Western Standard - June 11, 2025


Pipelines from East to West

Topics
make good connections
Guests
Crystal Wood
Mentioned
Stampede
Carney says Muslim values are Canadian values Spread the wealth!

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

175.94

Word count

1,009

Sentence count

103

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of the Global Energy Show, I sit down with Crystal Wood of the Montreal Economic Institute to talk about her work advocating for smaller, smarter policy and energy for Canada. She talks about how she and her team at the institute are working with the federal government to advocate for smarter energy policy in Western Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 I'm here with Crystal Wood of Rangel of the Montreal Economic Institute on the floor of
00:00:18.800 the Global Energy Show here in Calgary, Alberta. Crystal, thanks for joining us today.
00:00:23.840 Thank you for having me.
00:00:24.660 So you're here as a part of the energy influencers part where you're going to be
00:00:28.260 making a pitch to different people in the industry to support work that you're doing.
00:00:33.220 When you work at the Montreal Economic Institute, I was poking fun at you earlier that the Montreal
00:00:37.760 Economic Institute actually now seems to be more of the Calgary Economic Institute lately.
00:00:42.980 A lot of the leadership actually lives out here, including some very French guys from
00:00:46.900 Montreal. But there's a few of you here now. You guys are increasingly involved in energy
00:00:52.040 policy for Western Canada. What is the pitch you're going to be making today?
00:00:56.560 So we actually have offices in Calgary, Montreal and Ottawa. And so we try to hit on all of those
00:01:03.140 jurisdictions federally, Quebec and Alberta. And so today I'm just going to run people through
00:01:08.700 basically in the last six months we've worked on a number of files. One is pipelines from east to west
00:01:14.780 as well as some reforms to the federal government's impact assessment act. And in those two files we had
00:01:21.460 over 50 interviews and over 2300 media mentions. So during a very dynamic time in Canadian politics
00:01:27.740 we're really shaping public opinion. We're starting to disseminate some of our broader work related to
00:01:33.540 the impact assessment act as well. So moving forward we're just going to be encouraging and advocating
00:01:39.880 for smaller, smarter policy and energy for Canada.
00:01:43.940 I think about a third of those media mentions were from us. We pick up a lot of the work you guys do.
00:01:47.920 It's good stuff. You have kind of a unique voice in the policy space in Canada that you're
00:01:54.820 dealing with sometimes with regional issues but kind of the greater whole of a Canadian economy
00:02:02.040 if that's a thing. And we're now using the term one Canadian economy. You guys are kind of really ahead
00:02:06.900 of the parade on that one. Is any of the work you guys have been doing, are you seeing that manifested
00:02:14.300 in some of the new legislation under the kind of, you know, revamped liberal government?
00:02:20.880 Well what we're trying to really push is that Quebec and Alberta, there's quite a few similarities.
00:02:26.220 Like our provinces are very different mentality-wise, policy-wise, but there is a lot of similarity
00:02:31.540 especially in how the relationship with the federal government has continued to evolve.
00:02:35.640 So we're really trying to kind of infuse that dialogue in the work we do as well.
00:02:41.740 And so we're hoping to be able to advocate for smarter energy policy federally in ways that make
00:02:47.820 sense and are very targeted. Like in our research paper for the IAA, it was very practical reforms
00:02:54.220 that are very easily implemented within the current legislative scheme. So if the federal government
00:02:59.700 is talking about wanting to make these moves, we've made it very easy for them to take our advice
00:03:05.020 in that regard.
00:03:07.580 Well, what are the big asks you're making right now?
00:03:10.860 Asks like to the federal government?
00:03:12.720 What are the, you know, bullet point of, what are the three big things they can do?
00:03:16.260 They can cut down on the approval process for major infrastructure projects and they can do that
00:03:21.220 by really peeling back some of the layers that were added on with the Impact Assessment Act
00:03:25.800 that took it from an environmental assessment into a hodgepodge of assessment.
00:03:31.440 We have to understand the gender of the pipeline. 1.00
00:03:33.400 Yes, exactly. Some of the things that, you know, are well-meaning perhaps, but don't have
00:03:37.440 place in an environmental assessment. And then also looking at ways to reduce the duplication.
00:03:42.420 So there's substitution agreement with British Columbia where their assessments can be recognized
00:03:48.560 by the federal government. So there should be more of those with other provinces. We don't
00:03:52.180 need to be duplicating the assessments.
00:03:54.240 Do you think that's a double-edged sword, though? I've thought of that. That's one of
00:03:58.220 the common recommendations out there. But, I mean, the provinces could stack it one way
00:04:05.140 or another. They could stack it in favor of development. They could stack it against development.
00:04:09.360 So do you think that's a double-edged sword?
00:04:10.880 I think that if the federal government focuses on having the provincial government only kind
00:04:17.640 of assess the areas of federal jurisdiction, which is what they should be doing, then it should
00:04:22.400 be streamlined and easily kind of move forward. Because already the provincial stuff is within
00:04:26.980 the provincial heads of power anyways. So it wouldn't change much from our perspective
00:04:32.700 in terms of how that should look.
00:04:35.280 Okay. Now, what do you hope to achieve here? Like, at the Global Energy Show, it's a big
00:04:40.780 deal. People can't see you. And we just got the Western Centre background right here.
00:04:45.280 But this is a gargantuan show that's just... I think it's got to be... After Stampede, I think
00:04:51.260 it's probably the biggest event in Calgary. What is it you're hoping to achieve here today?
00:04:55.880 Make some good connections. Have some good conversations like we're having now. But
00:05:00.460 ultimately, increase the kind of profile of MEI and, you know, perhaps get some more support
00:05:06.780 for the work we do.
00:05:08.000 You guys got to change your name. You're no longer Montreal Economic Institute. You're
00:05:11.060 just Canadian Economic Institute.
00:05:12.340 That's why we're MEI now. We just go by the acronym MEI.
00:05:15.100 That's like KFC.
00:05:15.760 Yeah, exactly.
00:05:16.780 Okay.
00:05:17.420 Yeah. Or BMO.
00:05:18.940 There you go. That's a very apt one. Okay. Well, is there anything else you want to add?
00:05:23.800 No, just happy to be here. And thanks for having this chat with me.
00:05:26.760 Well, thank you very much.
00:05:27.760 Awesome.
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