West Block Transcript: Season 6 Episode 4

THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 4, Season 6
Sunday, October 2, 2016

Host: Tom Clark

Guest Interviews: Jonathan Wilkinson, Ed Fast, David Hobbs
Plane Talk: Geoff Regan

Location: Ottawa

On this Sunday, the government approves the Pacific Northwest pipeline but opponents say it will hurt our international climate change commitments. The Paris deal will be up for debate in Ottawa this week. We’ll discuss that with two MPs.

Then, what is the energy source of the future and will it include oil from Alberta? We’ll put that to a leading global energy researcher.

And, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Geoff Regan, joins us for a little bit of Plane Talk about finding his voice.

It is Sunday, October the 2nd and from the nation’s capital, I’m Tom Clark. And you are in The West Block.

Well the government set 190 conditions when it approved the Pacific Northwest gas pipeline last week. Now if this project goes ahead, and that is a big if, critics say it will be one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the country. So what does that mean for the climate goals that we agreed to in Paris last year?

Well joining me now from Vancouver is Jonathan Wilkinson, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of the environment and Conservative environment critic, Ed Fast. Welcome to you both, thanks for being here.

Ed Fast: Good to be on your show.

Tom Clark: Jonathan, let me start with you. The most recent development of course was the LNG pipeline that was approved late last week. Specifically, is this going to increase, and if so, by how much greenhouse gas emissions just because of the pipeline?

Jonathan Wilkinson: So I mean the emissions are focused largely on the direct emissions associated with the LNG facility itself and they are about 4 megatons which is a significant number. But I would say that through the process that we went in terms of assessing the environmental impacts, we were able to actually reduce the direct emissions by over 20 per cent. And while the emissions are still significant, what we have very clearly is that they need to fit within the overall emissions profile of Canada and they need to fit within the context of the commitments we’ve made to meet the targets that were established under the Paris agreement. This is a significant economic driver for Canada and it’s one that we believe will move forward and can move forward in an environmentally sustainable way within the current climate framework.

Tom Clark: But Ed Fast, let me throw that to you. Would that amount of increase in greenhouse gas emissions and the fact that we’re going to be talking about the Paris Climate Accord this coming week, is there a dichotomy there in your mind that we have gone ahead and approved something that is going to make it even more difficult to get to our climate objectives?

Ed Fast: Well, I’m not sure that’s the case. We welcome this decision because as you know, the Conservative Party has been a champion of getting Canada’s natural resources: oil, gas, minerals to market beyond North America. And this decision of course allows us to do that. However, our big problem is that what the prime minister has done since the election is try to be all things to all people. When he was in British Columbia speaking to First Nations, he promised them that he was not going to allow hydrocarbons to make it to tidewater in order to protect the environment. When he’s in Alberta, he’s promising that he’s going to get resources to our oceans and to markets beyond North America. So what has happened now, we have some very angry First Nations. You have some very angry environmental groups are saying we’ve been betrayed. And that’s what happens when you try to be all things to all people.

Jonathan Wilkinson: I think the prime minister has been actually very clear that we believe very strongly in growing the economy and that the energy sector is a significant part of that, but that for projects to proceed in the modern age, they must be done in an environmentally sustainable way. This project went through a rigorous environmental process. It came out the back end with science that actually supports the ability to proceed relative to some of the concerns that people had around fish and fish habitat. And we have managed to put this into a context that will allow us to move forward with addressing climate change, which is a critical priority for this government.

Tom Clark: Well we also know that this may be a bit of a fantasy, this whole discussion because Petronas is rumored to be looking to sell it. People close to Petronas said they weren’t all that happy that they got a yes out it. This thing may never be built only because of the projected prices for liquid natural gas going into the future. But Mr. Fast, you’re talking about all things to all people and yet here’s an approval on a pipeline that happened that didn’t happen under your government. It happened under the Liberals.

Ed Fast: Well actually this whole process started under our government and moved through our environmental review process that we had actually renewed and improved in 2012. So it goes to show that our process actually works. Now we have a Liberal government that’s saying well that process, we want to completely turn it on its head. We want a different process. Of course that injected very significant uncertainty into our resource industry. It’s injected significant uncertainty into our economy and of course what we’ve seen is a massive flight of capital from Canada. You look at the statistics, Tom, you’re going to see that over the last year or so, you have seen investors park their money on the sidelines or take that money elsewhere because of the uncertainty that the prime minister has injected into our economy.

Tom Clark: I don’t exactly hear that from the energy sector, Mr. Fast. But be that as it may, I want to move onto the debate that we’re going to be having in this country and in Parliament on the Paris Climate Change Accord. Of course the environment ministers are meeting in Montreal tomorrow. Then Parliament gets a chance to do it. I would think, Mr. Fast that your party would be all in favour of what we’ve agreed to in Paris because after all, they were your targets when you were government.

Ed Fast: You’re absolutely correct. We do support the Paris agreement. After a lot of back and forth, the Liberal government has finally conceited that the targets that our Conservative government had set are actually reasonable. They’re rigorous. They’re robust and they are achievable but they’ll be difficult to achieve. And so we do support the Paris agreement. What we don’t support is the second part of the motion that the Liberal government has come forward with, which is basically saying that the Vancouver declaration gives the government a free hand to impose a massive carbon tax on Canadians. When I was at the Vancouver meetings between the premiers and the prime minister, I saw the news conference. After stumbling a little bit, the prime minister finally blurted out that he believed they had agreed to a national carbon tax, which forced Premier Brad Wall in Saskatchewan to say no that’s simply, simply not true. And since that time, we’ve seen the northern premier say no, we didn’t agree to a carbon tax. Premier McNeil in Nova Scotia is saying the same thing. We don’t want that tax in our province.

