Western Standard - Don't like AI？ Get a trade

00:00:00.000 Good evening Western Standard viewers and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show of the

00:00:20.940 Western Standard. It is Thursday, July the 23rd. With me tonight is Gwyn Morgan, who made his

00:00:27.960 career here in Alberta in oil and gas. He has been a director of five global corporations

00:00:34.520 and most notably president of N-Canada. I'm sorry, N-CANA. And now he is turning his attention

00:00:42.000 to AI and especially what it means for Alberta. Gwen, welcome to the show.

00:00:49.500 Good to be here. Thank you.

00:00:51.040 You're welcome. Gwen, a few weeks ago, you wrote about this in the Western Standard

00:00:56.140 and you said this.

00:00:58.980 Taken together, the AI data center boom is clearly a major source of jobs growth.

00:01:06.520 Yet, on the other hand, AI is slashing ragged swaths

00:01:11.280 through fields of human workers in industry after industry.

00:01:16.160 The bitter harvest shows every sign of accelerating and spreading into new fields.

00:01:24.240 Now, I think many people fear the same thing,

00:01:27.920 but it looks in your article as if you have found another side

00:01:32.500 which maybe you can tell us about.

00:01:37.560 Bitter Harvest, you seem to have come down hard on the opportunity side.

00:01:42.520 Why?

00:01:43.460 Well, let me start off a little bit earlier in the call

00:01:46.500 where I talk about the impact on young people trying to get jobs.

00:01:51.780 A lot of people go to college, university, and we're taking computer science.

00:02:00.480 And I point out that that is, that when you, and in fact, I had a nephew doing that.

00:02:06.260 And what happens, of course, is that there's no need for any such thing as programming anymore.

00:02:12.940 It's all done by AI.

00:02:14.880 So where does that leave young people?

00:02:16.640 So what I say is you have to get into something where there is demand.

00:02:22.800 And where there is demand are the things that you don't deliver online,

00:02:28.500 you deliver in person, everything from doctors, dentists,

00:02:32.080 and all the other people we need to see every day,

00:02:34.020 as well as the skilled trades.

00:02:37.560 And so this is sort of going from one end to the other in my column,

00:02:42.120 But my conclusion is that for people looking to get it, who thought they were going to get into computer science, they'd be a lot better off going into the jobs where you do things in person.

00:02:56.500 And as I say, the skilled trades and the other fields that we all know.

00:03:01.760 Well, you know, I think we might have said that.

00:03:04.760 There's an awful lot of people with master's degrees who are serving coffee in Starbucks.

00:03:09.460 so the people who you can't get hold of easily are those who know how to fix a leaking tap

00:03:15.280 so but what are the trades that you think would be most useful in this going forward and do we

00:03:24.460 have them in alberta enough that this is actually going to be useful to us we're going to get a

00:03:30.920 benefit from it well the the thing is that there's a whole bunch of trades you know and you know

00:03:38.100 everything from when you're when your washing machine isn't working you call who do you call

00:03:42.580 you call it a skilled trades person and then there's all the stuff in the construction area

00:03:46.820 where whether you're building a car or whatever you're doing requires trades knowledge so there's

00:03:54.180 there's a myriad of trades but they're all going to be an increasing demand not less

00:04:00.740 and that's the important point so what are the new trades that uh that like the ones we're not

00:04:07.060 familiar with that it would be like if you were a 20 year old and you wanted to get trained in

00:04:12.340 something that was going to be a scarce commodity what would you recommend well you know i think

00:04:18.900 it's just about every trade everything but from from metal workers to to people who who know how

00:04:26.420 to fix machines like your car or your or your washing machine all those trades that that are

00:04:33.220 that you're every day you need and and that people need and and they are not something that can be

00:04:39.860 done by computer and that's that's the most important thing to point to make they are not

00:04:45.460 something that could be done by computer and not done by ai and and well ai is already doing it

00:04:53.380 that's my point they're already doing all the things that people thought they were going to

00:04:57.380 build a career career around and they're finding they can't get a job and they're coming out of

00:05:03.060 university or college and saying I don't have a future and so what I'm trying to

00:05:10.020 do is is present a route to a future and it's the things that people do in person

00:05:16.620 there's a couple of things that seem really new about this for one thing

00:05:22.680 this is moving forward at an astonishing rate you would be very well familiar in

00:05:28.860 your long career just how difficult it is to get a pipeline built something that we understand very

00:05:34.700 well and yet ai has just come out of nowhere and the rumor is they're going to be turning

00:05:40.700 sod on something in september uh how have these guys gone around the the approval process

00:05:49.740 Well, I don't think there really is an approval process.

