Western Standard - What Carney says and what Carney does, just don't line up.

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

00:00:21.160 of the Western Standard. I'm Nigel Hannaford, and it is Thursday, June 5th. Earlier this week,

00:00:26.800 newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney met with Canada's premiers to talk about rebuilding

00:00:31.200 Canada as an energy superpower. There would be nation-building projects and legislation to cut

00:00:37.860 project approval times from 10 years down to two. With me today to talk about this is Gwen Morgan.

00:00:46.920 Gwen, out west, you really need no introduction, but for viewers elsewhere, you are the founding

00:00:52.140 CEO of Encana, that became Canada's largest energy company, and you've been a director

00:01:00.060 of five other global corporations.

00:01:02.760 Gwen, welcome to the show.

00:01:04.540 Thank you.

00:01:05.040 Good to be here.

00:01:06.060 Thank you very much.

00:01:07.060 Gwen, there was a lot of smiling and happy talk at that meeting, and it seemed like everybody

00:01:11.240 thought there was a believable plan to make Canada great again after the 10 last years

00:01:17.560 of Mr. Trudeau.

00:01:18.420 But earlier today, we published a column by you in the Western Standard, and you were not so confident that anything good was going to come out of what happened on money.

00:01:28.940 What is your problem with Mr. Carney, sir?

00:01:31.580 Well, if I could, I'll just read some of my columns to get to the listener's perspective.

00:01:36.960 Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's carbon taxes, EV subsidies and net zero targets are without a doubt the key factors in Canada's anemic economic GDP growth and doubled national debt over the 10 years that Trudeau was in power.

00:01:54.120 Now I have a new Liberal Prime Minister who is also ardently net zero, but more cunning and better connected to the global zealotry establishment.

00:02:05.140 But Mark Karner served as the co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, otherwise known as Guvance.

00:02:14.660 And he was also a UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance.

00:02:21.320 So when he was campaigning for the Prime Minister, he said he would remove the Consumer Cardin Tax.

00:02:33.360 But this is sort of an example of how cunning he is.

00:02:37.920 He simply moved the carbon taxes from producers to voters, in other words, to producers.

00:02:44.560 And the voters pay the price, but they don't know that.

00:02:47.440 So they blame business people for the increase in price.

00:02:53.440 His career among the global super elite makes it hard for him to relate to parents who pay

00:03:00.320 carbon taxes while struggling to house and feed their families or the people who work 14-hour

00:03:07.040 days trying to build a business and meet a payroll. Mark Carney has never had to meet a payroll.

00:03:15.200 Carney's career among the global super elite makes it hard for him to relate to parents who

00:03:20.080 do that. And that's why one of the reasons we have a prime minister now who is a member of

00:03:27.920 the super elite international group, and more scary also, the same group that wants to

00:03:34.800 decarbonize the global economy. But here in Canada, our oil and gas revenues are the bedrock

00:03:42.240 of our economy, the foundation of everything from equalization grants to foreign exchange

00:03:48.320 revenues, crucial to the Canadian dollar exchange rate.

00:03:51.680 so when you talk sir about a global elite in this field of energy i think you just said

00:04:02.600 that they do have a goal and that is to decarbonize our western economies

00:04:09.080 why i mean i know there's a climate change argument going on here but is that

00:04:15.060 really is it all about saving the planet or is there something else going on here

00:04:20.220 Well, a lot of people have different views on that. Something is to say it's kind of an

00:04:26.620 international plot to sort of hamper the future of the Western world. But I don't quite get that

00:04:33.900 far. I think these are climate zealots and they are commenced that if we don't cut the emissions,

00:04:41.980 we're going to destroy the world. And in that regard, let me read something else from my column.

00:04:47.100 that Trudeau's net-zero policies inflicted huge economic damage

00:04:55.260 at a decade of economic and personal sacrifice.

00:04:58.060 But to what end?

00:05:00.160 China, India, Russia, and the United States combined

00:05:03.580 produce almost 40 times the carbon emissions that we do.

