Canada’s inflation reaching 8.1%
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
182.10162
Summary
Greg Mclean, Shadow Minister for Natural Resources, joins the show to talk about the importance of energy independence in Canada and the world, and why it is so important that we have a Canadian LNG project in development.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, everyone. Welcome once again to The Blueprints. This is Canada's Conservative
00:00:07.000
Podcast. I'm your host, Jamie Schmael, Member of Parliament for Halliburton,
00:00:10.360
Co-Orthal Lakes Brock, with new content for you every single Tuesday, 1.30 p.m. Eastern Time.
00:00:15.920
We're not taking time off this summer because the Liberal gender is always moving. And because it
00:00:20.800
is, we ask that you like, subscribe, comment, share this program. Together, we can push back
00:00:26.020
against what the Liberals are doing. And this is probably content you're not getting in the
00:00:30.240
mainstream media. Because it is, we ask that you, if you can't watch or listen to this entire program
00:00:35.880
right this second, download it, listen to it on platforms like CastBox, iTunes, Google Play,
00:00:40.020
Spotify, you name it. It is out there. Today, we're going to talk about the world energy market.
00:00:45.720
We're going to talk about Canadian energy. We are going to talk about the importance of energy
00:00:50.200
independence. And to talk about that, we have a great friend in the show, the Member of Parliament
00:00:55.400
for Calgary Centre, the Shadow Minister for Natural Resources. Greg McLean, welcome back
00:01:02.460
Jamie, thank you for having me. It is always a pleasure being here. So much appreciated.
00:01:06.720
Well, I remember last time we had you, we were in the studio and we talked about this topic
00:01:10.680
in particular, not focused a whole show on it, but we did touch on it. So let's follow up on that
00:01:16.720
domestic energy and what is going on in the world. You had a National Post article and I'll pull it up
00:01:23.260
in front of me on July 28th, 2022. Energy ignorance on display in Canada and Germany. Why don't you
00:01:31.800
tell us a bit about that? Well, thank you, Jamie. The article I wrote at the time, and obviously
00:01:36.880
you got to fit it in that 600 word format to get inside a publication. It really is about how
00:01:43.400
our policies on energy around the world have led us to where we are today. And where we are today is
00:01:48.900
best exemplified by Germany in the fact that they are losing energy security. That is, they're
00:01:54.580
entirely dependent on a hostile party at their borders in order to keep their economy rolling
00:01:59.940
this winter, in order to heat their homes, in order to light their homes. They are dependent on
00:02:04.540
Russia supplying them gas, not just gas though, but also oil. This is all based on a historical energy
00:02:11.620
policy that Angela Merkel came up with when she was Chancellor of Germany. It was called Energiewind.
00:02:17.320
And what that was is a pushback towards solar and wind as the solution to how they exit from
00:02:26.140
nuclear power. Germany's wanted to exit from nuclear power. Angela Merkel made this compromise
00:02:32.680
in order to gain the support of the Green Party and, you know, really support her coalition.
00:02:38.440
The cause of that, of course, now is over-dependence on Russian supply of the resource market,
00:02:43.140
oil and natural gas in particular. But let's talk about natural gas,
00:02:46.960
because this is exactly what I spoke with the German ambassador about a year and a half ago when I
00:02:52.800
met with her. At that point in time, they were looking at approving a project called Nord Stream 2,
00:02:58.480
which was a doubling of the pipeline supplying gas from Russia directly to Germany. And I was speaking
00:03:05.120
against it, how it would put them in a position where they were so dependent upon a hostile foreign
00:03:12.400
party potentially cutting off their gas supply and more or less making them completely energy insecure
00:03:18.240
at that point in time. And I pushed, of course, as my job is to try and get them committed to some
00:03:22.640
Canadian LNG supply and develop that infrastructure. So they'd also have a balance, a diversification,
00:03:28.800
if you will, of their natural gas supply. And those projects in Canada would take anywhere up to five
00:03:33.520
years, if you will, to actually get rolling. Remember what happens in Canada is projects get held up by
00:03:39.360
our current regulatory environment. So things don't get done. But we need this to get done. I think it's
00:03:44.160
the big impetus for us at this point in time. The one thing we've learned in this, of course, is that
00:03:49.840
get stuff done because the world needs our energy. If we had these LNG plants 10 years ago, there were 18
00:03:56.560
Canadian proposals for LNG export from Canada. If we had one of those up and running right now, we don't even have one,
00:04:02.640
we'd be able to provide some of the security the world requires while one of the world's
00:04:07.200
biggest energy suppliers is cutting off supply Western Europe. Well, that's where we have the
00:04:13.120
conversation. We're not, I don't think conservatives are against, well, we're definitely not against
00:04:17.520
green energy. We support that, but what we support is an abundance and a variety of options within the
00:04:23.600
energy market. So it's A plus B, not B minus A. We like abundance equals peace, right? When there's
00:04:30.640
shortage, there's conflict. And, and that's what we're trying to get across. Like if you want to
00:04:35.040
add to the energy supply, that's a good thing because competition is good. We see a lowering
00:04:41.600
of prices. We have a variety of options, but when you, when you totally take away sectors of our economy,
00:04:49.280
like the liberals are doing with oil and gas here in Canada and, and relying on other unproven
00:04:55.360
technologies at this point, you are going to cause shortage. We need to add different options to this
00:05:01.200
energy portfolio. You're correct. We are the whole thing that you're looking at as far as energy
00:05:07.520
supply and recall the energy, the article I wrote is about energy ignorance. There is no forecast out
00:05:14.720
there that doesn't have us consuming more energy in the world in 20 and 30 years. It's all forecasting.
