Smith shreds Guilbeault over Suncor comments, emissions cap
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
187.41167
Summary
In this week's episode, we're joined by Sean and Corey to talk about the ongoing tensions between Alberta and the federal government over climate change and energy production in Canada. We also discuss the recent announcement that Suncor is to continue to remain an oil company, and the impact that could have on the price of oil and gas.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Thanks for coming in, Sean. We've got some interesting times happening here between Ottawa
00:00:04.000
and Alberta. Yeah, thanks, Corey. Yeah, well, there's been kind of a war of words in the
00:00:10.720
Twittersphere. I don't know what you call it these days, the exosphere,
00:00:14.160
between Premier Daniel Smith and Environment Minister Stephen Gibault.
00:00:19.760
Pretty much started when he came to Calgary in July, followed up with the electricity regulations.
00:00:27.360
And just this week, he traveled all the way to China and instead of criticizing the Chinese for
00:00:35.920
their emissions, which amount to about a third of all the greenhouse gas emitted in the world,
00:00:42.720
he took a shot at Suncor for selling off its renewables business and said it warrants an
00:00:48.080
emission cap. Yeah, and I mean, the announcement that Suncor, you know, an oil company was going
00:00:52.480
to remain an oil company. It came out about a week or two weeks ago, perhaps. I mean,
00:00:56.800
when they formally, they've been kind of shedding some of those renewables for a little while,
00:00:59.760
but this isn't really big news. Why did Gibault choose right now to suddenly go on about Suncor?
00:01:08.080
That's a really good question. I think it's because he's going to come out with the emissions cap.
00:01:13.920
So this is going to be the next shoe to drop. Apparently, it was supposed to have been released
00:01:19.680
already and it's been delayed. So my thought is probably within the next week or so after he
00:01:26.080
gets back from China and before he goes jetting off to Dubai for the COP, I'm not even sure what
00:01:33.360
it is, COP 28 summit, that these are going to drop and then he's going to hop on an airplane and
00:01:40.320
get out of town as fast as he can. Well, the irony of this, this summit happening in Dubai too,
00:01:45.280
where they don't care. They're pumping the oil out with mad abandoned over there and they're more
00:01:49.360
than happy if the Canadians are stupid enough to shut in their own resources.
00:01:52.400
I tend to agree. I think there's a lot of virtue signaling going on with the sheiks over there
00:02:00.480
because they want to pump more oil and be seen to be good corporate citizens, national citizens or
00:02:07.760
whatever while they're doing it. Yeah, host that summit. There we go. We're good guys. I mean,
00:02:13.200
never mind all that oil we're putting out, which nobody should mind the oil they're putting out.
00:02:16.880
But I mean, isn't it really demonstrates the futility of Canada always having to play the boy scout?
00:02:22.720
And meanwhile, he's paying lip service to some of the worst offenders on the planet being China
00:02:26.880
and some of the Middle Eastern producers. Well, Monsieur Gibault in his previous press statements has
00:02:34.160
actually bragged about Canada being the first mover and setting an example for all these other
00:02:42.160
countries in the world, you know, to presumably follow us, even though China under the Paris Accord
00:02:49.520
has a 2060 deadline to reach net zero and India is 2070. And between the two of them, they are half of
00:02:57.760
all the global emissions are in the world. And we're at 1.6% of the global emissions,
00:03:02.720
I believe. Something like that. And we're supposed to hit it by 2035.
00:03:06.160
Right. And Suncor is about 2% of that 1.5%. Yeah. So globally speaking, even though the
00:03:15.040
world's largest oil sands producer, we're talking tenths of a percentage point. But the economic impact,
00:03:22.320
I mean, if we, you know, when they keep talking, we want to transition, we want to get out, we want to
00:03:26.080
lose the oil and gas and in Canada. I mean, it provides a massive resource for the federal
00:03:31.520
government. I mean, people seem to forget that some of the supporters in Toronto or Montreal might
00:03:35.680
not realize, but a lot of these social programs they're enjoying are due to this oil and gas
00:03:41.040
being generated out here. Well, they've got a rude awakening coming because I think that the policy of
00:03:47.120
the federal government is actually to make oil production so expensive that it just becomes an
00:03:53.200
un-economic proposition and producers will basically be forced to leave it in the ground.
00:04:00.400
But what that's going to do for anybody who has home heating oil down east, anybody who
00:04:06.000
drives a car and people are still going to have to drive a car even after the EVs take over,
00:04:12.080
you're going to be looking at, I saw one forecast today, 300 bucks a barrel for oil.
00:04:16.320
Yeah. If it costs that much to pull up with the bottom line is the cost of renewables. If we went
00:04:22.640
to that as a sole source of energy, it wouldn't be far behind the oil and gas, especially if you got
00:04:27.440
rid of the oil and gas. I mean, we're all going to take a hard, hard hit here.