00:05:08.920 If Canada was to shut down and disappear from the earth completely,

00:05:12.360 It would take those countries nine days to make up the difference in emissions. Nine days. And that's what Canadians have been paying the price for years under the Trudeau and now the Kearney plan.

00:05:29.060 Sir, you are saying, I think, that Mr. Carney has very clearly laid out his case over a long

00:05:38.980 period of time, 20 plus years, and that there's no way that he could have walked all that back

00:05:45.380 in his own mind. And therefore, what he's telling us about becoming an energy superpower is

00:05:54.420 disingenuous. What would it take, sir, for you to take Mr. Carney at his word when he says he wants

00:06:04.020 to make Canada an energy superpower? What does he have to do? Well, I'll tell you what he doesn't

00:06:12.420 have to do. In the recent meeting with the premiers, he put the classic liberal spin on

00:06:18.740 on what you're talking about.

00:06:20.340 He said, yes, we'll build a pipeline,

00:06:22.460 but only if you decarbonize the oil.

00:06:25.340 These are his words.

00:06:26.780 What does that mean, actually,

00:06:27.840 for people who don't follow it as closely as we do,

00:06:30.460 decarbonizing oil?

00:06:33.480 What do you do to decarbonize oil?

00:06:36.480 What do you do to change metal to plastic?

00:06:39.500 I mean, it's impossible.

00:06:41.120 The oil is oil.

00:06:42.620 And so when he's talking about decarbonizing,

00:06:44.980 what I think he means is offsetting it

00:06:47.000 with all kinds of other emissions controls.

00:06:50.640 But there's no...

00:06:51.620 Buried CO2 and pumped CO2 down holes?

00:06:55.160 Only if they decarbonize the oil.

00:06:57.460 No one knows what that means.

00:06:59.720 But in a typical fashion, the liberals haven't defined it.

00:07:04.060 It's one of these ways that Carney and his predecessor

00:07:09.900 go about just trying to be as ambiguous as possible.

00:07:13.840 And he's a master of ambiguity.

00:07:15.400 He says one thing, but he means another.

00:07:18.120 And we're becoming very familiar with that, with Mark Carney.

00:07:23.760 Well, yes, that certainly seems to be so.

00:07:30.580 One thing that you have pointed out in several of your columns

00:07:35.280 is that it's really no good talking about more pipelines

00:07:39.540 and whether they have decarbonized oil or something else in them

00:07:45.640 unless you remove the emissions cap.

00:07:51.660 There seems to me there's a couple of other things that need to go,

00:07:54.600 like the no pipelines bill and the tanker ban on the West Coast,

00:07:58.400 but let's start first with the emissions cap.

00:08:04.240 What is it and what's it supposed to do

00:08:07.820 and what's actually been the effect?

00:08:10.860 Well, what it amounts to is, let's say today

00:08:12.800 we're producing a certain amount of emissions from our oil and gas.

00:08:18.600 That would be capped.

00:08:20.680 No more. No more emissions.

00:08:23.200 But at the same time, you're supposed to build a pipeline

00:08:25.180 that's going to carry more oil. 1.00

00:08:27.460 So it's a conundrum, and it's a meaningless statement

00:08:30.400 because you cannot produce more oil

00:08:33.840 and take it to a pipeline to markets

00:08:37.420 without some increase in emissions.

00:08:41.160 So that's typical of Carney.

00:08:43.280 He'll say one thing and then he'll put something else in front of it.

00:08:49.080 And when it comes right down to it, it makes the first thing he said impossible.

00:08:53.000 So really, an emissions cap is a production cap by another name.

00:08:57.040 Yes.

00:08:57.940 And if you have a production cap, then the issue of whether there's a pipeline or not

00:09:04.380 becomes less important because you've got nothing to put in it.

00:09:06.740 Exactly.

00:09:07.740 It's impossible.

