Power Struggle
Improving the energy dialogue in Canada (and beyond) through honest, non-partisan, and fact- based conversations.
The energy conversation is personal: it’s in our homes, in our hands, and now, it’s in our ears. Power Struggle invites you to listen in on honest, non-partisan, and fact-based conversations between host Stewart Muir and the leaders and thinkers designing modern energy.
Watch videos at https://www.youtube.com/@PowerStrugglePod
Power Struggle
Jason Kenney on Energy, Recovery, and Canada’s Resilience | Election Special Ep.3
In this episode of Power Struggle: Election Special, former Alberta Premier and federal cabinet minister Jason Kenney joins Stewart Muir to discuss Canada’s most pressing challenges — from addiction policy to energy infrastructure and national defense.
Kenney contrasts Alberta’s recovery-focused approach to addiction with Vancouver’s harm reduction model, while also tackling issues like Bill C-69, Indigenous equity partnerships, and Canada’s need to invest in energy security and military readiness.
Key topics:
- Alberta’s alternative addiction strategy
- Federal legislation and energy investment
- Indigenous ownership in resource development
- Arctic sovereignty and defense spending
- Economic resilience and national security
The energy conversation is polarizing. But the reality is multidimensional. Get the full story with host Stewart Muir.
Reach out to us with thoughts, questions, or ideas at info@powerstruggle.ca
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We are now the equivalent of the 50th, ie the poorest US state, alabama In terms of. If you take all of the entire Canadian economy divided up by the 40 million people, we are the equivalent in currency-adjusted terms as the poorest of the US states. Now remember Donald Trump. When asked, I think January 12th in Mar-a-Lago, mr President, do you intend to use military force to annex Canada, he said no, that's not necessary. We'll just exert so much economic pressure that they're going to want to become the 51st state.
Stewart Muir:Welcome to Power Struggle. I'm your host, stuart Muir. This month, the show is traveling across the country for a special series on Canada's federal election campaign, looking at energy issues from all sides. We started out here in the studio in Vancouver and then, just a few days ago, I stopped in St John's, newfoundland, where I sat down with one of the country's most intriguing thinkers. Today, I have the pleasure to be joined by a remarkable and accomplished Canadian, jason Kenney.
Stewart Muir:Jason became leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party after it had been cast out of a long reign as the province's natural governing party. To come back to power, he had to first merge with the Wild Rose Party to form the United Conservative Party. No mean feat and a testament to Jason's political skills. From there, he won the 2019 general election and served as the 18th premier of Alberta until 2022. Before provincial politics, jason served in various federal cabinet posts, including national defense, immigration and economic development under Prime Minister Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2015. More recently, he became a senior advisor for the law firm Bennett Jones, and he's joined me here today in the studio. So great to see you, jason. Likewise, you're someone who's frequently come to Vancouver over the years. You know it well, we're a beautiful place, but also one that has a tourist hotspot, for all the wrong reasons, a few blocks from here. One of the issues that every Vancouverite feels, and I know you feel strongly about, is the human face of despair and addiction and degradation here.
Jason Kenney:Right. There's been an object lesson in bad social policy in the downtown east side of Vancouver for going on 15 years. I mean, we know that in our urban cores, big cities, there's always been a population of transient people, indigent people, people with mental health or addictions problems. But what was a fairly conventional urban core problem in the downtown Eastside 20 years ago has become a charnel house with ever-rising rates of addiction, social disorder and overdose-related deaths and crime-related deaths. And what I find so disturbing about this is that this has been expanded and amplified by wrongheaded policy. Now, maybe it was well-motivated. The so-called harm reduction movement thought that if they were just to start to destigmatize and normalize illicit drug consumption and maybe facilitate it in quote-unquote safer consumption sites and so forth, that they could somehow diminish the associated deaths. What we saw year after year the past 15 years since Vancouver Vancouver politicians, aided and abetted by the BC government, the federal government and an entire poverty industry in the downtown Eastside where hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed to nonprofit agencies is just an ever more strident, unhinged pursuit of facilitating dangerous drug addictions. And you can see the results. I mean ordinary objective people have seen the results mounting the more they try to facilitate addiction providing product, now destigmatizing it, making it easier to use and to access in effectively a law-free zone, has resulted in thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths and a lot of that model has spread to other parts of Canada.
Jason Kenney:Unfortunately, it's a public policy model up and down the West Coast into the United States.
Jason Kenney:Most places are turning sharply away from it. In Alberta we observed this and it started to hit us and we said, look, we're not going to let this happen in our province. We're going to take a different approach, a recovery-oriented approach, which was about a massive expansion of a seamless system for intervention, detox, treatment and lifetime recovery. Now, that doesn't work for everyone, it certainly doesn't work all the time, but the starting point is that addiction to toxic drugs is actually bad and that there is an alternative, a life-saving alternative, and if we can help to get people into that, we do it in Alberta now through the alternative sentencing in the courts. We have treatment centers in jails and in prisons. We have a seamless connection with the social services agencies to try to move people from homelessness who are addicted into the various kinds of treatment programs. Look, it's not perfect, it hasn't eliminated overdose deaths, but it's providing, I think, a life-saving alternative to the charnel house that we see in the downtown east side of Vancouver.
Stewart Muir:Do you think that one view is eventually going to become the dominant view, because surely both of these can't be the right way to go?
