Western Standard - HANNAFORD： 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

00:00:20.920 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-Canna. And now he is turning his

00:00:41.380 attention 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

00:00:56.840 and you said this. Taken together, the AI data center boom is clearly a major source of jobs

00:01:05.480 growth. Yet, on the other hand, AI is slashing ragged swaths through fields of human workers

00:01:13.320 in industry after industry. The bitter harvest shows every sign of accelerating

00:01:20.040 and spreading into new fields. Now, I think many people fear the same thing,

00:01:27.900 but it looks in your article as if you have found another side, which maybe you can tell us about.

00:01:37.540 Pitter Harvest, you seem to have come down hard on the opportunity side. Why?

00:01:43.340 Well, let me start off a little bit earlier in the call, where I talk about

00:01:47.660 the impact on young people trying to get jobs. A lot of people go to college, university,

00:01:57.020 and we're taking computer science. And I point out that that is, that when you, and in fact,

00:02:03.820 I had a nephew doing that. But what happens, of course, is that there's no need for any

00:02:10.140 such thing as programming anymore. It's all done by AI. So where does that leave young people?

00:02:17.580 What I say is you have to get into something where there is demand. And where there is demand

00:02:24.620 are the things that you don't deliver online, you deliver in person. Everything from doctors,

00:02:31.580 dentists, and all the other people we need to see every day, as well as the skilled trades.

00:02:36.540 And so this is sort of going from one end to the other in my column, but my conclusion is that for

00:02:45.660 people looking to get it, who thought they were going to get into computer science, they'd be a

00:02:52.620 lot better off going into the jobs where you do things in person. And as I say, the skilled trades

00:02:57.820 and the other fields that we all know. Well, you know, I think we might have said that. There's an

00:03:05.100 a lot of people with master's degrees are serving coffee in starbucks so the people who you can't

00:03:12.220 get hold of easily are those who know how to fix a leaking tap so but what are the trades that you

00:03:18.220 think would be most useful in this going forward and do we have them in alberta enough that this

00:03:27.980 is actually going to be useful to us we're going to get a benefit from it well the the thing is

00:03:34.540 is that there's a whole bunch of trades, you know, and everything from when your wash machine

00:03:40.720 isn't working, who do you call? You call it a skilled tradesperson. And then there's all the

00:03:45.460 stuff in the construction area where whether you're building a car or whatever you're doing

00:03:49.640 requires trades knowledge. So there's a myriad of trades, but they're all going to be an increasing

00:03:59.060 demand not less and that's the important point so what are the new trades that uh that like the ones

00:04:06.740 we're not familiar with like that would be like if you were a 20 year old and you wanted to get

00:04:11.860 trained in something that was going to be a scarce commodity what would you recommend

00:04:17.860 well you know i think just about every trade everything but from from metal workers to

00:04:23.540 to people who who know how to fix machines like your car or your or your washing machine all those

00:04:31.700 trades that that are that every day you need and and that people need and and they are not

00:04:39.060 something that can be done by computer and that's that's the most important thing to point to make

00:04:44.740 they are not something that could be done by computer and not done by ai and and well

00:04:51.540 AI is already doing it. That's my point. They're already doing all the things that

00:04:56.100 people thought they were going to build a career around and they're finding they can't get a job

00:05:01.540 and they're coming out of university or college and saying, I don't have a future. And so what

00:05:09.460 I'm trying to do is present a route to a future and it's the things that people do in person.

00:05:15.940 Well, there's a couple of things that seem really new about this. For one thing,

00:05:23.140 this is moving forward at an astonishing rate. You would be very well familiar in your long career

00:05:29.700 just how difficult it is to get a pipeline built, something that we understand very well,

00:05:36.020 and yet AI has just come out of nowhere. The rumor is they're going to be turning

00:05:40.660 sought on something in September. How have these guys gone around the approval process?

