Western Standard - Trump’s energy revolution leaves Carney in the dust

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

00:00:20.480 of the Western Standard. It is Thursday, May 7th. The global warming revolution is dead

00:00:27.760 as western economies raced to reduce carbon emissions to save the world many lost sight of

00:00:34.160 the vital contribution fossil fuels make to economic resilience and national security and now

00:00:41.840 regional international security with me today to talk about what this means for canada

00:00:48.000 and the world is author and political economist brian lee crowley welcome brian it's always great

00:00:54.640 to be here nigel thank you well thanks for coming on the show brian is founder of ottawa's leading

00:00:59.760 think tank the mcdonald gloria institute and also of the washington-based center for north american

00:01:05.840 prosperity and security which gives him a unique viewpoint into what's going on down south so it's

00:01:14.160 good to have you back brian what we want to get at today is what the u.s blockade of the gulf of

00:01:19.280 Hormuz means for Canada and for the rest of the world. It has turned a well-supplied European 0.90

00:01:25.840 market into one that is drawing down inventories at a rapid pace to meet demand. Great Britain and

00:01:31.760 Europe are paying 20% more for gasoline. We are paying more for gasoline here in Canada,

00:01:38.640 where we're sitting on a great pool of oil. And the only reason the Europeans and the British can 1.00

00:01:44.560 get oil, is it? Now the Americans are selling it to them. But now in the past month, and I know 0.64

00:01:50.000 you're going to love this, Canada has authorized a new oil pipeline into the U.S. market. It is

00:01:57.120 the Bridger line. It uses up a lot of KXL infrastructure. It'll take half a million

00:02:02.640 barrels a day. Presumably this is to help Americans meet demand in Europe. Does this make any sense

00:02:09.920 to you brian well if you're thinking about it in terms of the great geopolitical chess board

00:02:18.400 uh you know how are the pieces moving russia iran the middle east china and the americans

00:02:28.640 it actually makes a lot of sense to me uh but i think many people have not you know their image

00:02:34.960 of the world is not quite caught up with how the chess pieces have been moved. And what I have in

00:02:40.140 mind here is that one of Donald Trump's major ambitions has been to end the dominance of the

00:02:47.840 Middle East on world oil prices and supply, to break up OPEC, and to shift the center of the

00:02:57.620 world oil market away from the Middle East towards the Americas. And I think that we're 0.85

00:03:04.120 living through the consequences of that strategy and of course it creates some short-term pain

00:03:10.700 the you know the the Strait of Hormuz which you mentioned uh through which about 20 percent of

00:03:18.360 the world's energy uh travels on its way to either Europe or Asia uh you know part of Donald Trump's

00:03:25.080 strategy I think was he forced Iran's hand on the Strait of Hormuz what he did was he said you guys

00:03:31.640 have been threatening for years that, you know, if anything happened to you, you would close this

00:03:37.300 trade of Hormuz. And everybody could manage that risk. They knew it was a possibility, but perhaps

00:03:42.800 not very likely. What Donald Trump did was he forced them actually to do it. And one of the

00:03:47.560 consequences of that, Nigel, is that as soon as that vital choke point becomes used as leverage,

00:03:55.880 it immediately begins to be discounted by everybody because they start to look for ways

00:04:01.140 to get around it. And now Saudi Arabia is sending 7 million barrels a day roughly of oil to the Red

00:04:07.140 Sea so that they're not going through the Persian Gulf. I think Oman or the UAE, I don't remember

00:04:13.620 which now, has built a pipeline to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, sending about 2 million barrels

00:04:19.780 a day. Brian, hold on. They just built a pipeline? How long was it? It takes 10 years to build a

00:04:25.940 I mean, let me put it this way.

00:04:29.160 They've expanded capacity to about 2 million barrels a day

00:04:33.300 to allow them to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. 0.85

00:04:36.980 And, you know, all of this means that Iran's leverage,

00:04:42.060 because of its proximity to the Strait of Hormuz, is a declining asset.

00:04:46.880 It's not going to be very valuable to them for very much longer.