Jason Kenney:Yeah, I think it is. And you see, even here in the BC government they were ideologically rigidly committed to expanding, for example, what they called the latest version of the harm reduction movement was safe supply, where they would replace toxic street drugs with supposedly the pharmaceutical alternative. So they just use that as a commodity to sell into their own black market to generate money to buy the ever more potent illicit products. So it hasn't reduced the availability or the consumption of the toxic street drugs, but it has increased addiction with the secondary market for the government-issued opioids. And I mean, where did all of this start was 20 years ago with the opioid crisis fueled by rapacious mega pharma companies that were pushing OxyContin and other products in. You know dangerously normalizing those, the prescriptions of those products. So why did we forget those basic lessons? You know dangerously normalizing those, the prescriptions of those products. So why did we forget those basic lessons that addiction generates more addiction? And so even the BC government has backed up on that.
Jason Kenney:As you know, even the BC government has said there are certain places where we ought not to be facilitating open drug use, like near schools, god forbid. But just this past week, as we taped this, an Ontario court ruled. They suspended a law from the Ontario government to a similar law to prohibit open consumption at, or in the end, so-called safe injection sites, safe consumption sites at or near schoolyards, playgrounds and places where kids can't go. So part of the problem here, I believe, is courts that have some judges who have had a disordered sense of where to locate rights. Where's the right of the local community? Where's the right of the people, the longtime residents of Vancouver, chinatown, to live peacefully? Where are the rights of the family members of hardcore addicts who lose their loved one? Where are the rights of the families of those kids in those playgrounds littered with syringes and used condoms and so forth? Where are the rights of the community to live a basically peaceful life?
Jason Kenney:So I think that there's been a huge shift in the debate since people started paying attention and witnessed a recent study that's come out, a really high quality empirical study concluding that so-called safe supply and other aspects of the harm reduction strategy have not reduced deaths or addictions. Much of this stuff has been driven by a veneer of evidence-based policy. That's what we always heard from the advocates of drug decriminalization and destigmatization that it was all evidence-based. Well, it turns out when you look under the surface, as people like journalist Adam Zeebo have done, you see that most of those so-called supportive studies are actually very low-quality surveys, people being questioned who come from the entire ecosystem that is promoting safe supply and legitimization of toxic drugs.
Jason Kenney:So, you know, I think we need to be discerning about this. Put to the side these let's call them faked, rigged or infected studies, and we need to see more hardcore, empirical stuff, which it's very clear. The more of this we have had as a function of policy, of funding, of promoting availability to toxic, illicit drugs, the more addiction we've had, the more death, the more criminality, the more social disorder. By the way, it's not exactly like. What I've just described is entirely intuitive.
Stewart Muir:And it gets worse. Jason, you came in in 2019 as the new Alberta Premier. There was a lot going on. You were calling one of the pieces of federal legislation the no More Pipelines Act. There was the tanker ban affecting the West Coast. There was a continuation of the lawfare against a federally approved project in the nation's interest the Trans Mountain Pipeline from Edmonton to Vancouver and you came into office and this stuff was still hot. What was your initial reaction, day one in the job on those issues?
Jason Kenney:Well, it wasn't just a reaction, because I knew what was going on and my whole platform was built around getting resource infrastructure built, because obviously for Alberta that's kind of existential I think. I believe we're increasingly seeing under the shadow of the Trump threats. That is existential for Canada. Let me just say, to back up a step, I think that in parts of urban Canada, perhaps including Vancouver, toronto, montreal, ottawa there is a really kind of blinkered and false distorted view of the Canadian economy and we have these highly urbanized areas and where most people have zero experience or direct visibility of the natural resource extractive industries which have always been the core of Canadian prosperity, and I know some people would like to wish that away because they think these industries are dirty or they're the past or we're going to transition past them. I'm not just talking about oil and gas, I'm talking about logging, mining, agriculture, all of it. And the truth is I'll tell you this, I was part of a federal government, all of it. And the truth is like, I'll tell you this, I was part of a federal government Harper government that increased Canada's free trade agreements, but with 39 countries, we went from six to 45 free trade agreements during the Harper decade, partly through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement, precisely to diversify our export markets so that we would be less dependent on the United States, which, of course, is now a big imperative in light of the Trump threats.
Jason Kenney:But when we actually look at how our export profile has grown with those 45 countries since then, hardly at all, and partly because we don't export much in the way of manufactured stuff. What? What do we export that is of high value Commodities, um, potash, uranium, canola oil, oil oil by far the number one lumber uh, to some extent natural gas, which is hugely untapped and other commodities. So if we are going to become resilient contra Donald Trump, we have to develop those industries. So that wasn't something I kind of stumbled on in 2019.
Jason Kenney:But when I became premier in 2019, the federal government Trudeau government was, as you've said had tabled in parliament Bill C-69, the so-called Impact Assessment Act, which was replacing the longstanding Canadian Environmental Impact Assessment process, and it was so Byzantine, with no time limits at all and the ability of the federal cabinet to override the decision of independent federal cabinet, to override the decision of independent regulatory bodies, to politicize it, which would mean that a project proponent that has to spend hundreds of millions or potentially billions of dollars on a proposal, would not know what the ultimate threshold was.
