine the prosperity that we could have right now.
00:05:24.500 And a cautionary tale to all of those boomer, elbows up boomers that own their house and have a big pension.
00:05:31.900 All you have to do is look at what happened to Detroit when you're not looking at the fiscal management of the public purse.
00:05:40.440 Because if you looked at Detroit before it took a big dive, people had houses that they invested with that are basically worthless.
00:05:49.860 They had their pensions.
00:05:51.240 When there's no money in the kitty for pensions, they'll come back to the pensioners and said, sorry, there's no money.
00:05:56.480 We can't pay you out.
00:05:57.400 We'll renegotiate at a fraction of what you think you're getting.
00:06:01.360 So if they think that they, again, there's an end to financial capabilities to fund these efforts.
00:06:12.260 And if they don't think that it's going to impact them, it is.
00:06:16.080 And it also speaks to the selfishness of the boomers because they just don't seem to care about their kids and grandchildren.
00:06:22.740 I mean, ultimately, we're all in it to make sure that our kids and grandchildren have a better prosperity than we had.
00:06:31.540 And unless you invest in things that make economic sense, like our resource sector or oil or natural gas, unless we get those to marketplace.
00:06:41.940 And as we're just sitting on our hands, like when the G7 countries came to us and said, we want your liquefied natural gas.
00:06:52.800 We don't want to buy it from Russia.
00:06:54.680 And we just sat on our hands.
00:06:55.880 Other people fill that void.
00:06:57.740 The United States has seven LNG plants.
00:07:00.420 And they're oh so happy to accept the prosperity that we just didn't want because we were virtual signaling.
00:07:08.140 And Canadians need to wake up.
00:07:12.000 They're all drinking the Kool-Aid, a large majority of them.
00:07:16.560 We need prosperity.
00:07:18.120 We need to get a resource to market.
00:07:19.500 And we need to deal with our largest customer, which is the United States.
00:07:22.480 Yeah, I mean, it may take an economic shock to shake people out of their stupor.
00:07:29.320 You know, it may take really hard times.
00:07:32.180 And we're seeing maybe just the start of it now with job losses in Canada.
00:07:36.740 What do we have, like 24,000, 25,000?
00:07:39.740 25,000 job losses in January.
00:07:42.660 I just read an article in Global News that for every job opening, there's three unemployed people.
00:07:49.440 So do the math.
00:07:51.440 If people aren't working, if jobs are leaving, if companies are closing and relocating, where are you getting the tax dollars from?
00:07:59.560 Yeah, absolutely.
00:08:00.400 And those boomers that voted for Kearney, I mean, yeah, sure, they love those elevated real estate prices.
00:08:07.000 You know, it gives them value.
00:08:09.360 And that's all fine.
00:08:10.860 You know, they have valuable properties there.
00:08:13.020 But if the economy goes for a dump, as it's starting to, the value of these homes will start to fall.
00:08:19.520 And I mean, I understand why the Liberal government wants to bring in more people, like millions of people into the country,
00:08:25.660 because they could artificially prop up the value of homes by increasing the demand from outside.
00:08:32.980 But, you know, if the economy tanks, people aren't working, your point earlier about pensions, you know, it's going to fall hard.
00:08:43.140 And then people are going to wake up and then realize that they've made a huge mistake.
00:08:46.840 But by that point, it might be too late.
00:08:48.880 You know, then what do you do?
00:08:49.940 You scramble to build pipe.
00:08:51.180 Okay, and we get it now.
00:08:52.480 We're going to build pipelines now.
00:08:54.220 Well, you should have done it, you know, 10, 15 years earlier.
00:08:57.160 And people have filled the void that we refuse to fill.
00:09:02.500 So the profitable time would have been during the last 15 years when there is a huge demand.
00:09:09.100 We're way behind in terms of building up our infrastructure.
00:09:13.860 We're way behind in building up our manufacturing to support the resource sector.
00:09:20.180 We've seen companies leave.
00:09:21.920 We've seen job losses.