00:04:50.680 One of the consequences, as you know,

00:04:52.840 Donald Trump, as soon as Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, he started to post on true social

00:04:59.700 pictures of, you know, very large crude carriers, the VLCCs, which were leaving the Middle East

00:05:07.420 empty. And where were they headed? They were heading down under Africa, up across the Atlantic

00:05:12.580 towards what I still call the Gulf of Mexico. Why are they headed to the Gulf of Mexico? Because

00:05:18.360 Donald Trump has now positioned America to be the place where people go looking for that

00:05:27.760 barrel of oil they can no longer find in the Middle East. And he makes a lot of the fact

00:05:34.980 that America is now exporting the equivalent of 10 million barrels of oil a day. I say the

00:05:41.240 equivalent because they're exporting five, six million barrels a day of crude, but they're

00:05:46.420 exporting you know four five six uh million barrels a day of uh processed uh petroleum

00:05:54.040 products so you know the equivalent of about 10 they've gone up to as much as 13 million barrels

00:06:00.160 a day uh so uh america is now the largest exporter of oil in the world uh and he's put america at

00:06:10.000 the center of the world energy trade and you've got the uae uh the united arab emirates a major

00:06:16.140 oil producer in the Middle East saying, you know what, the world has changed so much. We're getting

00:06:22.100 out of OPEC. We don't like the organization Petroleum Exporting Countries anymore, controlling

00:06:28.560 prices, controlling production. We want to get as much value as we can out of our reserves before

00:06:34.780 the world stops using oil. I personally don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, but still,

00:06:39.600 that's their strategy and this is all grist to donald trump's mill he has reordered the world

00:06:46.420 energy markets in a fundamental way in an amazingly short period of time it's astonishing

00:06:51.700 accomplishment let me just take you back to where we came in we've got this line going south from

00:06:58.740 alberta the old keystone line they're going to take it to to wyoming half a million barrels a day

00:07:07.480 I can see why if the Americans are selling all this oil to everybody, they would be quite glad

00:07:13.800 to just be bringing in another half million barrels from Canada. But Mr. Carney has said

00:07:19.780 that he wants to do big things, have great projects in Canada. Wouldn't it make a great

00:07:25.920 project to, like, why aren't we doing this? Why aren't we just building the line eastwards?

00:07:31.700 Or if Quebec won't have it, sending it up through Churchill, why aren't we advancing that project?

00:07:37.480 selling it to Europe ourselves. Such an interesting question. Well, first of all,

00:07:43.700 let's start with, you know, where is this oil going? You've mentioned Europe. Absolutely,

00:07:50.680 Europe is anxious to find new sources of oil, but it's also Asia. Don't forget that, you know,

00:07:58.160 Japan, Taiwan, Korea, a whole bunch of other countries that are friendly to us, plus China,

00:08:05.440 who is one of our great adversaries, depend enormously on Middle East oil.

00:08:12.160 And now that's no longer so easy to get.

00:08:17.540 This is another one of Trump's victories in his reordering of the world oil markets.

00:08:22.700 You know that Iran was selling a lot of, you know, off the books, under the radar,

00:08:30.920 sanctions busting oil through a shadow fleet to China.

00:08:34.620 he's destroyed that trade. So we could talk about that too. But let's come back to Canada

00:08:41.340 and our ability to export oil. You know, Mark Carney says that our reliance on the United

00:08:49.680 States has become a weakness, not a strength. He wants to diversify our trade. The very easiest

00:08:55.720 thing he could do to diversify Canada's trade on a massive scale would be to build a pipeline to 0.99

00:09:02.460 the west coast and send our energy resources to all those hungry asian markets uh but of course

00:09:11.080 this is the same prime minister who in one breath says we want to diversify our trade uh blah blah

00:09:17.080 blah but in the next breath he says oh and by the way if we're going to build a pipeline to the west

00:09:21.200 coast i need to get the permission of both the government of british columbia and all the first

00:09:25.720 nations along the route this is something that no federal government has ever agreed to before