Jason Kenney:And then, even worse, they kept changing the game by improvisation. I'll give you one example Energy East, ok, transcanada Energy, tc Energy had spent $800 million seeking approval of that process. And then the feds come along and say well, now you're going to have to account for the up and downstream GHG emissions associated with that pipeline, by which they meant the carbon footprint of producing the energy up in the Canadian oil sands. And if it's shipped down to New England, the diesel that's burned by the trucks in Boston, you're going to have to account for that too. Well, how the hell does a pipeline company account for these things? By the way, when a tanker comes into the Bay of Fundy from Saudi or Algeria or the US Gulf Coast, nobody is tracking. There's no Canadian regulator penalizing the marine vessel for its carbon footprint or the upstream or downstream emissions associated with it or the contents of that ship.
Stewart Muir:At ResourceWorks we did a study recently. We found that in Canada the price of carbon for industry that produces oil is $58 a ton when it's netted out. The oil that is shipped to Canada there's not a lot of it, but especially on the East Coast, there's a substantial amount that goes to St John, to the refinery 30 cents per ton. Wow, that's the global average. So we are paying just one country We've found. This is astonishing what I'm about to tell you that one third of all the carbon taxes paid in the world are paid in Canada.
Jason Kenney:Yeah, so we saw all of that, which is why I said one of my top commitments as premier would be to launch a constitutional challenge to Bill C-69. Now, by the way, I went down to Ottawa, day three of my tenure as premier, and I said to Justin Trudeau I can be an ally with your government on a lot of things, for example internal trade, but on this you have to understand this. Bill C-69 would be kind of the equivalent of telling Quebec that you're going to shut down their aviation sector. We will get no major projects applied for, let alone approved, under this. I went to the Canadian Senate, I made that case. They accepted my argument. They accepted all of Alberta's tabled amendments which basically gutted C-69, went back to the House of Commons. Trudeau reverted to the original form of the bill. It became law. I sued him and we won. We won four to one in a magnum opus decision at the Alberta Appeal Court which said that it was a constitutional Trojan horse, a clear violation of the powers of the federal government. Because under it's already getting wonkish here, but I know you've got a well-employed viewership we do Under section 921A of the Constitution Act, which Peter Lougheed got embedded during negotiations on patiation in 1981, it says the provinces have the exclusive jurisdiction to regulate the production of natural resources, including oil and gas.
Jason Kenney:So basically, we won on that grounds, also at the Supreme Court, on a I think it was a five to two or six to two decision on the Supreme Court of Canada. Unfortunately, that was two years ago and the Fed still haven't amended the legislation. I mean, the Liberal Party always frames themselves as the great champions of the Canadian Constitution. Somehow they were in flagrant violation of that. By the way, I also sued them under the Emergencies Act and they were found to have violated the Constitution, the charter there, but they still haven't acted on it. By the way, what I said in 2019 about C-69 proved to be prophetic, because not a single major project has been approved since that became the law. So this has to be a central issue in this election if we're going to be more resistant to fight the threats from down south, we need this energy infrastructure. We need to diversify our largest export products away from total dependence on the US as an export market. That means LNG, it means oil pipelines, it means more rail, it means bigger ports, it means all of the above.
Stewart Muir:One thing I want to hear from you directly, because every time I go to Toronto, inevitably with a friend, someone I meet, I get this talking point, which is well, trudeau built Trans Mountain and before 2015, harper didn't build any pipelines. So this is a vacuous claim that Trudeau was not in favor of building pipelines.
Jason Kenney:It's qualified credit because the federal government did step in and bought the Transmountain Expansion Project from a US company, Kinder Morgan, and now that the project's been completed we can see the huge economic benefit. There's been a measurable increase in our national GDP as a result of just that one project, because it's half a million additional barrels a day at about, with no price discount, unlike what we sell the Americans, which is going to global markets. That is an immediate lift at about $75 a barrel. You do the math. This is real. Wealth flows back into government coffers and eventually the debt in that crown corporation will be paid down because there's tolls, there's revenues that come off that pipeline every day, predictably for 25 years.
Stewart Muir:And you know, even if a lot of that oil goes to California, it's going without the discount. They're taking the full price. Really important point which gets overlooked.
Jason Kenney:So you know what Credit there they never should have. Kinder Morgan. If we had a normal, functioning like first world regulatory environment, as opposed to what many regard as kind of banana republic regulatory environment, kinder Morgan wouldn't have bailed. Now let me just say this I don't want to sound completely pessimistic, because I actually am optimistic about this stuff.
Jason Kenney:If we dial back five or 10 years ago, the number one impediment to Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, northern Gateway, et cetera, and a lot of other projects was a lack of clarity around Indigenous consultation. Under Section 35 of the Constitution Act, the honor of the crown requires that indigenous communities be consulted on projects that might affect their traditional territories. Okay, granted, but nobody really knew what that meant in detail. So there was like 20 years of litigation around it, lots of uncertainty. Tmx was a perfect example, but finally, thank goodness, the Supreme Court of Canada in a critical decision in 2019, gave us clarity and they said you don't need unanimous support from every putative Indigenous rights holder on a project. You need to engage in good faith efforts and basically, in layman's translation, they said you need to see that there's broad support or at least not widespread opposition. Well, according to the Supreme Court, they upheld the finding of the BC Superior Court that there was 110, I think of 119, interested indigenous communities who were either supportive of or not opposed to it. And at the end Stuart, you would know better than me, I think there were only really three First Nations who were opposed, which is why the project was built. So now we have legal certainty.