00:05:20.800
The world will need more energy. Where does that energy come from is the question. Wind and solar,
00:05:26.160
as we point out in the article there at points in time in Germany, it provides less than 2% of the
00:05:32.160
required energy to run the factories, to eat the homes, to light the homes. So the compromises are
00:05:37.440
going to have to be made at some point in time there. The base load is going to continue to provide
00:05:42.080
the power force. No different from Canada, by the way. And I'm in Alberta, we have the Alberta electrical
00:05:47.120
system operator here. And there's points in time in this winter in Alberta, you can imagine it's
00:05:53.040
minus 40 below in parts of Alberta. My part of the country got down to minus 37 below this past winter.
00:05:59.200
At that point in time, our alternative energy, which we'll classify as wind and solar,
00:06:04.640
supplied less than 1% of the power required in Alberta. And they represent about 17% of our capacity.
00:06:13.440
So 70% of our built capacity providing less than 1% when we really need power. Therefore,
00:06:20.960
we need to continue to have those base load power mechanisms, whether they be
00:06:25.440
natural gas, which we're mostly moving off of coal, natural gas or nuclear. Now, nuclear is something
00:06:31.280
I think you and I have spoken about before. If we're going to address greenhouse gas emissions,
00:06:36.000
one of the technologies we need to look at is how we economically deliver nuclear power to Canadians.
00:06:42.560
And that's something that, again, the Germans have turned away from by choice here. France,
00:06:47.520
by the way, right on the door of Germany, has increased their nuclear power supply. So they're
00:06:52.320
trying to rebuild some of their power by nuclear in France, and Germany's turned completely away from
00:06:58.320
it. These are political choices. So recognized as the European Union, it covers one broad political
00:07:04.160
entity, but there's a bunch of other entities within that one broad political entity, France and Germany,
00:07:09.280
that are going different directions, and how they see that base load power. The problem that Germany
00:07:15.120
encountered right now, it's turning on a whole bunch of coal, and it's dirty coal in Germany,
00:07:19.920
it's way dirtier than Canadian coal. And that's how they're going to fund, they're going to feel most
00:07:24.800
of their base load power this year. But the point I'd like to make, and I'll quote Sabine Sparwasser,
00:07:30.160
who's the ambassador, but she came before the committee of House, the House Commons Committee
00:07:35.440
on Foreign Affairs last week, and said, we made a huge strategic mistake by creating such
00:07:41.920
a dependency on Russia. It is a grievous mistake. It happened over many, many decades, since the 1970s,
00:07:49.360
actually. Adding that Germany has made legislative changes to fast track its energy transition. I think
00:07:56.400
there's a reckoning on the part of the German government that for too long they relied on cheap
00:08:00.240
gas. That's Melanie Jolie's comment, okay? Well, Melanie Jolie, the reason they relied on cheap gas
00:08:07.440
is because getting gas from Russia was about half as expensive as getting LNG from North America,
00:08:14.480
because of the process we have to go through to supply that gas. Nevertheless, that is part of the price
00:08:20.080
and the cost, if you will, of energy security. This winter, Germany will enter energy poverty.
00:08:26.080
If they have a cold winter in Europe, we are going to see much dislocation, much discomfort. However,
00:08:32.640
it's our job to push forward with a world where we believe in the rights of democratic states to
00:08:40.320
continue to exist. What Russia's done in the Ukraine, the invasion, is abysmal. And I think we need to
00:08:46.480
continue to stand by Ukraine and make sure we enforce all the sanctions against Russia to make
00:08:52.160
sure that we come up with the support of one of our democratic partners in the world. The energy
00:08:57.760
issues we're going to have to recognize is going to be more expensive, but let's start getting those
00:09:02.640
energy solutions built to help Europe. Well, you remember back in Ontario, probably 16 years ago,
00:09:10.080
the provincial liberals at the time decided to start the Green Energy Act, which resulted in billions of
00:09:18.160
dollars in subsidies going to wind and solar plants and solar farms. And when the money ran out,
00:09:25.680
the jobs went away, unfortunately, and a lot of them were shipped off overseas. But at the same time,
00:09:33.760
people went into energy poverty because the cost of electricity went up substantially to make up for
00:09:39.840
these subsidies going elsewhere to these individuals. And it really caused problems
00:09:45.680
within our grid. And it was less than 5% at peak of our energy supply here in Ontario.