00:05:53.740 I mean, in itself, AI and all of that is free market businesses.

00:06:01.740 And they're now the largest businesses in the world by far.

00:06:05.740 The three major hyperscalers that people know about are just huge.

00:06:15.740 huge okay you're talking about a trillion dollars worth of market value in the three major

00:06:22.300 hyperscalers so so i think that the um the bottom line here is that uh that you can't stop the train

00:06:31.420 at but in but also there are certain ways in which you take advantage of it yeah well it's uh

00:06:38.140 What astonishes me about this is that this AI development, who knows how much it's going

00:06:46.840 to mean in the end, but even now they're talking about it needing power on the scale, enough

00:06:53.640 power which would power a city of a million people.

00:06:57.060 This is enormous, and it's going to presumably be mostly natural gas generating electricity.

00:07:02.940 Yeah. Now, it's interesting. Of course, I built my business in my company with a huge, we're the biggest natural gas producer in North America when I stepped down as CEO. And so I know a lot about natural gas. But the thing is that I was also during my career being hammered away by the environmentalists as an evil guy because I produced fossil fuels.

00:07:28.980 and here we are now with with with a technology that's using multiples of the fossil fuels we

00:07:35.460 ever used before and who's who's talking about that but i think that the big thing is the scale

00:07:42.980 of these things like one in grand perry alberta this they're like 40 40 sections of square miles

00:07:50.900 of the area and requires enormous amounts of power.

00:07:56.800 And most of the power, of course, is generated by natural gas.

00:08:00.220 One of those major data systems uses as much natural gas and power as the city of Edmonton.

00:08:12.940 That puts it into perspective.

00:08:17.260 Yeah, I guess this is what I don't get.

00:08:19.560 a few years ago we came very close during a very cold day in the winter and it was 2023 february

00:08:25.640 january we came close to a brownout if not an absolute cessation of service of power in some

00:08:32.440 parts of the province because we plain didn't have enough yeah now time has gone by and more power is

00:08:40.280 now online but all the improvements that we've made have been made against the background of

00:08:47.400 of the federal government saying, well, we need you to be carbon neutral by 2035, and then it was 2050.

00:08:58.000 And I don't know how we're doing on that, but what I do know, and what I'm reading in the papers,

00:09:02.520 and you're talking about in C2C there and in the Western Standard,

00:09:06.680 is that we've got this enormous development going on.

00:09:11.040 It's going to take an enormous amount of power, which is going to be generated by an enormous amount of natural gas,

00:09:15.980 and nobody's talking about our carbon net zero commitments how do we how are we managing to

00:09:22.080 skate past that in fact should we be you know how is it that we've got we can do this for ai but we

00:09:28.100 can't do it to keep our own feet warm in january you know what i mean don't expect the liberal

00:09:34.680 federal government policies to make sense that's the first thing but i think that they uh that

00:09:40.700 But what's happening here is interesting because we still have, you know, the current government still, he's a radical environmentalist when it comes to fossil fuels.

00:09:50.740 He doesn't say that, but he is.

00:09:52.780 But the real world, though, is that most of these data centers that require such a huge amount of natural gas-fired power are in Alberta.

00:10:03.940 So they don't need federal approval.

00:10:05.480 And that's one of the reasons, besides the fact they have access to gas.

00:10:09.460 So, you know, as long as the annual Smith government agrees that they can put these plants in place, they're going to be in place.

00:10:21.140 And so Alberta will end up being, you know, for a long time, the Europe and I should say China produced a third of the AI generated energy.

00:10:36.120 and another third was two-thirds are mostly in the United States,

00:10:41.000 natural gas-fired power, as I say.

00:10:43.600 And now what's happened is that they're kind of at their limit,

00:10:52.620 especially in the United States.

00:10:54.540 So many of them, they're getting a lot of opposition.

00:10:57.460 But in Alberta, where the natural gas is there,

00:10:59.860 they have wide-open labs, lots of land, and we don't have any restrictions.

00:11:05.820 So that's why Alberta is a huge opportunity for it.

00:11:09.980 So if I'm understanding you correctly, when we want to ship natural gas out of the province,

00:11:16.860 it matters. C2C emissions matter. But if we're doing it all within our own borders,

00:11:22.140 they don't matter. They're not covered by federal legislation. Is that right?