00:09:08.740 When you hear Mr. Carney talking about that he's all for pipelines if he has the but,

00:09:16.740 but, he says, you have to have indigenous agreement and you have to have, if it's going

00:09:22.620 to go across Quebec to the east, you need the agreement of the Quebec government.

00:09:30.300 Is he really speaking in favor of pipelines or is he just talking?

00:09:36.740 Well, it comes back to what we were talking about earlier, Nigel.

00:09:41.140 I think he'll say things, but he knows there's—

00:09:45.500 he'll say, I'm in favor of something, but he knows darn well

00:09:48.620 that the other conditions around it are impossible to meet.

00:09:52.220 And then, obviously, further discussions with the Aboriginals

00:10:00.660 or the First Nations are happening all the time.

00:10:04.740 and everywhere we produce oil, it's in their areas. They're already being consulted.

00:10:12.900 But he always has some reason, we're going to do something, but he knows in the back of his

00:10:19.460 mind that something else is going to stop it anyway. Well, he has set himself a very ambitious

00:10:25.140 target of building a strengthened Canadian economy. He talks about it being an energy superpower,

00:10:35.940 and yet, as you rightly point out, there are several caveats on this.

00:10:42.180 Given what you know of Mr. Carney, and what you know of the efforts that he made over an

00:10:48.020 extended period of time to try and persuade people not to invest in the energy industry,

00:10:54.180 This was while he was at the Bank of England and later working for the United Nations.

00:11:01.860 You know, when you see what's left, what has he got to work with? What can he do? Surely this

00:11:07.780 isn't all about solar power that only works during the day and wind power that only works

00:11:15.060 when the wind blows. That's not his solution, is it? Well, he's a very surreptitious guy.

00:11:20.660 You know, he says something, but he knows that he's in favor of something knowing that it can't happen anyway because of something else he's doing.

00:11:30.320 But, you know, he's a very, I don't know, obtuse guy.

00:11:36.840 That's probably an over-favorable thing to say about him.

00:11:42.180 He's deliberately a chameleon.

00:11:46.440 and we already know what this real chameleon's about.

00:11:52.600 But he says things that he knows can't happen

00:11:55.360 and therefore will already give him an excuse for it not happening.

00:12:00.320 Now, during your professional career, did you ever meet him personally?

00:12:06.220 No.

00:12:07.080 You know, it's an interesting thing, Nigel.

00:12:09.580 People talk about these bank, you know, the heads of these banks.

00:12:16.440 national banks as being some sort of a guru.

00:12:20.140 Actually, when it comes right down to it,

00:12:23.500 whether it be our head of our national bank

00:12:27.040 or Britain's or where else,

00:12:28.660 they don't have any power to do anything

00:12:31.180 except set the interest rate.

00:12:33.420 They do not make financial decisions.

00:12:35.540 They're not involved in the budget.

00:12:37.720 They are simply sitting there

00:12:39.560 in this wonderful little job

00:12:42.100 at the top of the rung sort of thing

00:12:44.080 to say, okay, well,

00:12:45.440 you know we're going to change the interest rate or up or down and maybe we'll say to the government

00:12:52.960 that they shouldn't spend as much money but he doesn't have any any power over that he never

00:12:57.340 has that so he's never had to deal with being accountable for what really happens so i come

00:13:05.900 back to the question as prime minister what what is the one thing the two things that he could do

00:13:13.740 that would make you say, okay, maybe he really means what he says?

00:13:23.340 Well, he could stop sort of speaking in riddles, which he does.

00:13:30.080 And when you speak in riddles, it's hard to pick out anything particularly

00:13:32.980 that he could do to make him believable.

00:13:37.540 If he dropped the emissions cap, would you take him seriously?

00:13:41.540 If you drop the emissions cap about a pipeline?

00:13:46.060 Yes.

00:13:49.160 I would take him seriously about that,

00:13:51.880 but I'd worry about some other reason why it can't happen.

00:13:55.580 He has it in the back of his mind.

00:13:57.840 What else could there be?

00:13:59.920 No tanker ban, perhaps, in BC?

