Western Standard - March 29, 2022


EXCLUSIVE： Dr. Leslyn Lewis on Canada Energy, Equalization, Global Affairs...

Topics
environmental policies & pipelines equalization formula supply management system改革 military spending
Mentioned
Lewis Bill C-63 Steven Guilbeault Pierre Paglia Keystone Trudeau
The gross display of the Hollywood elite on Oscar night LIVE - Triggered： Exclusive interview with Dr. Leslyn Lewis.

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

147.54

Word count

2,056

Sentence count

118

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with Alberta s Premier Rachel Notley to discuss her vision for the future of the province and the energy sector. We discuss the challenges facing the oil and gas sector in Alberta, the need for more infrastructure, and the need to diversify the economy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Our environment minister, Stephen Gilbeau, has set and come out today as well as Prime Minister Trudeau with some very aggressive emissions reduction targets that are probably going to pressure the Alberta oil field very heavily.
00:00:13.760 What kind of response do you have to that sort of planning and rejection, I guess?
00:00:18.120 Well, I think it's very important that any policy that we implement takes into account the regional uniqueness of the West and just how reliant that economy is on oil, natural gas, LNG production.
00:00:36.200 And so I think that we have to take that into consideration and any policies that are implemented should also look at how much of this product are we importing.
00:00:48.340 And if we're not dealing with the importation of that, then again, what we're doing is we're creating policies that's just going to stymie production in certain areas.
00:00:59.100 It's going to create alienation, exacerbate the already existing alienation.
00:01:04.620 Because if you look at the policy of the regulation Bill C-48 and Bill C-69, we know that those regulations favored foreign production and it really crippled our local industries.
00:01:21.240 And so we witnessed corporations fleeing Canada, going to other places that had more enabling legislation.
00:01:30.940 And that's really, really problematic.
00:01:33.820 And so we have to make sure that our environmental policies are all encompassing and look at our natural gifts and our natural resources and our natural endowments, such as the accessible oil reserves that we have.
00:01:48.720 So in getting further with infrastructure, because, I mean, there is quite a demand for oil at this time and gas and ethically produced Canadian products, but we're having a very hard time getting it to market.
00:02:01.000 Our pipelines have been stopped in almost all directions, whether Keystone to the south or Northern Gateway to the west or Energy East, of course, to the east.
00:02:09.060 Would a government under you be examining more ways for Canadian products to get to Tidewater?
00:02:15.840 Absolutely.
00:02:16.480 I think it's very essential.
00:02:18.220 And I look at the environment from a holistic perspective.
00:02:22.360 So I look at the entire life cycle of products, whether they be electric cars or solar panels or wind generation.
00:02:31.680 I look at the entire life cycle from the day it's created to how do we dispose of it after we're done using it.
00:02:39.840 And so when you do do that, you'll see that certain things are not as environmentally friendly as we actually think they are.
00:02:48.820 And the building pipelines are the most that is the most efficient way to transport LNG and our oil and gas.
00:03:00.200 It's very, very important.
00:03:01.440 It's that we build these pipelines.
00:03:03.320 It's more efficient than trucking and rail transportation.
00:03:09.940 And I think it's very important that we get our product to Tidewater because we will be able to offset some of the dependency on Russian oil that we see in Europe.
00:03:22.440 And it will also bring revenues into our country and assist us with some of the issues that we're having with the high rates of unemployment that we're facing post-COVID.
00:03:34.580 Great.
00:03:35.140 And then getting into more governance issues, I guess, and such, an area of concern for us has always been equalization.
00:03:41.460 We held our referendum on that recently in Alberta.
00:03:44.140 We do understand it's constitutionally entrenched.
00:03:46.460 It's not easy to address, but the formula is within the ability of the federal government to set and determine.
00:03:53.240 A lot of people in the West feel that perhaps the formula hasn't been fairly treating out like provinces.
00:03:57.780 Would you be looking at reviewing the formula and how equalization has been applied?
00:04:01.760 I think it's important that we look at some way of making the formula more equitable.
00:04:07.140 And if you take, for example, what's happened with COVID, you'll see that the current formula, there's a three-year lag period.
00:04:16.280 And because of this three-year lag period, in times of real hardship, just that we've experienced in COVID, the West have been paying, 0.64
00:04:27.760 provinces like Alberta have been paying equalization payments based on days of prosperity.
00:04:34.380 And right now it's days of famine, basically.
00:04:39.300 And the formula has no mechanism of being altered to account for that current reality.
00:04:48.080 So we have to, I think, even though it is constitutionally entrenched, I think Canadians are fair.
00:04:54.260 And that when they recognize that something is not working in the best interest of, say, a particular province and that it's unfair in certain respects,
00:05:05.960 I think they will come to the table and find ways to modify the formula so that it's more equitable.
00:05:13.940 Great.
00:05:16.400 Your leadership competitor, Pierre Paglia, the other day put out a release talking about digital currencies and facilitating the expansion of those within the Canadian market.
00:05:27.740 Have you determined a stance or looking at those sorts of things going forward as we have something of a new developing whole kind of industry and means of commerce on our hands right now?
00:05:37.720 Well, many people are concerned about digital identification and just the infrastructure that blockchain will bring in for facilitating that digital ID.
00:05:52.960 So I think it's very early to say that that is something that you're going to implement without knowing whether or not this is something that the people want.
00:06:05.180 I think it's a little bit presumptuous and it's not something that is in our campaign at this present time.
00:06:13.860 Although we haven't put out fully our policies yet, we will be putting out our policies.
00:06:18.760 But we're also very sensitive to the fact that people are very concerned about the digital ID and the repercussions of the blockchain on altering how we do things.