00:11:26.860 Yeah, that's an inside Alberta project. You know, if Alberta could put on a natural gas plant

00:11:34.700 through their local authorities. It doesn't need federal approval. It only needs federal

00:11:39.660 approval if you move it outside of the province. Okay. Well, that certainly answers one set of

00:11:46.860 questions that are asked by the people who don't want it at all. I mean, you've got a very

00:11:52.860 strong NIMBY lodging, not in my backyard, NIMBY. What do you say to those people?

00:11:59.980 I mean, you have long experience of getting major projects through the approved and into operation,

00:12:09.260 and you will have encountered before people who don't want something in their backyard.

00:12:14.540 How do you sell this to people who don't want it in their area?

00:12:18.540 Well, I don't think you can sell it. But the reality is that they're getting approved by

00:12:27.580 by the provincial government.

00:12:30.040 And then it comes down to siting, you know,

00:12:33.780 try to site at a place where it has the least impact

00:12:37.300 on people's home or anywhere right where near,

00:12:43.260 it's gonna interfere with their day-to-day lives.

00:12:45.600 And so that's why these data centers are being put in,

00:12:50.060 you know, North of Grand Prairie

00:12:51.820 and in all kinds of places like that

00:12:53.580 where there's wide open spaces

00:12:55.460 You don't have to have the neighbors interrupted or disrupted.

00:13:00.800 Well, if I were a regional municipality up in that area and somebody was going to take up two square miles of bald prairie and build an incredibly expensive, valuable industrial plant, I would actually be welcoming it.

00:13:15.000 I mean, the taxable revenue to the local area would be huge.

00:13:19.020 But I guess if you're a farmer or a rancher, then that's not an incentive.

00:13:27.000 Is there anything that we can do to make it less bad?

00:13:30.880 There's not really much.

00:13:32.100 I mean, there's going to be people against.

00:13:34.820 And even if you try to cite it as the lowest possible impact on people, there's going to be people against.

00:13:42.920 The reality is that these projects are moving forward.

00:13:46.020 They're going to get approved.

00:13:46.880 and all you can do is communicate as well as you can

00:13:51.660 with whoever may be disrupted.

00:13:53.820 I think the one that we've just been talking about

00:13:55.780 is called Wonder Valley, right?

00:13:58.200 Yes, that's one of them, yeah.

00:14:00.220 Yeah.

00:14:01.800 So we've all talked about how artificial intelligence

00:14:06.540 is changing the way we work, the way we live,

00:14:09.300 the way we shop, all manner of things.

00:14:13.000 You're now talking about an industry

00:14:14.920 that is going to be how many?

00:14:17.580 A hundred billion dollars by the time it's fully developed?

00:14:20.920 Yeah.

00:14:21.560 In a...

00:14:22.660 Hundreds of billions.

00:14:23.900 Hundreds of billions in a province

00:14:25.940 where the annual budget is, you know,

00:14:30.660 still in the low numbers of billions.

00:14:34.840 Surely this is going to have a transformative effect

00:14:39.160 on Alberta's economy beyond direct jobs.

00:14:44.920 Things like diversification, tax revenues, I think in your article you make reference to growth in the technological ecosystem, which means that as I take it to mean that as this thing gets underway, the industries that serve that main industry come in and you start to get people who all know about the same stuff working together and moving around.

00:15:10.020 you know, potential synergies with the province's existing energy agriculture and manufacturing sectors.

00:15:18.160 I mean, what do you, looking into the crystal ball, what do you see?

00:15:25.780 And how would you know this is a good thing?

00:15:28.120 What metrics would you use for success?

00:15:32.340 Well, I don't think there's any single message,

00:15:35.760 But the reality is that when these plants are underway and even being built, they generate a huge amount of jobs just to build them alone.

00:15:46.760 And so that's a hugely tremendous number of jobs created.

00:15:57.380 Now, the other thing of ours is you have to train people for those jobs.

00:16:01.480 And so the trade schools and so on and some other university courses have to be expanded.

00:16:08.180 It's going to be, this is such a, it's all happening so fast and it's so huge.

00:16:14.240 It's almost incomprehensible, all the effects and what has to be done.

00:16:18.980 Well, I think that's why we're having you on today because we do find it incomprehensible.

00:16:23.240 It does seem vast and overwhelming.