00:14:04.300 Well, you know, one of the things that Pierre Paulyev said was

00:14:08.220 we're going to set the regulatory process up

00:14:11.520 so it's only going to take a year.

00:14:14.660 Carney says it'll take at least two years.

00:14:18.140 But he knows that unless something's fundamentally changed

00:14:21.420 for the regulatory system, it'll take a lot longer than that.

00:14:24.940 So he already knows that in a lot of ways

00:14:28.520 that for his four-year term,

00:14:31.460 whatever he says about building a pipeline

00:14:34.200 is not going to happen.

00:14:35.000 So, he has, on the other hand, made some very bold promises about what he's going to do.

00:14:47.140 He has to try something.

00:14:53.020 What do you think that he has in the back of his mind?

00:14:56.320 Like, he's very friendly with the Chinese government.

00:14:58.920 Do you think he has in his mind importing masses of Chinese solar panels, perhaps?

00:15:05.440 Is solar his plan?

00:15:07.700 No, I don't think so.

00:15:08.820 I mean, the one thing that is in the background, maybe in the foreground of all this,

00:15:16.040 is this country is almost bankrupt right now.

00:15:18.780 Our actual debt is doubled under the Trudeau government.

00:15:22.720 Our dollar is basically not worth the economy that we have.

00:15:29.840 It's got to be headed down if we keep on carrying it where we are.

00:15:33.520 And so we're a country that needs to create jobs,

00:15:37.320 we need to create industry, we need to attract business,

00:15:40.380 and we need to get business excited about building new things in this country.

00:15:44.440 And I don't see that he's the prime minister that can do that.

00:15:47.780 Yeah, that's what he has promised to do.

00:15:50.000 I try not to be overly pessimistic

00:15:55.280 I hope he does

00:15:56.100 But he's going to have to

00:15:58.160 He's going to have to be a person of his word

00:16:00.620 And so far, we haven't seen that

00:16:02.960 So it's a

00:16:05.720 Are there any other members of the

00:16:08.860 Cabinet that

00:16:10.840 Give you any hope

00:16:13.040 That there is something better on the way

00:16:15.180 For example, the new energy minister

00:16:17.400 Probably somebody

00:16:18.940 Do you know Tim Hodgson?

00:16:21.540 Yes, and I have to say that's an excellent appointment.

00:16:26.480 And to be fair, Nigel, when I heard that,

00:16:30.840 I thought, well, maybe there is something to this guy.

00:16:33.240 Maybe this prime minister is more honest

00:16:39.880 about what his intentions are than I thought.

00:16:43.440 Then I saw that he also had the other guy on the regulatory side

00:16:48.940 is a guy who has been against the oil industry his whole life.

00:16:54.080 So, you know, I don't know whether it's kind of creating

00:16:59.100 automatically cancelling out, automatic cancellation

00:17:03.700 of one person versus another or not.

00:17:06.080 But I'm trying to be optimistic because I really felt that

00:17:09.260 that energy appointment was excellent.

00:17:13.740 And I'll just try to be meaningful.

00:17:16.200 Yes.

00:17:16.440 Well, certainly his appointment to the Environment Ministry, the name escapes me for a moment.

00:17:23.960 Grobair.

00:17:25.080 Pardon?

00:17:26.200 Grobair.

00:17:27.980 Uh-huh.

00:17:29.080 It was a woman, Julie Drew.

00:17:32.900 But she's been a hardline anti-oil industry, and now she's in the ECCC environment. 0.77

00:17:40.960 Yeah, very hardline.

00:17:42.800 and it's a very hard line and that's why I was saying he seems to sort of feel like creating this

00:17:49.760 tension between it and it maybe gives an excuse for things not happening.

00:17:54.880 Sort of makes you wonder where all this leads if you say well this is my intention but these

00:17:58.800 things need to happen. Those things can't happen so that intention doesn't come through. Well then

00:18:06.240 what was the intention? Where are we going with this? I call him a master of ambiguity.