00:09:33.100 it's always been accepted that it was federal jurisdiction to build pipelines so he's thrown

00:09:37.700 up all kinds of barriers himself to the single easiest way for Canada to diversify its trade

00:09:43.220 so instead what's going to happen because I think those conditions are virtually impossible to

00:09:49.880 fulfill and uh what's going to happen then is if we're going to create egress for alberta's energy

00:09:56.980 resources ironically it's going to be by taking them south uh we're going to get them to tide

00:10:03.280 water it's just going to be on the gulf of mexico uh and uh you know we're going to become even more

00:10:09.760 dependent on the united states and we are going to contribute to donald trump's uh ambition to

00:10:16.500 turn north america or the americas more generally because we should include venezuela and even

00:10:21.000 argentina which has huge oil resources they haven't developed yet turning the americas into

00:10:26.600 the the key to world energy markets that the middle east has been for the last uh you know 50 60 70

00:10:34.600 years uh and i i the interesting thing because let's think for a minute about what trump's

00:10:44.060 ambition is and America's energy production, which is needed to back up this shift to make

00:10:50.320 America the center of world energy markets. You know, it used to be that America was a

00:11:03.260 major consumer of oil. They were not an exporter. In fact, they used to have an export ban because

00:11:09.060 they needed to keep all the oil that they could within the United States. Now, because of the

00:11:13.940 fracking revolution. America has vastly increased its production capacity, but they still import

00:11:22.240 almost 8 million barrels of oil a day. So, you know, yes, they export 10, but they import 8.

00:11:29.460 So their net contribution to world consumption outside the United States is only 2 million

00:11:35.380 barrels. That's not huge. So what, given how the Iran conflict and so on has tightened up oil

00:11:43.140 markets, raise prices and so on. America is rather anxious right now to find other sources of oil

00:11:49.420 based in the Americas that they can use to fill up these very large crude carriers that are coming

00:11:55.080 from the Middle East empty because they can't get the resource in the Persian Gulf. And what

00:12:01.960 would be the easiest way to do that would be to increase Canada's oil exports to the United States.

00:12:07.720 Because if you look at the production curve of fracked oil in the United States, it actually leveled off in the last quarter of 2025.

00:12:18.560 Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we've hit peak oil or anything like that. I think that's rubbish.

00:12:23.840 I would never discount America's ability to innovate and, you know, apply artificial intelligence to fracking to increase production. 0.80

00:12:33.360 But the fact of the matter is that, you know, fracking produces huge splashes of oil at the beginning and then it quite quickly declines.

00:12:43.320 Whereas, as you know, oil sands production is fantastically stable.

00:12:49.320 You know, once you start production, you just have this, it just motors along at a consistent level off into an indefinite future.

00:12:57.260 And this is a tremendous supplement to America's own energy supply in this effort to achieve

00:13:05.660 American dominance in world oil markets.

00:13:08.900 So I know that Donald Trump likes to say Canada has nothing that America needs, but he's wrong

00:13:15.100 about that.

00:13:16.300 You know, exactly the strengths of the Canadian oil sands are the supplement that his energy

00:13:22.940 ambitions need because the fracking revolution in the united states is not enough by itself

00:13:28.620 well the implications of what you have just said brian are that this is huge news for alberta

00:13:36.380 the because if what you said was that pipelines to the west coast not that likely because of the

00:13:44.540 conditions that mr carney has chosen to accept for their approval that is indigenous

00:13:50.540 approval, and

00:13:53.880 going in the other direction, they want the approval of Quebec

00:13:59.820 to put a pipeline across it. That doesn't seem to

00:14:03.380 be happening. They don't care.

00:14:06.720 So oil can only actually make it out of Canada

00:14:11.240 through Alberta, which

00:14:14.940 that takes us in so many different directions, but

00:14:19.300 And you have really just given everybody who's ever thought about investing in Alberta time to think about it and to make a decision.

00:14:30.180 And I think has not Shell just committed to a $20 billion investment in Alberta?

00:14:37.080 Does this factor into your case?