00:16:25.360 that little old Alberta, you know, with its four and a half million people

00:16:31.280 is suddenly going to have this enormous investment.

00:16:34.480 We've been trying to get investment in the energy industry,

00:16:38.780 but darn it, we haven't been able to get a lot of things done

00:16:44.000 that we wanted to get done, and now this is coming along 0.94

00:16:46.780 and it's just going at a very, very fast pace.

00:16:50.360 So you're going to have a whole new population center

00:16:54.440 we're in wonder valley i mean they're not going to be commuting in from somewhere else they're

00:16:59.080 going to end up living there and the demand for government services at a time when the the

00:17:05.400 government is already being pushed to the wall with immigration uh building the schools and

00:17:11.800 the hospitals and then what sort of a government department might you need to keep an eye on all

00:17:19.560 this? Well, you know, they definitely get to have approval from regulators. But the reality about

00:17:28.520 this is that there's very little impact on the day-to-day life of the people in the country,

00:17:37.240 they're in the province. And once these things are built and operating,

00:17:47.480 they only require a few hundred people to operate them so it's the construction and development and

00:17:52.840 the supply most of it comes the biggest thing will be the the natural gas to power systems

00:17:59.240 there'll be a huge amount of those to be built and they probably can't build it fast enough

00:18:06.280 okay well that's uh that i mean just so just so can you give people an idea what this actually

00:18:13.800 looks like i mean i've seen the the the illustration of the of the area and it's got all these

00:18:19.800 buildings on it but what what's in those buildings what is actually being built and developed

00:18:27.320 well they're full of of transistorized uh systems that can can can uh what's happening

00:18:36.840 really is a broader sense is that the complexity of of the calculations and the amount of

00:18:42.920 calculations are expanding so rapidly in order to facilitate all the AI and other things that they

00:18:51.880 have to have larger and larger data systems to do that. And what I don't, you know, what was almost

00:19:00.920 overwhelming even to me because I looked into this quite a lot is how in the heck such a huge amount

00:19:09.160 of activity, jobs, and various functions that are not only displacing other jobs and other things,

00:19:17.480 but also expanding so rapidly. And it's, you know, even as I say, after looking at all of this and

00:19:26.840 thinking about it and having some history in producing natural gas and generating power,

00:19:32.760 it's still overwhelming to me. So this is a new territory.

00:19:40.920 Well, it certainly is. And I think that's probably why so many people are saying,

00:19:45.480 well, what's happening? And even as they're asking the question, the backhoes are moving into place. 1.00

00:19:53.480 We have to make the assumption that AI is a good thing. 0.99

00:19:56.440 Certainly, it's not going away now that people have got used to using it for their own purposes.

00:20:01.400 the only thing i would say is the only thing i would say is just to go back to where i started

00:20:07.520 what about the young people wanting to do choosing a career and the bottom line here is everything

00:20:13.960 from electricians to all the other trades to have to build these things and maintain them

00:20:21.340 there can be huge demand so instead of taking computer science get a trade get a trade well

00:20:29.020 Well, look, we're happily running out of time, Gwen.

00:20:32.840 It's been a pleasure to have you on board.

00:20:34.820 I've got one last question for you, though.

00:20:37.440 I'm sure you've tried out AI there in your office in Victoria.

00:20:45.320 Have you ever asked it whether Alberta independence would be a good idea,

00:20:48.600 and what did it say?

00:20:51.420 I don't think that's the kind of job the AI will help you with.

00:20:54.960 I don't think so.

00:20:55.880 I don't know.

00:20:56.460 Dr. Grock comes up with a pen.

00:20:57.760 What AI does, you know, most of the time, it just goes into other information and brings it out and presents it.

00:21:05.940 And so you have to be careful because there's a lot of things it's presenting that may or may not be based upon reality.

00:21:13.820 So it's a complicated business.

00:21:17.020 Well, Gwen, it's been a pleasure to have you on again.

00:21:19.000 It's been more than a year.

00:21:19.900 We should do this a little more often, I think.

00:21:22.080 But thank you for giving up some time this afternoon.

00:21:24.480 Looks like it's a hot day in Victoria.

00:21:26.100 uh god bless and we'll see you again okay thank you good to be here thank you

00:21:34.180 for the western standard i'm nigel hannaford

Western Standard - July 24, 2026

Don't like AI？ Get a trade

Episode Stats

Transcript