Jason Kenney:The next piece was and, by the way, we've moved even further on the Indigenous front and this is something I'm particularly proud of as Premier I created a crown corporation called the Indigenous Opportunities Corporation to backstop to provide Alberta credit, backstop to help First Nations get access to commercial rates of credit to buy equity in major projects and other economic investments. Because what I found was the real problem was that First Nations were only getting token, marginal industrial benefit agreements with logging companies, mining companies, oil pipeline companies, et cetera, but they didn't have an ownership stake because they didn't have balance sheets, they had no experience in complex commercial transactions, they didn't have the financial weight to buy into these projects. So we, recognizing that gap, that kind of if you will, kind of market failure, we have provided access to the provincial balance sheet so they now are buying into these projects. It's been a huge success, a game changer. Bc has replicated it.
Jason Kenney:Saskatchewan, ottawa companies are stepping forward. This is the new table stakes. If you want indigenous support, you have to facilitate indigenous ownership. That's why I'm very enthusiastic. So we've got, I think we've largely well, never completely, but largely solved for the kind of uncertainty around indigenous objections a decade ago. Now, if we can fix the regulatory piece with sensible replacement to C-69, depoliticizing it very quick, timelines New Zealand style, one-stop permitting, if we can get that in place, we're going to cook with gas, so to speak.
Stewart Muir:Yeah Well, alberta has innovated a lot of things Recently hydrogen proliferation as a fuel in the economy, industrial carbon pricing started in Alberta. The AIOC Alberta-. Indigenous opportunities you started, that it was copied by Saskatchewan BC and, as you say, the federal government, which just doubled the capital pool to $10 billion. So another influential idea which I think Alberta you know as a born-in-Alberta guy. I think sometimes it doesn't get the credit it deserves for being a forward thinker, usually driven by market ideas, which is not always true everywhere else.
Jason Kenney:I think that's look. I mean, I'd like to say the government I led was very forward leaning and innovative in these areas. And let me add something to this when I made this commitment in the 2019 Alberta election to create a special crown corp to basically encumber the provincial balance sheet to assist First Nations in equity participation, at that time there were like tens of thousands of out-of-work blue-collar folks from the oil field and adjacent industries, and many of them had been unemployed or underemployed for four or five years. There was a malaise, there'd been five years of economic decline and stagnation, and I was a little concerned that this could be misperceived as, or it could be exploited by divisive voices as a special giveaway to indigenous people, to First Nations. We're unemployed. Why is he helping those folks?
Jason Kenney:Well, I'm so proud of Albertans because they got it right away.
Jason Kenney:They understood, and they understand deeply, that we have to be partners full, real, substantial, not just like token and marginal, but full and real, substantial partners with First Nations if we're ever going to get any of this stuff done. So I think this also marks a kind of social progress as well. There's a lot of sad history in this country, and part of it in the past was racism, not to say it doesn't exist. But I think this is a mark of real social progress, of social unity, where green organizations tried to exploit, I think, first Nations in what Ellis Ross and others have referred to as eco-colonialism and where certainly you talk about those Toronto Laurentian elites. When you go down there, you talk to anybody within spitting distance of like the CBZ headquarters, the CN Tower in Toronto. You get an reflexive view that all Indigenous people are opposed to all resource projects. And why are you even talking to us about this? I think we've demonstrated increasingly in Western Canada that the opposite is true, that they have economic rights to say yes, not just legal rights to say no.
Stewart Muir:And some of the best deals that exemplify this are in Alberta, in BC Saskatchewan, because I think the resource sectors out here, which are so prevalent in the economy, have collaboration started five or 10 years ago.
Jason Kenney:It's been built on a foundation. Look, some companies got it terribly wrong. Some companies came to first nations. Well, way too late in the process, or net or or or only offered scraps in terms of, uh, economic benefits. You know, it would offer sometimes a couple dozen jobs for running the shuttles or doing night security jobs or clearing the vegetation, but the idea like so.
Jason Kenney:There were companies that weren't star performers in this respect, but others that have been really deeply integrated and, by the way, the most beautiful example of this is the Fort McKay First Nation near Fort McMurray in the oil sands region of northern Alberta.
Jason Kenney:When you drive around that reserve, I mean you might as well be driving around a beautiful middle upper, middle class town in anywhere in Canada beautiful manicured lawns, brand new trucks, bunch of millionaires on that reserve, full employment and, with the revenues they've generated because of the commercial partnerships, building all sorts of amenities and beautiful continuing care facility for the seniors, rec facilities for the kids.
Jason Kenney:It's a model of what we could do and have been doing in Alberta. Now we need to move this model eastward when we get to like talk about the Ring of Fire mining projects for critical minerals in Northern Ontario. Those First Nations have less of an experience like this, and when you get further east, like the Mi'kmaq in New Brunswick, they really have no historical relationship of this nature with resource development companies, and so there's been a lot of reflexive opposition to natural gas development, for example fracking in New Brunswick. So we've got to take and I think indigenous leaders in Western Canada, whose communities have moved from poverty to prosperity through these economic relationships, can be very helpful to spread the gospel of growth, as it were, to their counterparts down east.
Stewart Muir:This federal election in the early days, including the days just before, seemed exceptional because it was the first one I can remember ever where energy issues were the number one talking point out of the gate. And whether that persists we'll just have to wait and see, but in these early days it was absolutely fascinating as, at least amongst the two major parties, there was a jockeying to find out who's the most enthusiastic about pipelines. But is everyone completely candid? Is there a litmus test? Because I would like to give the listener here a bit of a touchstone so, as they go through the next couple of weeks, the wisdom that you can impart from your experience, Jason, to tell what's true and what isn't true and which statements should be held up to closer scrutiny.