00:05:51.540 Well, I don't think there really is an approval process. I mean, in itself,

00:05:59.380 AI and all of that is free market businesses. And they're now the largest businesses in the world

00:06:05.540 by far. The three major hyperscalers that people know about are just huge. You're talking about a

00:06:18.980 trillion dollars worth of market value in the three major hyperscalers. So I think that the

00:06:26.660 bottom line here is that you can't stop the train, but also there are certain ways in which

00:06:34.660 and take advantage of it. Paul Jay Well, what astonishes me about this is that

00:06:42.820 this AI development, who knows how much it's going to mean in the end, but even now they're

00:06:48.740 talking about it needing power on the scale, enough power which would power a city of a million

00:06:56.020 people. This is enormous, and it's going to presumably be mostly natural gas generating

00:07:02.100 electricity yeah no no it's interesting of course i built my business in my company with a huge we're

00:07:09.620 the biggest natural gas producer in north america when i stepped down as a is ceo and so i know a

00:07:16.580 lot about natural gas but they the thing is that that i was also during my career being hammered

00:07:23.780 away by the environmentalists always a evil guy because i produced fossil fuels and here we are

00:07:29.780 now with with with a technology that's using multiples of the fossil fuels we ever used before

00:07:37.060 and who's who's talking about that but i think that that the big thing is the scale of these

00:07:43.300 things like one in grand perry alberta that's they're like 40 40 sections of square miles of

00:07:51.060 the area and and and requires enormous amounts of power and most of the power of course is generated

00:07:58.580 by natural gas. One of those major data systems uses as much natural gas and power as the city

00:08:11.620 of Edmonton. That puts it into perspective. Yeah, I guess this is what I don't get. A few

00:08:19.860 years ago, we came very close during a very cold day in the winter. I think it was 2023, February,

00:08:25.380 January, we came close to a brownout, if not an absolute cessation of service of power

00:08:32.100 in some parts of the province because we plain didn't have enough.

00:08:36.640 Now, time has gone by and more power is now online, but all the improvements that we've

00:08:45.220 made have been made against the background of the federal government saying, well, we

00:08:50.720 need you to be carbon neutral by 2035 and then it was 2050 and I don't know how we're doing on that

00:09:00.020 but what I do know and what I'm reading in the papers and you're talking about in C2C there and

00:09:05.120 in the Western Standard is that we've got this enormous development going on it's going to take

00:09:11.520 an enormous amount of power which is going to be generated by an enormous amount of natural gas

00:09:16.620 and nobody's talking about our carbon net zero commitments how do we how are we managing to

00:09:21.900 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

00:09:27.980 can't do it to keep our own feet warm in january you know what i mean don't expect the liberal

00:09:34.860 federal government policies to make sense that's the first thing but i think that they uh that

00:09:40.620 But what's happening here is interesting because we still have, you know, the Karni government still, he's a radical environmentalist when it comes to fossil fuels.

00:09:50.720 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.

00:10:03.900 So they don't need federal approval.

00:10:05.840 And that's one of the reasons, besides the fact they have access to gas.

00:10:09.440 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.

00:10:21.120 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,

00:10:40.980 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,

00:10:52.600 especially in the United States.

00:10:54.520 There's so many of them, they're getting a lot of opposition.

00:10:57.420 But in Alberta, where the natural gas is there,

00:11:00.300 they have wide-open labs, lots of land,

00:11:03.020 and we don't have any restrictions.

00:11:05.800 So that's why Alberta is a huge opportunity for it.

00:11:09.960 So if I'm understanding you correctly, when we want to ship natural gas out of the province,

00:11:16.840 it matters. The C2C emissions matter, but if we're doing it all within our own borders,

00:11:22.120 they don't matter? They're not covered by federal legislation? Is that right?

00:11:26.840 Yeah, that's an Inside Alberta project. You know, if Alberta could put on a natural gas plant

00:11:34.680 through the local authorities. It doesn't need federal approval. It only needs federal

00:11:39.640 approval if you move it outside of the province. Okay. Well, that certainly answers one set of

00:11:46.840 questions that are asked by the people who don't want it at all. I mean, you've got a very

00:11:52.760 strong NIMBY lodging, not in my backyard, NIMBY. What do you say to those people?