00:14:38.880 Well, it's very interesting that you raise this, Nigel, because, you see, the industry in Alberta, particularly in the oil sands, has been coasting along for a decade and more on investment that was made basically before 2015.

00:14:58.860 uh there really has not been any new productive capacity uh a greenfield productive capacity

00:15:06.800 created there's been you know incremental increases in uh the capacity of existing

00:15:12.760 plants to produce more oil but basically for over a decade we've not added to our productive capacity

00:15:20.240 in uh in the oil sand uh but during all that time we've been applying you know typical alberta

00:15:28.000 ingenuity and and driving down the cost of producing a barrel of oil out of the oil sands

00:15:33.920 from this productive capacity that we created decades ago that it means that you know that

00:15:40.640 we've been driving down the production costs oil prices have to be quite high right now i mean the

00:15:46.480 existing productive capacity in alberta is is really fantastically profitable uh and so it's

00:15:54.480 attracting uh i i think international players to want to get a a piece of that action but it's very

00:16:02.160 important to understand that what we really need now is uh the ability to get greenfield sites

00:16:09.920 going you know to do the kind of upfront investment that would create larger productive capacity over

00:16:16.880 time and that i don't see happening yet because you know much as mark carney says he uh he wants

00:16:23.760 to see this happen you know we've got the egress problem that we talked about east and west we've

00:16:28.560 got uh you know the carbon capture and storage uh uh obstacle that he attaches to uh to new egress

00:16:36.400 and new productive capacity i mean he's he's he talks a good game but my view is that he's not

00:16:43.520 at all creating the conditions in which it's worthwhile to invest in new productive capacity

00:16:49.200 in Alberta. So the oil majors are attracted to the profitability of what already exists,

00:16:56.000 but what we in Canada really need is to increase that productive capacity. And we're not there yet,

00:17:01.440 as far as I can see. Do you think Mr. Carney understands

00:17:06.560 what Donald Trump is doing the way that you understand it? Is there any evidence?

00:17:10.640 well you know my reading of mark carney is that he is he is perfectly happy to take short-term

00:17:24.780 political advantage of say canadian's unhappiness with donald trump and you know look

00:17:30.680 i can't disagree that donald trump has said many offensive things and he's insulted canadians and

00:17:36.980 I get that. But, you know, Mark Carney has taken that and turned it into an entire political brand.

00:17:44.640 And he has invested not just the government of Canada, but the future interests of Canada in an anti-American extravaganza,

00:17:54.680 which I think really harms our national interests in the long run.

00:17:57.840 And I think he understands perfectly well what he's doing.

00:18:00.480 and he's willing to take short-term political advantage

00:18:05.520 over promoting the long-term interests of Canada.

00:18:09.380 I actually think this is quite a shameful position to occupy.

00:18:14.460 Well, I think you'll find lots of support for that point of view here in Alberta,

00:18:18.260 where many people do not like the messaging that's coming out of eastern Canada,

00:18:25.360 central Canada.

00:18:26.900 And there is, as you probably know, quite a strong independence movement in Alberta.

00:18:34.040 That will come to a head in October.

00:18:35.960 But meanwhile, it's no surprise to us that Mr. Carney may want to take a short-term advantage to his political benefit.

00:18:44.860 But why does this sell so well in central Canada?

00:18:48.240 So, well, you know, there's an historian who once said that a Canadian is the perfect anti-American, anti-American as imagined in the mind of God.

00:19:00.320 You know, there is an anti-American streak in Canada.

00:19:04.640 There always has been.

00:19:06.740 It's kind of inevitable sharing the continent with the United States.

00:19:11.000 But, you know, we've always been able to sublimate or submerge this kind of anti-American reflex because we understand that our our fates are inevitably tied together, our two countries in North America.

00:19:30.280 And I'm sorry that Donald Trump has, you know, used his traditional negotiating strategy, which is to so outrage his negotiating partners that they lose the ability to focus on their own interests.

00:19:46.440 And I think Canadians fall for it every time. And, you know, what he's done is said outrageous things and Canadians say, how dare he say that to us?