Jason Kenney:Well, I think it's a fairly accurate observation, at least of the two main parties. But I find it interesting that the parties that have lost half of their historic support the Bloc Québécois and the NDP are the parties who are reflexively still opposed to energy infrastructure and pipelines. I find that very interesting. I don't think it's just that one issue, but I think Canadians are getting the bigger picture, which is, with the Trump threats, we need to grow, we need to diversify, we need to build big things, infrastructure, and so that old message of no, the NIMBY message, has a shrinking electoral constituency in Canada. So you've got two parties that are, you know, the conservatives is really central to their agenda is energy infrastructure, big projects, massively accelerating approvals for those projects, etc. And the liberals are kind of an apparent course correction from the extremism on this that came from the Trudeau government. How sincere they are, I don't. I mean, I think that's a big question in this election.
Jason Kenney:I'm concerned, like maybe even if, first of all, mark Carney supported the cancellation of Northern Gateway, the oil pipeline, the oil pipeline, yeah, he has been obviously the leading advocate in global financial markets, capital markets, to effectively disinvest from oil and gas. By the way, let me just make an aside here Most of the oil and gas developed in the world is developed by state-owned enterprises or quasi-SOEs, like in Russia. I mean, they're ostensibly public companies but they're all controlled effectively by Putin. So Canada and the United States are really the only two major producers where you have non-government companies, publicly traded, government regulated, but private enterprise developers. So when a guy like Mark Carney comes along and says you pension funds, you banks, insurance companies at all, you have to move your products away from high emitting industries. That doesn't affect Saudi Aramco. He in fact, through Brookfield, invested in a pipeline in or a bid on at least he bid on a pipeline in Saudi. It doesn't affect Gazprom, it doesn't affect the Mexican state-owned enterprise or any you know, the Qataris. It affects Canada and the United States.
Jason Kenney:So what he was trying to do through his financial coalition on decarbonization was very prejudicial to resource development in Canada. And then finally he's got folks like Stephen Guilbeault, who's an absolute nut on these issues. You know, former Greenpeace civil disobedience guy for whom this stuff is religion. Gregor Robertson, the former mayor of Vancouver, who was the perhaps the leading opponent to the Trans Mountain expansion. Presumably they would both be cabinet ministers Guilbeault would be for sure, because he's Kearney's Quebec lieutenant, which is one of the most powerful positions in the government. So I'm very concerned. Look, I don't want to be overly partisan here, but if you're a voter who's concerned about prosperity and resource development, I would say it's nice that there's some moderating messages coming from Mr Kearney. But I would say that there's still a real lack of credibility there.
Stewart Muir:I'd just like to play a bit of tape.
Jason Kenney:Kinder Morgan's pipeline is a bad deal for Vancouver's environment and our economy.
Stewart Muir:This project is not in Vancouver.
Jason Kenney:BC or Canada's interest.
Stewart Muir:That, of course, is the then mayor of Vancouver, gregor Robertson, with his view on Trans Mountain, not in Vancouver or British Columbia or Canada's interest. On the day it was approved, years ago, he continued to oppose that pipeline, including by taking part in legal actions to fight it, including being out there pretty much every chance he got to say what a terrible idea it was, including being out there pretty much every chance he got to say what a terrible idea it was. Now he's just been parachuted in, that is to say acclaimed into the new federal writing of Vancouver, fraserview, burnaby, south. So he's going to be the Liberal Party of Candidates candidate for parliament there and I wonder if that previous stance, which was no secret and he's of course not going to be able to even attempt, and he probably wouldn't attempt, to deny it, is going to be a difficult one to compare with what Mr Carney is saying in terms of you know what he wants the government to do, because surely a star candidate like Mr Robertson is headed for cabinet.
Jason Kenney:Well, I don't know what Mark may have said in the past about TMX, but I do know he openly opposed Northern Gateway and I've never heard him object to the way they effectively strangled Energy East. Who here is going to take on the BC government's policy about electrification of any future LNG compression on the West Coast, which could kill LNG, canada train two and the future of large scale LNG? So you know, I think if you're a voter who wants responsibility to develop Canadian resources, partly as a response to the Trump threats, then I at least would not hire the guys who brought in Bill C-69, who killed Northern Gateway, who killed Energy East, who surrendered to Joe Biden's veto of the Keystone XL pipeline on day one as his first executive order. Not a peep from the Trudeau government. If they're elected, they will have a caucus filled with Gregor Robertsons and Stephen Gibbos. Even if Mr Carney has had a kind of change of view on these issues, I'm not sure how he would be able to carry a caucus for whom their environmental commitments are analogous to religious doctrine.
Stewart Muir:So here we are, a few days into the election campaign. A lot of people are saying that this election is about Trump. It will all be decided around how voters see that. Others are saying, well, maybe it's not so much that, it's partly that, but it's about affordability for a city. Right right, economic issues more directly.