00:06:32.820 Great.
00:06:33.340 Something I've been asking each candidate as I get them on, something of a tradition in Alberta since the late 80s has been, we at least go through the motions of electing senators to nominate and propose towards Ottawa.
00:06:45.080 And often if we have a favorable government, they will appoint the ones we've chosen.
00:06:49.240 Would you commit to appointing senators if a province should elect them?
00:06:52.420 Well, to be honest with you, I actually like the way that Alberta does this because it's not patronage. 1.00
00:07:01.220 It's the people, it's grassroots.
00:07:02.900 And so the senator-in-waiting campaigns that took place last year, I found them very, very interesting because the candidates were out meeting with the people, engaging, seeing what the response was.
00:07:24.100 And then the members were able to vote on who they wanted.
00:07:29.660 And so in such a process, the person that is most connected to the community is the one that represents it and not someone that's handpicked by the government because of past favors or because of connections.
00:07:45.180 So I think that the Alberta system is very, very good.
00:07:49.740 I support it.
00:07:51.300 And absolutely, if the people have said that this is who they want to represent them, I think that that should be honored by whichever prime minister is in place.
00:08:03.700 Great.
00:08:04.820 Economically, we've got inflation, of course, has been a very strong issue all over the world now.
00:08:10.160 A lot of it's been related to the pandemic, related to overseas conflicts.
00:08:14.000 But I mean, a lot of it's been probably, you know, can be directly related to the amount of government spending and borrowing we've done.
00:08:20.120 Is there a plan to rein in borrowing and spending and some of the output from the Bank of Canada?
00:08:26.820 I think what's important is that we have to make sure that we bring our supply chains home and that we up our manufacturing production.
00:08:36.780 And so we want to start being more of a production economy where we're producing things, we're generating wealth rather than the government just basically indebting future generations and creating a debt society.
00:08:54.800 So we want to change that.
00:08:57.020 The only way that you could really do that is to bring back confidence in the economy by either incentivizing or promoting and encouraging small and medium sized businesses who employ over 80 percent of the population to start reinvigorating, reemploying people and taking chances again.
00:09:18.440 And once we are able to get the economy kickstarted again, up our production, then you will see a reduction in inflation because you'll have real dollars, real dollars, not just debt, not just debt in our economy.
00:09:39.100 And people will have real money that they can buy products rather than fewer products out there being chased by lots of debt dollars.
00:09:50.820 Great. Another thing that's put pressure on a lot of consumers when it comes to staples like foodstuffs is Canada's supply management system.
00:09:58.480 It's a touchy issue. It always has been, but it's one that certainly comes with a cost.
00:10:03.740 Is there any consideration of possibly reforming or moving away from that system?
00:10:06.860 Well, the problem is, is that our our production, our products that we get from supply management, I actually enjoy the fact that we have a superior production and output.
00:10:22.440 And if you look at some of the things that the enhancements that are used by, say, in the United States, like BST on on their cows and the just the amount of pus that you would get in milk.
00:10:40.880 And I just find that those products are not on the same level as our Canadian products.
00:10:47.460 And so you have to pay for quality. And when you look at some of the industries worldwide and you ask our smaller producers to compete with them,
00:10:58.040 they would be they would be completely overshadowed that we would not have independent industries.
00:11:04.140 And so while I am a free market person and I do believe in free market and I think it's I would I would still think that we would need supply management to to assist our farmers or else they would be overtaken by foreign production.
00:11:24.360 OK, I'll pivot a little. I mean, something that's quite new on the scene for us, unfortunately, but it's in foreign affairs.
00:11:31.500 You know, the world certainly has changed now with the Ukraine, Russia conflict.
00:11:35.380 It seems to have expedited the prime minister in finally getting forward to buying the F-35s for Canada that they've sort of shelled for quite some time.
00:11:44.780 But where do you land on Canada's military spending in force or where would you envision Canada's military being in the future?
00:11:50.640 Well, it's it's been years since they they should have bought those F-35 jets years ago.
00:12:01.200 And I'm glad to see that they're making some commitment to do that now.
00:12:06.880 I think that our military has been underfunded and this government has failed to provide for our military and to make sure that they were properly equipped.
00:12:18.280 I think that we had a lot of wasted time and there was a lot of vulnerabilities there.
00:12:23.620 But when you see the recent acts of Russian aggression and you realize that we technically share a border with Russia.
00:12:31.480 So our Arctic, our Arctic coast is something that is very, very fragile.
00:12:38.780 And we have to make sure that we have the capacity, the military capacity to protect our borders.
00:12:48.260 Even beyond that, even beyond the jets, I think that we Russia has over 40 icebreakers and we have zero.
00:12:57.400 We need to up our military capacity and invest in in making sure that we can defend ourselves.
00:13:05.120 Great. Well, I think we've already it goes fast.
00:13:07.460 Right. The time we'd allotted to sit down with you.
00:13:09.340 I hope we get more chances before the end of the campaign.
00:13:11.380 But is there more you'd like to add before we let you go, Dr. Lewis?
00:13:14.380 Well, I will be in Alberta and Saskatchewan and Manitoba in the next week.
00:13:23.100 I start my tour on Friday.
00:13:24.700 So I look forward to perhaps popping in if you have a studio or meeting various people out there.
00:13:32.540 So it should be a very good tour.
00:13:34.700 I look forward to meeting the people in that region next week.
00:13:38.960 Great. And well, we did expand actually into a nice, larger new studio.
00:13:42.640 So I hope we can get you in here for an extended interview at that time.
00:13:45.880 I look forward to you coming out and wish you the best as the campaign develops.
00:13:50.060 So thank you very much for joining us today, Dr. Lewis.
00:13:52.240 And I hope we can talk again soon.
00:13:53.940 Awesome. It was great. Thank you so much. Take care.