00:19:56.500 And Mark Carney has said, yes, exactly. And if you support me politically, I will find us

00:20:01.660 alternatives to the United States. The fact of the matter is, though, as Margaret Thatcher used to

00:20:06.580 say, there is no alternative. The idea that there is some substitute for our relationship with the

00:20:14.000 United States is, in my estimation, completely fanciful. Can we sell more to other people?

00:20:21.340 of course we can should we do so of course we should but that's not the same as saying that

00:20:28.800 there is some alternative to our relationship with the united states because there isn't i i just

00:20:34.480 very quickly because i know we don't have a lot of time but i i'll just point out that you know

00:20:39.000 he talks sometimes about we should join the european union we're the most european non-european

00:20:43.660 country blah blah blah blah we negotiated a free trade agreement with europe uh came into effect

00:20:51.240 in 2015 so it's been in effect for 10 years so we already have free trade with europe in 2015

00:20:58.840 we sent 10 of our exports to the european union now 10 years later after 10 years of free trade

00:21:05.080 with europe what share of our exports are we sending to europe 10 percent in other words it

00:21:09.960 hasn't the existence of a free trade agreement with europe hasn't changed one iota the extent

00:21:16.680 to which we are reliant on europe as opposed to america so what is this alternative is it going to 0.89

00:21:26.640 be china the people who kidnap our citizens who weaponize trade relationships you know the they 0.93

00:21:33.500 japan became reliant on trade with china the first thing china did was to institute a rare earth 0.93

00:21:40.200 export ban, which is a dagger aimed at the industrial heart of Japan. I mean, talk about

00:21:46.960 out of the frying pan and into the fire. If I'm choosing between a country that engages in slave 1.00

00:21:53.200 labor and weaponization of trade and, you know, opens police stations on my soil to intimidate 0.99

00:22:00.980 Chinese-Canadian as opposed to the relationship that we have with the United States, I will choose 0.97

00:22:07.860 that relationship with the United States any day of the week. And I just don't get 1.00

00:22:14.680 this nonsense that Mark Carney is perpetrating on us that there is an alternative to the United

00:22:25.040 States because he's just wrong about that. Brian, we've got to go to the last question here.

00:22:30.180 When you began speaking about this, you said that Mr. Trump had a plan to upset the oil markets worldwide, to make America the center of it.

00:22:42.140 If that is the case, two things.

00:22:46.520 One, has he got there or is he still working on it?

00:22:51.160 And second, what does that mean for people in Canada?

00:22:55.080 well uh so i i would say he's he's he's most of the way there is this is this is a long-term job

00:23:05.880 uh um uh you know the the conflict with iran has driven a lot of short-term traffic away from the

00:23:13.880 middle east uh uh we're not quite there yet in terms of the america's production productive

00:23:21.960 capacity in oil and gas, but we're headed there, and the investment is happening, and

00:23:28.160 I think he will win his bet, and America will become the dominant oil and gas power in the

00:23:36.160 world. America will set the marginal price of a barrel of oil, not the Middle East, and this will 0.85

00:23:42.400 be a radical change to the world we've known. Because, you know, America doesn't have enough,

00:23:50.040 in my view, productive capacity to play that role alone. It really is going to be an America's

00:23:55.580 strategy, not America alone. And Canada, sitting on the third, at least the third largest reserves

00:24:04.040 of oil in the world with, you know, a great environmental record and egress from Alberta

00:24:10.960 and Saskatchewan south to an America that wants those energy resources, we are extremely well

00:24:18.900 position. And I think, you know, if we play our cards right, I think this could greatly redound

00:24:26.960 to the benefit of not only the oil patch and the resource-rich provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan,

00:24:33.420 but the country as a whole. Well, thanks to the U.S. Navy then, and thanks to President Trump.

00:24:41.080 Anyway, Brian, it's been great to have you on the show again. Thank you so much for coming.

00:24:46.420 And for the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

Western Standard - May 08, 2026

Trump’s energy revolution leaves Carney in the dust

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