00:11:59.960 I mean, you have long experience of getting major projects through the approved and into operation,

00:12:09.320 and you will have encountered before people who don't want something in their backyard.

00:12:14.520 How do you sell this to people who don't want it in their area?

00:12:18.600 Well, I don't think you can sell it. But the reality is that they're getting approved by

00:12:27.560 by the provincial government.

00:12:30.020 And then it comes down to siting,

00:12:33.760 try to site at a place where it has the least impact

00:12:37.280 on people's home or anywhere right where near,

00:12:43.240 it's gonna interfere with their day-to-day lives.

00:12:45.580 And so that's why these data centers are being put in,

00:12:50.040 you know, North of Grand Prairie

00:12:51.800 and in all kinds of places like that,

00:12:54.100 where there's wide open spaces

00:12:55.440 don't have to uh have the neighbors interrupted or disrupted well if i were a regional municipality

00:13:03.040 up in that area and somebody was going to take up two square miles of of uh bald prairie and

00:13:09.120 build an incredibly expensive valuable industrial plant i would actually be welcoming it i mean the

00:13:15.360 taxable revenue to the to the local area would be huge but i guess if you're a farmer or a rancher

00:13:23.520 then you that's not your that's not an incentive is is there anything that we can do to make it

00:13:29.920 less bad for it there's not really much i mean there's going to be people against

00:13:34.320 you can't and even even you try to cite it as you know is the lowest possible impact on people

00:13:41.280 they're going to be people against okay reality is that these projects are moving forward they're

00:13:46.000 going to get approved and uh all you can do is uh is communicate as well as you can with whoever

00:13:52.080 may be disrupted now i think the one that we've just been talking about is called wonder valley

00:13:56.960 right yes what's one of them yeah yeah um so we've all talked about how artificial intelligence

00:14:06.640 is changing the way the way we work the way we live the way we shop all manner of things

00:14:13.120 you're now talking about an industry that is going to be how many hundred billion dollars

00:14:18.800 by the time it's fully developed, hundreds of billions in a province where the annual budget is

00:14:30.800 still in the low numbers of billions. Surely this is going to have a transformative effect

00:14:39.840 on Alberta's economy beyond direct jobs. Things like diversification, tax revenues,

00:14:48.160 I think in your article you make reference to growth in the technological ecosystem,

00:14:56.480 which means that as I take it to mean that as this thing gets underway, the industries that

00:15:01.760 serve that main industry come in and you start to get people who all know about the same stuff

00:15:08.080 working together and moving around. You know, potential synergies with the province's existing

00:15:15.040 energy agriculture and manufacturing sectors i mean what do you looking into the crystal ball

00:15:22.320 what do you see and how would you know this is a good thing what metrics would you use for success

00:15:32.480 well i don't think there's any single message but the reality is that

00:15:37.680 that when these plants are underway and even being built they generate a huge

00:15:42.720 amount of jobs just to build alone and so that's a hugely

00:15:54.080 tremendous number of jobs created now the other thing of ours is you have to train people for

00:16:00.160 those jobs and so that the trade schools and so on and some other university courses have to be

00:16:06.800 expanded there's going to be this this is such a it's all happening so fast and it's so huge

00:16:14.080 it's almost incomprehensible all the all the effects and what has to be done well i think

00:16:19.600 that's why we're having you on today because we do find it incomprehensible it does seem

00:16:24.080 vast and overwhelming uh the 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 when we've been trying to get investment in the

00:16:36.800 energy industry but darn it we haven't been able to get a lot of things done that we wanted to get

00:16:44.720 things done and now this is coming along and it's just going at a very very fast pace so you're

00:16:50.720 going to have a whole new population center where in wonder valley i mean they're not going to be

00:16:57.440 commuting in from somewhere else they're going to end up living there and the demand for government 0.86

00:17:03.360 services at a time when the the government is already being pushed to the wall with immigration

00:17:10.800 building the schools and the hospitals and then what sort of a government department 0.96

00:17:16.800 might you need to keep an eye on all this well you know they definitely they they get to have

00:17:25.600 approval from regulators but but the reality about this is that that there's a very little impact

00:17:32.480 on the day-to-day life of the people in the country or in the province.