00:09:51.760
So it was a lot of pain for very little gain. But what happened in the House of Commons in the last
00:09:58.800
session, the NDP had a motion to tax the oil and gas companies because they made, Airfingers quote,
00:10:05.760
record profits. Well, if you're going to tax the oil and gas companies, what do you think is going
00:10:11.760
to happen to the price of oil and gas? It is absolutely ridiculous, their line of thinking.
00:10:18.560
It is. The inflationary suggestions that this government goes through is ridiculous. Of course,
00:10:23.600
the NDP piles on all the time because they think that corporations are taking money. Well, corporations
00:10:29.440
are making money. Yes, they are. And in the high oil and gas prices, yes, there are some profits being made by oil and gas
00:10:35.760
companies. That makes up for seven years of losses. There aren't too many companies in Canada, too many
00:10:41.680
industries that have gone through seven years of losses the way the oil and gas industry has. So some
00:10:46.480
of this is a makeup from some of the losses they've had over the last seven years to repair some of their
00:10:51.680
investors for the losses they've taken. You do not judge an industry on one year's performance.
00:10:57.360
Let's make sure we understand that. Let's also make sure that when the oil and gas industry
00:11:01.120
proffers, that prospers, pardon me, the Canadian economy prospers immensely. We have a way, you know,
00:11:08.880
the economic rent we get from the oil and gas industry in Canada is far superior to that used in
00:11:15.840
almost any country around the world. Norway is our only real competitor on how we perform
00:11:21.120
environmentally and from a social cost perspective on our oil and gas industry. So this year it looks like
00:11:27.840
the oil and gas industry is going to provide about 50 billion dollars of economic rent to Canadian
00:11:35.520
taxpayers. That's money that's going to fund schools, hospitals, all kinds of government programming,
00:11:41.760
and at the same time this government is going to continue to run a 52 billion dollar deficit.
00:11:46.560
That's ridiculous. We've got to start to get to paying our bills. Part of those bills get paid when
00:11:51.520
these companies are prosperous and they actually provide that money back to Canadian taxpayers so we have
00:11:56.640
the services that we do need to pay for. Inflation's at nine percent here in Canada. My goodness,
00:12:05.600
all they're doing is spending. As you just pointed out, they're going to keep spending.
00:12:08.960
It's like fighting, trying to cure cancer with more cancer. They're just spending again and again and
00:12:14.000
again. This is going to be, I think, very long-term pain for a lot of Canadians. Now they're talking about
00:12:21.200
reducing fertilizer use for our farmers by 30 percent. This is just on and on and on. We're
00:12:28.880
going to see hurt by the government. On average, Canadians just trying to get by.
00:12:35.840
You're right. The cost of food is going to go up under this government's plans from both a
00:12:40.560
production perspective if they cut back on fertilizer. Farmers will go out of business,
00:12:44.480
so we're producing less. Therefore, there'll be less supply. So cost of food will go up. Cost of
00:12:50.160
distributing food will go up as we continue to press down upon our distributors across Canada and their
00:12:56.720
cost of getting food to market. So there's all kinds of inflation this government's building into it.
00:13:02.320
But on top of that, they don't recognize the virus they're causing here with this overspending
00:13:08.160
is causing the inflation. Continue to watch this because you've already seen some protests finally
00:13:13.840
arrive from the governor of Bank of Canada. Now that I think he realizes that he's being judged
00:13:19.200
on his performance here in his, well, let me be quite blunt about it, his non-performance
00:13:24.480
in managing inflation. And that is his main job. He's completely failed at it. The whole Bank of Canada has.
00:13:31.120
So they've stumbled into bed with the Liberal government. Yes, we can continue to spend and spend
00:13:35.680
with these endless deficits. Well, we've doubled our debt in Canada and we're 1.3 trillion dollars
00:13:42.800
in debt as a country. That doesn't include our sub-national debt. That is our debts of all the
00:13:46.960
provinces. Ridiculous overspending going on. It does have a consequence. It has a consequence in
00:13:52.320
inflation, most likely seen in the housing debacle. And we've only seen the start of that at this point
00:13:58.960
in time, Jamie. It is absurd. These, you know, these decision makers are not coming to the conclusion
00:14:05.280
that they need to step back and actually stop causing the problems that are becoming more and
00:14:10.720
more severe in the economy. It seems the government seems to be creating one problem after another and
00:14:15.440
then trying to fix the problem that they caused in the first place. But I think I said 9% inflation.
