Trudeau’s net-zero plan leaves Canada reliant on foreign energy
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Summary
Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald laurier institute and author of a great piece in the Financial Post about the growing need for electricity in Canada. He argues that the lack of investment in new generating capacity is the root cause of the problem, and that the government needs to do much more to address it.
Transcript
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uh we will move from defense to a different form of territorial independence which is our
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electricity market now this is a i also i'll warn you it's a bit in the weeds in some ways but i
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think it's understandable because we see rising electricity rates in many places across the
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country i mean i'm from ontario which used to have like among the most expensive electricity
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anywhere in north america except for i think it was like hawaii back when kathleen wynn was in
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office but we have now seen ourselves become a net importer of electricity as a country for the
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first time this is quite significant we are now importing more electricity than we are producing
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and exporting and this is coming because there is a vulnerability that my next guest believes has been
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created uh in large part due to policy here a decarbonization focused energy strategy has
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allowed this to happen philip cross is a senior fellow with the mcdonald laurier institute and had
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a great piece in the financial post about this philip always good to talk to you thanks for coming on
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today my pleasure thanks for having me back so soon andrew so so why does this matter that we are now a
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net importer why is that relevant it's relevant because we think of ourselves as a country of
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almost inexhaustible supplies of electricity um particularly you know whole a great part of
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quebec's self-image is that it's this massive source of hydro uh newfoundland obviously has a huge hydro
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development ontario has an extensive network of nuclear plants manitoba and british columbia also have
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large electricity power sources and have been adding to them recently so the fact that you know
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we have this self-image that we have all its electricity and then suddenly this year we had to import more
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from the u.s normally we're exporting to the u.s for the first time ever in the at the beginning of this
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year we were importing electricity on balance from the u.s uh this shows that our supplies of electricity
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are not keeping up with demand uh you could look at the shortfall this year and blame it on some
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temporary factors you can say it's drought and it's maintenance at nuclear plants but it risks because of
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the fact we are not building up our electrical capacity this temporary situation risk becoming
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becoming permanent if this country doesn't get serious about building out its electricity supplies
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and why do you believe this has been really a problem created by policy in a lot of ways
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because uh they've you know it's been openly the goal of policy to electrify
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our energy demand for example the most extreme example is of course that we're supposed to not drive
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gasoline powered internal combustion engines in our cars anymore we're supposed to be driving electric vehicles
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well if we're all going to drive electric vehicles and if we're all going to heat our homes
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with electricity and not natural gas or in oil and if we're all going to use um all kinds of uh
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new technologies that are powered by the grid you know it was predictable we were going to need a vast
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increase in our electricity demand uh you know environmentalists say well we're supposed to cut back
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our investments in fossil fuels the counterpart of that though is you're supposed to be increasing
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your investment in electricity sources and we haven't been doing so one of the things that i found
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interesting in your piece is that the government knows it doesn't have the capacity to create all of
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this energy through the means they want to i mean that's the thing is that there's this fatwa against energy
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that we're using without a viable alternative there but we're so we're definitely putting the
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cart before the horse and we're seeing this i think yeah well on the heels of this op-ed i wrote in the
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post there's an interesting article in the globe today uh wednesday that is uh that highlights in
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quebec for example uh quebec brought out the trumpets and announced a great fanfare over the last couple
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months that they were going to substantially build out both their hydro and their wing capacity it
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turns out even with this vast expansion it's not going to meet even half of the projected increase
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hydro quebec admitted a couple of years ago that its projections about where electricity demand was
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going was completely wrong it was very slow to react the former head of hydro quebec said oh well
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this is a great opportunity to conserve demand and we don't need to build capacity
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they replaced her with michael savia who was formerly the deputy minister of finance here in ottawa
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and savia is pursuing a program of aggressive uh aggressively increasing supply but it's not going
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to be enough uh and that's the frightening thing is uh you know for bc for example to meet its projected
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hydro uh electricity demand they're not going to have to just build finished site c they're going to
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have to build at least five more dams the size of site c well imagine all the problems and delays and
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arguments about c site c multiply that by five and you can see you know this is something that we're
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going to have to start tackling right now i mean electricity generating plants are built with a horizon
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of uh 10 years from beginning to end so uh this isn't something you just go out and and throw up in a
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couple of years uh and i think the concern has to be that um you know we're going to in the short run
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over the next five ten years we're probably going to run chronically short of electricity and we're
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going to be reliant on the americans to supply our electricity which is going to be uh quite a role
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reversal for this country uh it was it didn't intentionally come out this way but you're coming
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on the heels of my discussion with admiral mark norman in which that's basically defense policy
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in canada now which is to ride the coattails of america and now we're doing the same thing on
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electricity too it seems i one of the things i want to ask you about was alberta now they had a
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i don't know if mini is the right word but they had a relatively short-lived thankfully electricity
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crisis in the last few months and is there any lesson to be taken from that that is being taken
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oh there's two i mean we had a couple of near misses uh in texas a couple of years ago and in
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alberta this year where the electrical grid almost collapsed we just didn't have the the capacity to
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meet demand people don't seem to realize this isn't going to be a three-hour blackout uh if your
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electrical grid uh goes down it takes months to to come back on stream imagine if a major state like
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texas or a province like alberta goes offline from electricity for weeks or months at a time
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i mean that this this would be catastrophic uh i mean i was aware during my tenure at sissy's canada
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uh that if you want to shut down our society cut off the juice uh every time there's a major power outage
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um for example ontario had a major one in 2003 uh economic activity just grinds to a halt
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uh our society cannot function without electricity and because of the decarbonization move and the
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the desire to get away from fossil fuels we're more dependent on electricity uh for energy than ever
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and yet we are not taking adequate steps to ensure both the security of supply in the sense of that it
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can be counted on that it's reliable and it won't be interrupted and with security comes affordability
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uh we can't increase the price of electricity by five times we will bankrupt ourselves and especially
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the poorest members of our society so we need to make sure that adequate cheap sources of supply
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are coming on stream over the next years 10 years to meet projected demand and it seems to be something
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that this country is just waking up to and we're we're behind the ball on this one
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the piece in the financial post which you should take a look at canada's energy blindness must end
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written by philip cross philip always good to talk to you thanks for coming on today thank you
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thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news