00:17:39.360 And once these things are built and operating,

00:17:47.560 they only require a few hundred people to operate them.

00:17:50.740 So it's the construction and development and the supply.

00:17:53.340 Most of it comes, the biggest thing will be the natural gas to power systems.

00:17:59.460 There'll be a huge amount of those to be built.

00:18:02.480 And they probably can't build it fast enough.

00:18:06.200 Okay.

00:18:09.140 Can you give people an idea of what this actually looks like?

00:18:14.400 I mean, I've seen the illustration of the area, and it's got all these buildings on it.

00:18:20.860 But what's in those buildings?

00:18:23.880 What is actually being built and developed?

00:18:25.560 Well, they're full of transistorized systems. What's happening really here is a broader sense

00:18:38.280 is that the complexity of the calculations and the amount of calculations are expanding so rapidly

00:18:47.480 in order to facilitate all the AI and other things that they have to have larger and larger

00:18:53.480 data systems to do that. And what I don't, you know, what over, I was almost

00:19:00.860 overwhelmed, even to me, because I looked into this quite a lot, is how in the heck

00:19:05.320 such a huge amount of activity, jobs, and various functions that are not only

00:19:14.200 displacing other jobs and other things, but also expanding so rapidly. And it's,

00:19:21.260 even as I say

00:19:24.180 after looking at all of this

00:19:26.360 and thinking about it and having some history

00:19:28.580 in producing

00:19:30.340 natural gas and generating power

00:19:32.320 it's still overwhelming to me

00:19:34.200 so

00:19:35.520 this is a

00:19:37.140 new territory

00:19:39.260 Well it certainly is

00:19:42.100 and I think that's probably why so many people

00:19:44.380 are saying well what's

00:19:46.380 happening and even as they're asking the question 0.99

00:19:48.540 the backhoes are moving into 0.99

00:19:50.440 place um like we have to make the assumption that ai is a good thing certainly it's not going away 0.99

00:19:57.720 now that people have got used to using it for their own purposes uh the only thing i would say

00:20:04.760 is the only thing i would say is just to go back to where i started what about the the young people

00:20:09.400 wanted to do choosing a career and the bottom line here is everything from electricians to

00:20:16.840 all the other trades to have to build these things and maintain them there can be huge demand

00:20:23.960 so instead of taking computer science get a trade get a trade well you bet well look we're

00:20:30.680 rapidly running out of time when um it's been a pleasure to have you on board i got one last

00:20:35.400 question for you though uh i'm sure you've tried out uh ai there in your your office in victoria

00:20:42.760 um have you ever asked it whether alberta independence would be a good idea and what

00:20:48.860 did it say i don't think that's the kind of job of the ai to help you with i don't think so i don't

00:20:56.180 know dr grok comes up with a pen what ai does you know most of them it just goes into other

00:21:01.860 information and brings it out and presents it and so that you have to be careful because it

00:21:07.420 But there's a lot of things it's presenting that may or may not be based upon reality.

00:21:13.840 So it's a complicated business.

00:21:17.000 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.

00:21:22.060 But thank you for giving up some time this afternoon.

00:21:24.620 It looks like it's a hot day in Victoria.

00:21:28.900 God bless, and we'll see you again.

00:21:31.260 Okay, thank you.

00:21:32.200 Good to be here.

00:21:33.560 Thank you.

00:21:34.100 For The Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

00:21:37.420 I'll see you next time.

Western Standard - July 26, 2026

HANNAFORD： Don't like AI？ Get a trade

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