Jason Kenney:Yeah Well, I think that's the big competition here. And you've got a large cohort of voters, typically younger people, who have been completely body slammed by what people are calling the lost decade the doubling of housing costs, the decline in real incomes, the social disorder in our big cities, all of it. They feel hopeless and helpless. Homeownership the dream of that is forever out of reach for many people sort of under the age of 50, certainly under the age of 40. And you've got this total inversion of historic voting patterns along age categories. Historically, not just in Canada but in every developed democracy, the 65 plus crowd were the most reliable electoral clientele of center-right parties and the sort of 30 under crowd were the most reliable electoral cohort for parties of the left. There's been a total inversion on that. So I don't know how that's all going to work itself out. I think you've got a lot of boomers, people over 60, 65, who are living in mortgage free homes whose value have doubled or more in the past decade, tripled or quadrupled over the past 20 years. So they're asset rich, so they're in many ways protected from inflation. Many of them are on index defined benefit pensions and are just less sensitive to these cost-of-living issues that are driving the deep frustration amongst younger voters.
Jason Kenney:Who shows up? Where's the greater intensity? I think that's a big X factor here. You know, some commentators are dismissing Mr Polyev's rallies the largest we have ever seen, I think, in Canadian politics, with the possible exception of a Maple Leaf Gardens rally that Trudeau had in 76 or something. But these are mega rallies that reflect a degree of intensity. So I think you're going to have probably unprecedented turnout amongst the people who have lost in the last decade and are ticked off about it. But you may also have unprecedented turnout amongst those whose only issue is Trump.
Jason Kenney:Now I think Mr Polyev's message, which I find rational, is yes, like I don't, by the way, I think rhetorically he's been stronger on Trump than Carney and they're completely aligned on reciprocal tariffs and the need to inflict targeted countermeasures on the Americans in this trade war. But where his message I think is more credible is what's the long game here? How do we rebuild a more resilient Canadian economy that can defend itself, and are we going to do that? Mr Carney suggested, with a $2 billion grant, to turn Southern Ontario into producing domestic vehicles for Canada. Is that realistic? Or how about a couple more major LNG projects that can reduce global GHG emissions and another coastal oil pipeline to gather those things and, by the way, getting critical minerals unlocked. Should we develop our own supply chains on lithium and other critical minerals? Those would be big strategic game changers and I think Mr Polly was making a credible case there.
Jason Kenney:But will all that get lost in the anger and the vibes around Trump? You know who's going to decide that. Donald Trump, yeah, I think. If he stops using Canada as a play toy, to be cynical, for the next month, it gives Mr Pauly a chance to move the key ballot question back to change in cost of living. But if Trump continues to insult this country, threaten our sovereignty and attack our economy, that will probably be the dominant question. So I for one don't want let him to decide how we think about the next four or 10 years in Canada.
Stewart Muir:Well, there is some polling that suggests Canadians are at a historic high in their understanding and support of the economic benefits of the resource industry. The poll I saw specifically was oil and gas, but I suspect that extends to critical minerals as well, and probably. I think, it's at 88%, 88%, yes, and what do you make of that?
Jason Kenney:That's astonishing, and we see now super majorities underline that, super majorities for, for example, lng and pipelines generally in Quebec. You know, let me tell you a little story. In 2019, just shortly after I became premier, I went down to Quebec. By the way, when I became premier, the night I was elected, I spoke for like five minutes in French to Quebecers because I knew I had a national audience and I speak reasonably fluent French and I said basically let's be partners in prosperity. You get $13 billion a year in equalization payments. We don't begrudge you that. As long as you, let us develop and sell the resources that pay for those bills. Let's be partners in prosperity. I went down to Quebec City with that message.
Jason Kenney:Mr Legault said to me basically well, jason, for political reasons, I can't touch oil. I used to support Energy East, but there's no social license for it. License for it. Mais il m'a dit je suis avec vous autres sur le gaz naturel et le gaz naturel liquéfié. I'm with you on gas and LNG. Let's work together on LNG Saguenay, a big project that was then moving forward. That was spring of 2019.
Jason Kenney:A year later, he came out against the project that he asked me to help finance LNG Saguenay, and he put a ban and moratorium on all natural gas development, seizing the leases that companies had bought to do natural gas development. And I always challenged him. He always told me this was political. I said, francois, I don't see a majority of Quebecers opposed to responsible resource development, especially on things like natural gas, especially if you were to lead on this. Well, now we see the public's ahead of him and he's modifying his position. So I think at least on natural gas we have a truly national consensus and we also have a market.
Jason Kenney:When Justin Trudeau outrageously said to the German chancellor, the Italian prime minister and others there's no business case for natural gas, let the market decide that. I'll give you one example. We have the Spanish owned Repsol LNG import terminal in the Bay of Fundy which could be converted, I think, if we did this under emergency rules, to an export facility very quickly. And then how about New Brunswick saying yes to responsible natural gas development in its own economy? So I think we are at that inflection point. We just have to keep the momentum going.
Stewart Muir:Energy realism is a term we've been hearing a lot and Canadians seem to understand what it means, but we're not hearing it much from some of the parties that are vying for their vote, so maybe that will need to sharpen up a little bit, because it's showing up everywhere. You know the acceptance of LNG in the West. People on the coast they know what it is. They understand the attachment to First Nations, prosperity and all these opportunities.
Jason Kenney:It's really, and can I just say you know, there's nothing more powerful in politics, in public opinion, than creating facts. Okay, so we have a fact, which is the commissioning of TMX. Trans Mountain Expansion been operating now for six months safely. Every day there's about five tankers leaving the port of Vancouver. There've been no crazy protests. There's been no crazy protests, there have been no environmental problems. It's all operating efficiently.