00:09:23.020 And still, we don't have a manufacturing strategy at any level of the government, provincially, federally, municipally, because they still view manufacturing with a turned up nose because they don't understand the importance.
00:09:39.840 Again, services move money around.
00:09:42.800 Manufacturing, especially exportable manufacturing, brings jobs and money in.
00:09:47.460 Yeah, and money goes where it's welcome.
00:09:49.740 And right now, it's welcome in the United States.
00:09:51.720 I mean, I realize that there's a lot of, and you know this, well, anybody, because you've expanded to Virginia from Scarborough.
00:10:00.680 And, you know, people are going to look at that and go, where is my money going to go where I can get a decent return on investment, you know?
00:10:12.420 And Canada's not the answer.
00:10:14.540 I mean, other people have kicked the tires up in Canada and they look at the regulatory regime and the tax structure and they go, no, thanks.
00:10:22.260 I don't need it.
00:10:22.820 I can go anywhere.
00:10:23.700 And so you've got a president in the United States saying, you know, fleeing open the doors to business and saying, yeah, come here.
00:10:31.260 And not only is he doing that, he's also using the tariff weapon as well, you know, in order to encourage strongly companies that were based here to return, you know, bring those manufacturing jobs back to the United States.
00:10:46.940 They've lost millions of manufacturing jobs over the decades to China and elsewhere.
00:10:52.780 And so you've got a president who's doing everything he can to bring those manufacturing jobs to the United States.
00:10:59.360 We need to do more, you know, have a plan by all means, cut taxes, you know, encourage manufacturing rather than discourage it.
00:11:07.580 Because you think, well, what do they used to say about you, that the business people are just tax cheats or just using their businesses to get tax breaks?
00:11:19.720 Isn't that how Justin Trudeau dismissed some of the companies that are part of your organization out there?
00:11:27.220 Yeah, and absolutely.
00:11:28.180 And it comes back to the quality of politicians that we elect.
00:11:33.040 If we elect people that have never worked in the private sector a day in their lives, they're going to think that it's all easy.
00:11:41.400 We need people.
00:11:42.280 It used to be that politicians were people that were successful in their own right.
00:11:47.140 They understood business.
00:11:48.260 They understand the economics.
00:11:50.600 And they wanted to give back.
00:11:52.100 But increasingly, it's a good little gig for those that are unqualified to do anything else.
00:11:56.440 So we should look at that.
00:11:58.620 And we should demand better of our politicians.
00:12:00.760 Make sure that they understand how economics works.
00:12:05.360 Make sure they have a plan to grow and maintain jobs so our kids have jobs.
00:12:11.480 And if we think, you know, a loss of 25,000 jobs in Canada is scary.
00:12:17.720 Just wait if we aren't able to secure an extension to the USMCA.
00:12:24.860 We're going to be in for a world of hurt there because right now, a large majority of our trade that goes back and forth is trade-free because of the USMCA.
00:12:37.660 And if they decide that they're not going to negotiate a deal because we have basically insulted our largest customer.
00:12:45.060 We just heard Doug Ford the other day.
00:12:47.200 Can't seem to stop himself from insulting his largest customer.
00:12:51.740 And all the while, when he was pouring out that Crown Royal, what was he saying?
00:12:57.000 Is this how you treat your largest customer, being the LCBO?
00:13:02.140 But yet, he doesn't make that connection that the US is Ontario's largest customer.
00:13:07.320 And he just can't stop himself from pissing them off.
00:13:10.420 Yeah, he was saying, you know, that's not how you treat family.
00:13:13.480 In the meantime, he's dumping out product that was manufactured or bottled or created in Manitoba.
00:13:23.280 Inexplicable, isn't it?
00:13:24.340 We're in a crazy town.
00:13:25.820 Very, very strange.
00:13:27.180 I mean, since 88, Canada has imported more than half a trillion dollars worth of energy.
00:13:32.600 And we've been enriching countries like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Russia, all at the expense of our own country.