00:04:30.880
Well, and it's the only way to really encourage, like when they talk about the transition, the only way to
00:04:35.360
encourage the transition is not so much to make the renewable energy cheaper, but to make the conventional
00:04:42.560
energy so expensive that the renewable stuff is cheap in comparison.
00:04:47.440
So Premier Smith doesn't sound like she's having any of this, though. I mean, she certainly responded
00:04:54.640
Yeah, absolutely. I think she's flabbergasted. So she, in discussions, she's referenced her
00:05:03.600
environment with Mr. Rebecca Schultz as the gibault whisperer. And I think they're coming to the end of
00:05:09.200
their rope and like, really trying to deal with this guy. Because every time you take,
00:05:14.880
you seem like to take one step forward, it's like four or five, six steps backwards. And I don't know
00:05:20.880
how long they continue like this. Well, you can't reason with Gilboa. I mean,
00:05:26.000
maybe people will start realizing this, you don't look him up the picture of him manically grinning in an
00:05:31.280
orange prison jumpsuit as he's being taken away in handcuffs. Like this man's an extremist. He always has
00:05:37.920
been. We're not talking about, you know, an environmental activist who's been rational
00:05:42.800
over this time. This is a guy on the fringe and he's the most powerful environment minister in the
00:05:46.800
country. And what's ironic is that he's threatening to have the RCMP come after politicians like Smith
00:05:53.280
and Moe and have them hauled away in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits, you know, for keeping the lights
00:05:58.480
on in the middle of January. Well, you know, speaking as a guy who's written a book on pursuing
00:06:02.480
independence in the West, if they wanted to send the RCMP to start arresting Western politicians, I know it'd be
00:06:06.640
great for my book sales, but not very good for the stability of the country as a whole. I mean,
00:06:11.040
this is really is challenging unity and stability within Canada. I mean, yeah, Scott Moe, I mean,
00:06:17.040
this is in Saskatchewan where these battles are happening as well. It's just dangerous politics
00:06:22.640
going on right now. Absolutely. And, you know, there's for all the talk of separation that there's
00:06:28.880
been in this country, Quebec nationalism is more cultural based, Western nationalism is more economic
00:06:34.800
based. It seems to me that these climate policies are becoming the catalyst for the breakup of the
00:06:42.000
country. Trudeau is going to be the one who presides over the end of this federation, this confederation
00:06:50.080
that we know. Well, and some of it's just the politics. I mean, we can see the liberals are in a
00:06:53.200
bad position right now as far as the polls go. I mean, it could be, we're looking at potentially two
00:06:56.880
years before the next election. Anyways, a whole lot, we know a whole lot could change between now and then,
00:07:01.360
you know, nobody in the CPC should be popping champagne corks yet. You're in the lead, but
00:07:05.280
that can, that can evaporate quickly. And one of the tactics, the old one used by the liberals
00:07:11.440
with the senior Trudeau and his advisor, that old term, screw the West, we'll take the rest.
00:07:16.160
Playing the politics of regional division has always been an asset for the liberals, you know,
00:07:22.640
because what do they got to lose? They got two seats in Alberta, zero seats in Saskatchewan.
00:07:26.400
If they can make us look like a bunch of jerks, it tends to sell well in Toronto.
00:07:31.440
Well, even Paul Martin, I was really, I thought Paul Martin was a good finance minister,
00:07:36.720
but I was really disappointed when he became prime minister, because when he was down in the
00:07:39.840
pools, that's exactly what he did, was start kicking at the West and managed to somehow salvage
00:07:44.720
the minority government out of it. But I don't know, I'm hoping that the Trudeau liberals are forced
00:07:50.720
so far down that they're not going to be able to come back. But what really concerns me
00:07:54.960
is the damage that they're going to be able to do in two years with this wrecking ball that they
00:07:59.760
have flying around the world, imposing all these policy by fiat.
00:08:06.080
Well, an investment chill, I mean, really, as an international investor, even a domestic one,
00:08:11.680
when you see that sort of hostility towards an industry in the country, it's gonna be a heck of a
00:08:17.440
lot harder to convince you to open your wallet and invest in a capital project when it looks like
00:08:22.320
we've got the powers that be want to shut us down. Absolutely. And a lot of people don't realize
00:08:26.560
that about oil and gas is number one, how much money it takes just to maintain production, never
00:08:32.640
mind, increase it. And the lead times, the time, the amount of time that it takes, you know, to build
00:08:39.920
these oil sands plants, to get this stuff out of the ground, and build these markets and build these
00:08:45.600
pipelines and do all these other things that need to be done before you can sell one barrel of oil.
00:08:51.200
Well, something else, I mean, that really poked the stick in the hornet's nest, and that came
00:08:55.440
from the Alberta side of it, I'm kind of throwing like a curveball, we didn't speak on this. But
00:08:59.600
still, it's been a it's a part of this issue was the moratorium or the freeze on on renewable
00:09:05.280
permits for the next six months in Alberta that the Premier Smith's government imposed. I mean,
00:09:10.000
that certainly infuriated those who feel we're going to fully transition into renewables soon.
