Juno News - July 14, 2024


Trudeau’s net-zero plan leaves Canada reliant on foreign energy


Episode Stats

Length

8 minutes

Words per Minute

164.96422

Word Count

1,475

Sentence Count

13


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show
00:00:05.920 uh we will move from defense to a different form of territorial independence which is our
00:00:14.580 electricity market now this is a i also i'll warn you it's a bit in the weeds in some ways but i
00:00:19.960 think it's understandable because we see rising electricity rates in many places across the
00:00:25.380 country i mean i'm from ontario which used to have like among the most expensive electricity
00:00:28.700 anywhere in north america except for i think it was like hawaii back when kathleen wynn was in
00:00:33.640 office but we have now seen ourselves become a net importer of electricity as a country for the
00:00:41.700 first time this is quite significant we are now importing more electricity than we are producing
00:00:46.860 and exporting and this is coming because there is a vulnerability that my next guest believes has been
00:00:52.720 created uh in large part due to policy here a decarbonization focused energy strategy has
00:00:59.260 allowed this to happen philip cross is a senior fellow with the mcdonald laurier institute and had
00:01:04.160 a great piece in the financial post about this philip always good to talk to you thanks for coming on
00:01:08.340 today my pleasure thanks for having me back so soon andrew so so why does this matter that we are now a
00:01:14.080 net importer why is that relevant it's relevant because we think of ourselves as a country of
00:01:21.020 almost inexhaustible supplies of electricity um particularly you know whole a great part of
00:01:27.920 quebec's self-image is that it's this massive source of hydro uh newfoundland obviously has a huge hydro
00:01:35.360 development ontario has an extensive network of nuclear plants manitoba and british columbia also have
00:01:43.840 large electricity power sources and have been adding to them recently so the fact that you know
00:01:50.500 we have this self-image that we have all its electricity and then suddenly this year we had to import more
00:01:56.000 from the u.s normally we're exporting to the u.s for the first time ever in the at the beginning of this
00:02:02.140 year we were importing electricity on balance from the u.s uh this shows that our supplies of electricity
00:02:09.740 are not keeping up with demand uh you could look at the shortfall this year and blame it on some
00:02:15.620 temporary factors you can say it's drought and it's maintenance at nuclear plants but it risks because of
00:02:21.040 the fact we are not building up our electrical capacity this temporary situation risk becoming
00:02:27.060 becoming permanent if this country doesn't get serious about building out its electricity supplies
00:02:32.400 and why do you believe this has been really a problem created by policy in a lot of ways
00:02:38.220 because uh they've you know it's been openly the goal of policy to electrify
00:02:47.360 our energy demand for example the most extreme example is of course that we're supposed to not drive
00:02:53.380 gasoline powered internal combustion engines in our cars anymore we're supposed to be driving electric vehicles
00:02:59.600 well if we're all going to drive electric vehicles and if we're all going to heat our homes
00:03:05.480 with electricity and not natural gas or in oil and if we're all going to use um all kinds of uh
00:03:13.340 new technologies that are powered by the grid you know it was predictable we were going to need a vast
00:03:20.220 increase in our electricity demand uh you know environmentalists say well we're supposed to cut back
00:03:26.500 our investments in fossil fuels the counterpart of that though is you're supposed to be increasing
00:03:31.880 your investment in electricity sources and we haven't been doing so one of the things that i found
00:03:38.900 interesting in your piece is that the government knows it doesn't have the capacity to create all of
00:03:46.980 this energy through the means they want to i mean that's the thing is that there's this fatwa against energy
00:03:52.260 that we're using without a viable alternative there but we're so we're definitely putting the
00:03:57.960 cart before the horse and we're seeing this i think yeah well on the heels of this op-ed i wrote in the
00:04:03.200 post there's an interesting article in the globe today uh wednesday that is uh that highlights in