Jason Kenney:It's expanded the Canadian economy, it's made us less resilient on the Americans. It's a win, win, win, win. And people can see that the fear of the unknown is what the opponents of economic progress always use. When LNG Canada at Kitimat is commissioned next year and you start to see big tankers coming in and taking liquefied gas out like they do safely all around the world, and people see the economic benefits a lift to our GDP, the government revenues, the associated jobs and no environmental hassles that will create more facts. So I think that's one of the ways that we build on this momentum, which is to dispel the fear of the unknown with a safe operation of incredibly sophisticated projects like this.
Stewart Muir:I think those are good words and could be taken away as an example.
Jason Kenney:I hope people do that and that's, by the way, why Indigenous communities in northern Alberta. They've been up there, right in the oil sands region. They're traditional territories and they are overwhelmingly supportive of the industry because there's no unknown for them to be afraid of. The known is this that Indigenous Canadians who work in the oil and gas sector make three times more income than those who don't.
Stewart Muir:The other piece here I wanted to get into and you have so much depth on this as former National Defense Minister is the Arctic Greenland 51st State. We're going to redraw your borders or rip up border treaties. All this stuff some of it nonsense, perhaps some of it, who knows but definitely we have other external threats from our northern border which we don't think about as a neighbor, but that's Russia. And where do we go from here? What is the path towards restoring our sense of security? Because we seem to be losing that.
Jason Kenney:Yeah Well, listen. If there's one good thing that comes out of these outrageous Trump threats, it will be, I hope, a new national consensus about taking our own security seriously. Let's face it, he's right about one thing we have been living under the American security umbrella for decades without paying our dues. We are at the very bottom of NATO in terms of defense expenditures a share of our economy even though we have the second largest landmass and the largest coastline in the world. So we just haven't done enough, and so I think the table stakes are getting our defense expenditure up to 2% of GDP within the next two or three years. And I think there's ways we can do that quickly, very quickly. Increasing military salaries to turn around the 30,000 personnel gap and the decline in recruitment. Improving investing in base infrastructure, better housing, all of those things, of course, massive acceleration of procurement for weapon systems, for new military systems those are just like immediate things that we could do in the next couple of years to get us closer to 2%. So then at least, whoever our prime minister, can go down to the White House and say we are at least paying our fair share. That's a starter and that we need to do for our own interests. It's not because the Americans are lecturing us. It's because if we want to get all elbows up about our sovereignty, then we damn well better pay the bills to be a sovereign country and that is a legitimate point that means investing, probably, I think, in a bigger submarine fleet, potentially a nuclear submarine fleet in the future that can operate under the Arctic ice cap. And we have committed Canada has committed to a significant renewal of the NORAD um as radar system and including an over the top system. Uh, that's a bipartisan point. Mr Polyev has a very detailed plan for Northern sovereignty, including, uh, expanding all of our military infrastructure in the North, expanding the Arctic Rangers, et cetera. So these are all de minimis. Like these are all I. I don't want to hear folks who are all of this.
Jason Kenney:Both this elbows up renewed Canadian patriotism, wanting to continue to cheap out of the National Defense Expenditure in terms of interdicting contraband drugs, fentanyl, precursor products and immigration as well. I mean, let's not forget all of this. Trump stuff started ostensibly on fentanyl and illegal migration from Canada into the US. I think a lot of that was massively overblown and, let's note, he hasn't talked about it for several weeks, but we've had tens of thousands of Canadians die from fentanyl. We know that those precursor products are largely coming from China. We know a lot of the processed product comes up from Mexico.
Jason Kenney:We are not doing enough to stop this. To inspect container shipping containers. Cbsa needs to be significantly better resourced. For all of that To bust up, the police need be significantly better resourced. For all of that to bust up, the police need to be better resourced and, unlike here in Vancouver, they need to be given a priority mandate to enforce against trafficking of dangerous drugs and also the immigration system. One thing that, as the longest serving minister of immigration in Canadian history, I'm particularly sore about it's how the Liberals took what was the world's model system Canada's with real integrity and blew a massive hole through it. So we need, through asylum reform, cracking down on immigration fraud and, frankly, just reducing the overall numbers to be in line with our absorptive capacity as a country. We need to get that right as well. So it's not just defense.
Stewart Muir:I was in Newfoundland last week and they are complaining there because suddenly there's no immigrants coming to fill the jobs that they have and they're now sitting empty. So they're going to Ottawa to say what have you done? And so this rather mangled immigration policy that wasn't working, except it was maybe bringing lots of numbers up. What's the way to fix that?
Jason Kenney:Well, let me just on this point the key to the successful Canadian immigration system in the past, which represented a bipartisan or multi-partisan consensus Canadian immigration system in the past, which represented a bipartisan or multi-partisan consensus, was that it was a system based on a it was called a high human capital model, where we typically selected economic immigrants with the criteria we knew, the attributes we knew would lead to, based on data on economic and social integration. So that included higher levels of education, english and or French language proficiency, younger as opposed to older immigrants, relevant work experience, et cetera, et cetera. Well, we've largely pushed, squeezed that down to facilitate enormous numbers of lower-skilled temporary foreign workers and foreign students, most of whom have come not all, but most of whom have come into these one-year diploma meal programs so they could get open word permits which the liberals gave them, and this has created like. Basically, this is so. We've switched from a high-skilled immigration program to a very low-skilled one in the course of a few years and this is the single biggest driver of the precipitous decline in Canadian per capita gross domestic product. Now, I know, for somebody who's struggling to pay their grocery bills or their mortgage, a concept like per capita GDP is not the top of mind voting concern, but what it means effectively is we are poorer, we have been declining. We are poorer, we have been declining.