00:09:14.160
No matter you know, how you look at it, that will slow the development of these renewable projects to a degree.
00:09:19.200
Do you think, you know, that something's going to be resolved, some better regulations and so on,
00:09:26.320
and those projects are going to start getting rolling again?
00:09:28.480
Well, right now, it's kind of like a wild west. And Texas had this problem when it froze a couple
00:09:34.320
years. So here in Canada, when you have the natural gas wells and it goes down to 40 below,
00:09:38.560
you have these things called freeze offs. So there's a certain amount of production that gets
00:09:42.240
shut in just from the coal. And in Texas, obviously, they're not ready for it, they're not prepared.
00:09:47.040
And when their gas went down, and they had to rely on the renewables for their grid, it was just havoc,
00:09:53.520
like people were getting power bills over like 10s of 1000s of dollars. You know, and there's a very
00:10:00.640
real possibility that if you don't have that backup for all the renewable generation, that people want
00:10:08.160
to come online, that it is going to destabilize the grid.
00:10:12.720
Yeah, so it means not the renewables themselves that are problems, they worry about the dependence on
00:10:16.480
the renewables as a source, right? And especially when they're intermittent, by definition, they're
00:10:22.320
intermittent. And, you know, I compared this with our other colleague, Nigel Hannaford,
00:10:28.640
you know, so OPEC, Saudi Arabia, they drill wells, and then shut them in and just leave them there and
00:10:36.640
drill the capacity, right? Well, it's a lot like these windmills that only run 30% of the time. So
00:10:43.440
you're spending all this money to have an asset that really is only 30% efficient, and you can't rely on
00:10:51.680
it when it's not there, when you don't have the other stuff to back it up. And solar is horrific. I
00:10:57.360
mean, we're in the northern hemisphere, the time of year when we would need it the most as a backup
00:11:02.320
is often cloudy, and we only have about eight hours of daylight. So it's a very, very limited
00:11:06.800
generating source for us. Well, I'm kind of surprised that Alberta is actually one of the prime locations
00:11:12.880
in the country for solar. But there again, until you've got some kind of method of actually storing
00:11:20.160
the energy that is produced so that you can turn it on when the sun isn't shining at night,
00:11:26.080
when it's dark for 16 hours a day, then it probably isn't a very practical proposition to
00:11:33.760
relying on it as your main source of electricity. Has Suncor responded to this, or are they just kind
00:11:39.920
of keeping their head low and letting the politicians duke it out on this whole thing? I think they're
00:11:44.560
probably letting the politicians duke it out. They have enough problems with their own shareholders and
00:11:49.280
investors, which I think is one of the reasons why they made that statement to begin with.
00:11:53.920
And they've got nothing to be gained. You know, oil companies tend to kind of try to keep a low
00:12:00.960
profile in these political things. But you know, there again, it goes back to the investment, because
00:12:05.120
if you scare away all of all this investment, you know, that accomplishes more than what Jibo can ever do
00:12:12.400
on his own. Yeah, and he's more than happy to scare it off. He knows that. I mean,
00:12:15.840
he's not stupid. He's crazy, which is dangerous. We're all going to pay a price. Well, crazy times
00:12:25.840
we're living in. But as I said earlier, I think it's just warming up right now. I mean,
00:12:29.120
Gabo's in China, the Alberta legislature hasn't, you know, hit its new session yet with the premier,
00:12:34.720
you know, newly elected. Now she's going to feel a lot more, I think, confident in taking stances.
00:12:39.520
Now she's been through an election. Nobody can say she doesn't have a mandate.
00:12:42.160
And of course, the parliament's going to go back into session too. So I think we're just seeing
00:12:46.560
the first volleys in this fight right now. Yeah, I think so too. And I've been quite impressed
00:12:51.680
with Premier Smith and how she's handled the file. Apparently, the electricity one,
00:12:57.360
she has taken it. It is her. And I would imagine that emissions cap will be. She's kept her cards fairly
00:13:06.320
close to her chest. You know, at the same time, while keeping all those options open, the Sovereignty
00:13:11.680
Act, constitutional challenges, and, you know, but at the same time, being very emphatic and very clear
00:13:19.520
that these are unrealistic, they're unachievable, and they will not be implemented by 2035. And certainly
00:13:27.840
not the way that, you know, the Liberal government thinks that they will.
00:13:33.200
Well, certainly gives you lots to cover, and it gives me lots to rant about. I appreciate you coming
00:13:39.040
in to explain kind of what's been going on with this fight that's unfolding, I mean, from China to
00:13:43.680
Alberta at this point. I mean, we've bypassed Ottawa for the time being. Right. And as I said,
00:13:49.360
it's probably only going to get worse. So we should all be keeping a close eye on this. So thanks for coming in to
00:13:54.720
talk to us today, Sean. And we'll have you in again soon. All right. Thanks a lot, Corey.
00:13:59.040
You can become a Western Standard member for just $10 a month or $99 a year for unlimited access.