00:13:39.860 And I just, I really hope that we wake up one day, but because we've already lost hundreds of billions of dollars in investment.
00:13:48.460 I mean, this country should be way better off than it is rather than running up the credit card every time we need to do something.
00:13:54.940 Now with a debt approaching, what, $1.34 trillion?
00:13:59.460 I mean, it is just absolutely.
00:14:01.060 And then you look at all the provincial debt, just piling it on every year.
00:14:04.920 You just have the worst possible managers taking care of our economy.
00:14:10.420 There was something else you wanted to talk about, the dumping issue.
00:14:13.220 You want to talk about that?
00:14:14.880 Yeah.
00:14:15.260 So dumping is when a foreign country brings in a product less than the total sum of what the raw material costs.
00:14:26.140 And here's the problem in Canada.
00:14:28.460 We take some of our raw material, we send it over to Asia.
00:14:33.600 They make a product with it and send it back for less than the cost of the raw materials.
00:14:40.480 And that's because a lot of the manufacturing in China is subsidized by the Chinese Communist Party.
00:14:48.600 So I hate to use the phrase dumping.
00:14:51.840 I prefer calling unfair trade practices because, you know, the left is really good at covering up the bad things by using a term that nobody knows.
00:15:04.160 For example, they call unfair trade practices dumping.
00:15:07.660 They call when we had carbon tax and everything, we still do have industrial carbon tax and jobs leave.
00:15:15.940 They called that carbon leakage.
00:15:17.520 Nobody knew what that was.
00:15:18.720 It was job losses because of bad policy.
00:15:21.500 So this has gone on for a very long time, completely unaddressed by the federal government.
00:15:30.200 We have in Scarborough a nut and bolt manufacturer that has had the trade tribunal rule in their favor that Communist China is dumping product or unfair trade practices
00:15:45.380 and competing and hurting Canadian manufacturers.
00:15:49.700 And the federal government just turns a blind eye.
00:15:52.100 It's, it's, it's, it's again, inexplicable why you wouldn't want to support your small to medium sized manufacturer.
00:15:58.920 These are small family companies that employ 92% of all Canadians work for a company that's 100 people or less.
00:16:07.300 And the federal government is doing absolutely nothing to protect those companies from what their own trade tribunal is, is declaring as unfair trade practices.
00:16:18.340 Yeah.
00:16:18.580 Because the government cannot control entrepreneurs that have their own companies.
00:16:22.720 These are people who want to be independent of government.
00:16:25.000 They don't like that.
00:16:25.800 They like people to be dependent on them.
00:16:27.740 That's why they lavish, you know, monies and services on people from outside the country, for instance, you know, that, you know, if you keep people dependent on government, then, you know, you can rely on them to vote for you, you know?
00:16:42.560 So that's really ultimately what it's about.
00:16:44.740 It's, it's about political power.
00:16:46.360 And I guess they don't think there's any political power or an advantage from their vantage point to support manufacturing since they don't.
00:16:55.000 Support jobs, obvious job creation, the job creation, the manufacturing sector.
00:16:59.520 That's the only.
00:17:00.400 Well, eventually it all collapses.
00:17:02.260 And then, and then when it all collapses, you know, what are they going to do?
00:17:06.120 Exactly.
00:17:06.640 You know, that, that day is coming and you and I know it's going to be pretty ugly when it does.
00:17:12.400 Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show, Jocelyn.
00:17:15.620 We appreciate it.
00:17:17.020 My pleasure as always, Mark.
00:17:18.660 Wish we had better news to talk about.
00:17:21.040 Oh, we got to talk about it nonetheless.
00:17:22.620 And you're terrific at it.
00:17:23.900 Jocelyn Bamford.
00:17:25.620 If you enjoyed this show, consider supporting great independent journalism where breaking news stories are told by going to junonews.com backslash straight up.
00:17:34.460 That's the name of this show.
00:17:35.400 Straight up.
00:17:36.380 Helped us a great deal.
00:17:37.780 Thank you so much.
00:17:38.740 We'll see you next time.