00:14:20.640
It is 8.1. So I do apologize. We are running out of time. I wanted to continue this about inflation,
00:14:27.760
but I just, in the absence of an abundance of time, I'm just going to quickly go back to the article that
00:14:33.840
you talked about and we've been referencing in the National Post and Financial Post. Canada did do
00:14:40.720
something quite interesting, which was help along the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the twinning of that
00:14:46.000
pipeline by releasing the turbines back to Russia. I'm glad the President of Ukraine, not exactly overly
00:14:54.480
happy about that either. Jamie, that's Nord Stream 1. Nord Stream 2 has been built, but never turned
00:15:01.200
on. So Nord Stream 2 is a twinning of Nord Stream 1. And before it got turned on, you had significant
00:15:07.360
lobbying from the United States in particular of Germany. So don't turn this on because look at what
00:15:13.040
Russia is doing. Russia had, you know, Germany had lots of foresight on what was going to happen. They
00:15:19.200
had all kinds of warnings, including for me, that this is where you are putting yourself as far as
00:15:24.320
energy dependency goes. So please look for other options. And now they're coming saying, well, we,
00:15:30.320
you know, we shouldn't have done what we did. Well, you know, how many people had to tell you that in
00:15:34.320
the first place? If Nord Stream 2 had been turned on, think about the double dependency Germany would
00:15:40.240
have right now on Russian gas. So this is something, the actual compressors, the turbines we talk about
00:15:46.720
that get repaired at a facility in Montreal. Canada reneged on its sanctions on Russia
00:15:54.080
to support our partners in Ukraine in order to deliver these compressors back.
00:15:59.120
And the false narrative that I've heard the two ministers, Minister Jolie and Minister Wilkinson
00:16:03.760
deliver on this is that we had to do that so that we could call Russia's bluff. We'd make them kind of
00:16:12.080
say that they, you know, it's not Canada's fault. Well, it doesn't matter whose fault it is. It doesn't
00:16:16.560
matter who gets blamed. We know Russia is not a reliable partner. We know they're at war with the
00:16:22.080
democracy in Europe. We know what they're going to extract a whole bunch of value for their,
00:16:29.680
for the resource this winter from a dependent Europe. Now, let me just go into that one final
00:16:34.320
bit here, Jamie. Recognize that when you're, when Russia is in that much control of European energy,
00:16:41.840
it gets to term, gets to determine supply supply, therefore determines price and scarcity. It would
00:16:49.120
surprise you to know the natural gas deliveries in Europe are about seven times more expensive than
00:16:54.480
they are in Canada. It's ridiculous what they have to pay for natural gas supply right now in Europe.
00:16:59.360
And that's because of the position they put themselves in. We need to make sure we don't
00:17:04.400
put Canada in that same position where Canadians are paying seven times more for energy because of bad
00:17:11.200
government policy. Well, the carbon tax here in Canada that keeps going up for every single year
00:17:16.640
isn't exactly helping either. Greg, we are running out of time. I have a whole slew of other questions
00:17:22.080
for you, like I always do. But as you know, the guest always gets the last word. So I turn the floor
00:17:27.040
over to you. Well, thank you, Jamie. Great being here. And I hope everybody takes a look at these.
00:17:31.520
Like I say, the article is about energy ignorance. We have a follow-up article on it as well.
00:17:36.000
People need to understand that energy is a system. Energy has to be on and to be available all the time
00:17:40.960
in order to fuel our economy, heater homes, lighter homes. These are things you cannot turn off or
00:17:47.040
depend on for a little switch. We're going to be consuming more of it. Let's make sure we transition
00:17:52.320
in any way effectively and with our eyes wide open about the costs and what the effects, including the
00:17:58.480
environmental effects, of every one of those transitions look like. Thanks for the time today,
00:18:02.960
Jamie. Really appreciate being here. Always a pleasure. Greg McLean, the Member of Parliament for
00:18:07.600
Calgary Centre, also the Shadow Minister for Natural Resources. Always a pleasure and always
00:18:12.240
too short of time to tackle all the issues you're dealing with. But again, we always have them back
00:18:17.440
and we'll do so again. We appreciate your time as well with new content every single Tuesday,
00:18:22.160
1.30pm Eastern Time. We ask that you like, comment, subscribe, share this program. If you can't
00:18:26.880
watch or listen to it at the exact moment, please download it. Tell your friends about it. Listen to it.
00:18:31.520
Platforms like Castbox, iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, you name it. It is out there. Until next Tuesday,
00:18:37.280
remember, low taxes, less government, more freedom. That's the blueprint.