00:18:12.800 Well, I do believe you're right. I'm just picking up a column that you contributed to us very

00:18:25.280 recently in which you spoke about the regulatory paralysis and hostility to core industries.

00:18:38.560 During the Trudeau years, some $500 billion in energy projects were blocked.

00:18:44.560 That capital won't return until Canada offers clarity and confidence.

00:18:51.560 confidence. Even if the Prime Minister was totally reliable in these things, how long

00:19:03.040 does it take the industry to decide maybe there's something good that can be done in

00:19:10.120 Canada? It takes years to build a reputation. You can lose it in a couple of minutes. How

00:19:17.560 it take to get this back? Well, it's a very difficult question to answer. I mean,

00:19:26.760 the bottom line is that these companies tried to build a pipeline to the northeast coast,

00:19:33.720 northwest coast. They tried to build a pipeline across the country to Quebec,

00:19:38.120 and they spent billions of dollars, years and years in regulatory authority, regulatory actions,

00:19:44.440 and actually at the end weren't successful. So I think there's a great hesitancy on the part of

00:19:55.400 the industry putting more billions into something when they maybe don't even trust the guy in the

00:20:01.160 first place. Yeah. So we really have four years at least to wait before we can even

00:20:08.840 begin perhaps to rebuild that confidence under a different government you mentioned the northeast

00:20:16.760 pipeline the one that is slated to go to uh churchill and hudson's bay i suppose the same

00:20:24.520 thing applies if you don't have any oil to put in it because of the emissions cap

00:20:29.720 it's not going to do you a lot of good no i was really talking about energy east 0.71

00:20:33.640 I think this whole Churchill thing is just a ridiculous idea.

00:20:43.960 This has been thought about for quite a few years. But you know, it's very difficult to 0.88

00:20:50.440 build a pipeline at Churchill. But even more so, the port is not open for a lot of the year because

00:20:57.320 you can't get chips into it so it's still frozen up there and so it's it's it would be tens of

00:21:05.320 millions of dollars years and years and not very functional oh that's although there's quite a few

00:21:12.200 people in alberta going to be disappointed to hear that because i do believe that's become something

00:21:16.760 of a of a great white hope um that's alarming but then the whole thing is alarming sir it's just

00:21:24.040 one of the things we live with here. You're better off in Victoria, I do believe.

00:21:37.320 Mr. Carney is our problem, I do believe, and I want to just thank you for illuminating some of

00:21:45.720 the some of the specifics about that any closing thoughts can you tell us anything

00:21:54.440 for our encouragement as we get ready to sign off

00:21:59.400 well you know i think that the um there's a lot of things going on in the country i mean

00:22:06.040 alberta and part and probably saskatchewan are wondering if they should even be in the union

00:22:10.280 So there's tensions

00:22:13.640 And they can only go two directions

00:22:17.500 They can get worse or better

00:22:18.760 And what I'm hoping for

00:22:21.380 Is that they will get better

00:22:23.620 Because there will be some sensitivity

00:22:26.460 On the part of those situations across the country

00:22:29.620 Not just in the federal government

00:22:31.460 But in Canadians generally

00:22:33.380 If we're going to be a united country

00:22:35.360 We have to be more united

00:22:37.480 Individually across the nation

00:22:40.120 And I'm hoping that we get to somewhere close to that.

00:22:44.540 Ladies and gentlemen, that was Gwyn Morgan, a giant in the Alberta oil industry,

00:22:52.320 now taking his retirement in Victoria and speaking to us from there.

00:22:57.240 Thank you very much, Mr. Morgan.

00:22:58.900 It's been a pleasure to have you on the program.

00:23:02.800 Thank you, Nigel.

00:23:03.720 All the best.

00:23:04.900 Yeah, well, it's been great.

00:23:06.140 Thank you so much.

00:23:06.860 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

00:23:10.120 .

00:23:20.020 .

Western Standard - June 06, 2025

What Carney says and what Carney does, just don't line up.

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