00:04:10.000 quebec for example uh quebec brought out the trumpets and announced a great fanfare over the last couple
00:04:16.260 months that they were going to substantially build out both their hydro and their wing capacity it
00:04:22.400 turns out even with this vast expansion it's not going to meet even half of the projected increase
00:04:28.320 hydro quebec admitted a couple of years ago that its projections about where electricity demand was
00:04:32.920 going was completely wrong it was very slow to react the former head of hydro quebec said oh well
00:04:39.240 this is a great opportunity to conserve demand and we don't need to build capacity
00:04:43.860 they replaced her with michael savia who was formerly the deputy minister of finance here in ottawa
00:04:49.040 and savia is pursuing a program of aggressive uh aggressively increasing supply but it's not going
00:04:57.460 to be enough uh and that's the frightening thing is uh you know for bc for example to meet its projected
00:05:03.720 hydro uh electricity demand they're not going to have to just build finished site c they're going to
00:05:09.100 have to build at least five more dams the size of site c well imagine all the problems and delays and
00:05:16.080 arguments about c site c multiply that by five and you can see you know this is something that we're
00:05:22.480 going to have to start tackling right now i mean electricity generating plants are built with a horizon
00:05:28.600 of uh 10 years from beginning to end so uh this isn't something you just go out and and throw up in a
00:05:37.020 couple of years uh and i think the concern has to be that um you know we're going to in the short run
00:05:43.660 over the next five ten years we're probably going to run chronically short of electricity and we're
00:05:48.320 going to be reliant on the americans to supply our electricity which is going to be uh quite a role
00:05:54.320 reversal for this country uh it was it didn't intentionally come out this way but you're coming
00:05:59.080 on the heels of my discussion with admiral mark norman in which that's basically defense policy
00:06:03.240 in canada now which is to ride the coattails of america and now we're doing the same thing on
00:06:07.920 electricity too it seems i one of the things i want to ask you about was alberta now they had a
00:06:12.740 i don't know if mini is the right word but they had a relatively short-lived thankfully electricity
00:06:17.620 crisis in the last few months and is there any lesson to be taken from that that is being taken
00:06:24.000 oh there's two i mean we had a couple of near misses uh in texas a couple of years ago and in
00:06:30.820 alberta this year where the electrical grid almost collapsed we just didn't have the the capacity to
00:06:37.100 meet demand people don't seem to realize this isn't going to be a three-hour blackout uh if your
00:06:42.920 electrical grid uh goes down it takes months to to come back on stream imagine if a major state like
00:06:50.440 texas or a province like alberta goes offline from electricity for weeks or months at a time
00:06:57.880 i mean that this this would be catastrophic uh i mean i was aware during my tenure at sissy's canada
00:07:04.260 uh that if you want to shut down our society cut off the juice uh every time there's a major power outage
00:07:11.860 um for example ontario had a major one in 2003 uh economic activity just grinds to a halt
00:07:19.500 uh our society cannot function without electricity and because of the decarbonization move and the
00:07:27.060 the desire to get away from fossil fuels we're more dependent on electricity uh for energy than ever
00:07:33.820 and yet we are not taking adequate steps to ensure both the security of supply in the sense of that it
00:07:42.580 can be counted on that it's reliable and it won't be interrupted and with security comes affordability
00:07:48.140 uh we can't increase the price of electricity by five times we will bankrupt ourselves and especially
00:07:54.240 the poorest members of our society so we need to make sure that adequate cheap sources of supply
00:08:01.040 are coming on stream over the next years 10 years to meet projected demand and it seems to be something
00:08:07.580 that this country is just waking up to and we're we're behind the ball on this one
00:08:13.140 the piece in the financial post which you should take a look at canada's energy blindness must end
00:08:19.640 written by philip cross philip always good to talk to you thanks for coming on today thank you
00:08:24.100 thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news
00:08:32.240 www.tnc.atown.ca.fr
00:08:40.180 www.tnc.atown.ca.