Jason Kenney:In the club of industrialized wealthy countries, 34 of them.
Jason Kenney:In the OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, canada comes 33 out of 34 on per capita GDP growth in the past decade.
Jason Kenney:That's the lost decade and the single biggest driver has been increasing the denominator, the number of lower skilled people earning very low incomes, paying very little tax. So we need to get back. I'm sorry if this upsets you know Tim Horton's operator in St John's but maybe they have to raise their wages to bring people into the workforce and if that means raising their prices, so be it. Or maybe they have to invest in greater productivity, enhancing stuff. So I'm not having been in the chair for five years at immigration, two years at federal employment, minister, I don't buy the sob story from the businesses that used, and often exploited, I think, low-skilled temporary foreign workers as a labor market model. I think that's been a massive policy failure and we need to get back to, not exclusively, but to focusing on a high-skilled selection of immigrants who we know are more likely to generate higher incomes, contribute to the innovation sector, et cetera, to generate higher incomes, contribute to the innovation sector, et cetera.
Stewart Muir:Well, we don't have an economy that will attract those skilled workers.
Jason Kenney:Because Canada, if it was, a state and this was before the 51st state thing became a meme it would be Alabama. Yeah, exactly, that was another point on this per capita gross domestic product decline. When Stephen Harper left office in 2015, we were the equivalent of Montana. We were like the equivalent of, I think, the 15th wealthiest state. We are now the equivalent of the 50th, ie the poorest US state, alabama. In terms of if you take all of the entire Canadian economy divided up by the 40 million people, we are the equivalent in currency-adjusted terms, as the poorest of the US states.
Jason Kenney:Now remember Donald Trump. When asked, I think January 12th in Mar-a-Lago, mr President, do you intend to use military force to annex Canada? He said no, that's not necessary. We'll just exert so much economic pressure that they're going to want to become the 51st state. So if you give that any credence at all, and the fact that he has been talking openly about rewriting the illegitimate border treaties and all of this crazy talk, if he's the least bit serious, then I think the game plan here is to fund him.
Jason Kenney:He sees us as a weak mark. One thing we know about a guy like Donald Trump is he has an eye for weakness and he wants to exploit it. And I think he sees us as economically weak and I think he imagines that if we have a continuation of the economic policies of the last 10 years, we'll become even weaker. And so I think that's why I mean for me Polyev's message of economic strength and resilience.
Jason Kenney:Getting it right on resources is absolutely critical, so that if we actually start mining those critical minerals, they're going to realize they'd rather be buying that stuff from Canada than the US. If we actually get more pipelines built and we get more greenfield upstream investment in oil and gas production, if we go from four and a half million barrels a day to, let's say, seven or eight million barrels a day, he's going to want to buy more of that from us at a discount. Make him realize that 80% of US farm fertilizer comes off of Saskatchewan potash. Make them realize that as nuclear grows as an alternative zero-emitting fuel source in the future, that we've got the second largest uranium plays in the world in Saskatchewan, etc. But we have to be able to develop those projects. That's why this election is so important.
Stewart Muir:Trump is obsessed by American dominance, but shouldn't he be more obsessed by North American dominance, because he surely can't expect America to be this internationally dominant country without Canada? Because without Canada, how could they do that? Without the oil, without the trade, it?
Jason Kenney:really makes no sense. You would take this incredibly resource-rich, friendly ally and turn it into an adversary and do everything possible to alienate us, humiliate us, turn us against them, diversify export markets by export markets. I don't think that's three-dimensional chass, I think it's improvisational, it's impulsive and I don't think it's in the interest of the United States. And, by the way, the rationale keeps changing. First it was fentanyl and migration. He hasn't mentioned that for I don't know six weeks. Then it was the $200 billion Canadian ripoff, which is actually our $90 billion trade surplus. Well, in fact they run a surplus against us on everything, essentially, except our oil exports to the US, which they buy at a 15% discount process in their Gulf refineries, sell products at 3x the input costs. That's a huge win for the United States. I always used to tell people in Washington 65% of your oil imports come not from Saudi Arabia or OPEC, but from Alberta, and you don't have to park a US naval fleet off the West coast of Canada to protect that supply. So these are basic things. That that I don't think they.
Jason Kenney:He says we don't need the Canadian oil, but he wants to build Keystone XL or a version of it, because at some level he understands that they benefit from Canadian energy supply. So I think we have to be cool headed about this. We cannot show weakness. That's why I believe that both Mr Carney and Polly have a right about reciprocal tariffs and we have to be prepared to play our long suit. The one thing that got his attention, apparently, was Doug Ford's threat to cut off electricity export not cut off, but to tariff electricity exports to the United States. So all of this, we have to be strong, but we have to build a more resilient Canadian economy. That will not happen without resources and I want to thank ResourceWorks and all the good work it's done over the years to make the case for that.
Stewart Muir:Thanks, Jason. Appreciate that this has been Power Struggle with today's guest, Jason Kenney. Our special federal election series will continue every week during the campaign, delivering a deep dive into the most important questions facing Canadians on Voting Day, April 28th. Thanks for tuning in.