Tom Clark: Hang on a sec now, Mr. Fast. A lot of that is just process because again, if you talk to people in the energy sector, the idea of a carbon tax is something that they want and they’ve been saying that for quite some time. I’m talking about the big producers of oil and gas in this country. But Mr. Wilkinson, I want to ask you something. You’ve approved a project that you have said is going to put a lot more greenhouse gas in the air. You’ve accepted targets that you criticize in the last election. A lot of people thought you would have done a little bit better than what we saw under the Conservative government. Why have you been so unambitious?

Jonathan Wilkinson: Well let me put this in context. The previous government signed up to targets with actually no plan to achieve them and did nothing to actually go after reducing greenhouse gas emissions, so if you actually forecast forward everything that has been done to date to 2030, we actually would be 10 per cent above the 2005 targets by then. And we’re committing to be 30 per cent below, so it is a very ambitious goal because of the inaction of the previous government. Our government is focused on working with the provinces and territories to put into place a Pan Canadian strategy that will allow us to have a good visibility on how we’re actually going to meet those targets. That includes—

Tom Clark: I’m sorry to jump in here but will that include an increase in the carbon tax that we see in British Columbia, was that part of the deal?

Jonathan Wilkinson: I think that the prime minister has been very clear that we need to see carbon pricing across the country and that carbon pricing will need to escalate over time to have the kind of impact on driving innovation and forcing people to consider energy efficiency and those kinds of things on a go forward basis. It’s a critical part. It’s a market mechanism that is a critical part of any reasonable climate strategy. And as you say, companies like Suncor and Cenovus and others are supporting them.

Tom Clark: Mr. Fast, Mr. Wilkinson thank you very much for joining us today. I really appreciate the preview to this discussion coming up next week.

Ed Fast: It’s going to be an interesting week.

Tom Clark: Alright, thank you.

Coming up next, oil pipelines and energy future: What role does Canada’s oil play in the years ahead?

Tom Clark: Welcome back to The West Block. Well late last week, OPEC announced that it would cutback oil and production. This created a small bump in the price of oil but for how long and who is going to be hurt in the long run? The big question in Canada, how, if at all, does this change the argument for or against pipelines from Alberta? David Hobbs is the head of research of the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Centre (KAPSARC) in Saudi Arabia. I sat down with him the other day and put these questions to him.

Earlier this week, OPEC decided that for the first time in eight years, it was going to reduce its output of oil that got a lot of people excited, especially here in Alberta. What do you think the effect of this is going to be?

David Hobbs: Well in the short term, the market’s already reacted positively it. Oil price is up a couple of dollars a barrel but not above 50. So it’s a step in the right direction if you’re looking for higher oil prices, but it’s a long way between an agreement in principle to cut production and deciding who’s going to share what proportion of the cuts and so I’d keep my eyes open till November.

Tom Clark: So not necessarily a renaissance in the oil patch as a result of that.

David Hobbs: And the strategy that OPEC was following in terms of winning back market share was really aimed at resources like the oil sands where they may have a very high cost full cycle to bring them on stream. But once they’re on stream they produce for a very long time and at the same rate. And the relative cost of that, you know they didn’t shut in the oil sands when the oil prices dropped down into the 20-something dollars a barrel and that was less than 20-something for the oil sands because of course being stuck in Alberta without the pipelines to get it away to tidewater or into the U.S. market, they were suffering an even lower price.

Tom Clark: You brought up pipelines, and I’m wondering if a move like this even though it may not be as big a deal as perhaps people initially thought. Does it though strengthen the hand for the idea of building pipelines? In other words, are we close to the end of the window where it makes sense to get into new development?

David Hobbs: Alberta needs to find allies to get its resource to market. Whether that is pipelines across the border to the south or its pipelines to the east. Pipelines to the west have proven to be quite difficult although those are really the ones that are most in focus. From a gas perspective and oil perspective they’re two very different stories. The announcement of the gas project approval, firstly it’s not the first to get government approval and government approval doesn’t guarantee it starts. Now the investors have got to decide whether or not they think that the market conditions and the costs justify the investment. And there are two or three other projects that are sitting there in the same sort of situation.

Tom Clark: And that brings up an interesting point because with the low price of natural gas right now, how big a win was this really for Petronas or any other LNG producer out there because talk about missing a window I guess is what—

Tom Clark: Give me your perspective if you project five or ten years out, the future of energy. What is that going to look like? I mean everything from the balancing of the environment and oil, to renewables, to new forms of energy. What’s it going to look like in ten years?

David Hobbs: Well what we can say for sure is that the Paris agreement has set us on a path that is a lower carbon future than we seem to be on a path for before. And the provisions of the agreement ratchet up the carbon reduction targets on a regular basis means that that’s going to accelerate.

Tom Clark: Does carbon tax have to be part of that equation?

David Hobbs: Well carbon tax can be. It used to be conventional wisdom that carbon taxes were electoral suicide. But British Columbia’s tax neutral carbon tax, it turns out to be rather more popular than many people first thought. Alberta’s talking about it. Others are now looking at it seriously. But carbon tax alone probably isn’t what it takes. It also requires incredible support of R&D. If you look at the way that wind and solar power have come down in cost to become if not yet competitive on a standalone basis, certainly a valid component of the energy mix. But we’re going to see natural gas probably a lot less coal, and gasoline and diesel are very energy dense ways of carrying energy and transportation requires energy density. Now if we see huge breakthroughs in battery storage that may make a difference. But it’s not only good for wind and solar because actually you can use batteries in combination with conventional dispatchable power plants and ring a lot of efficiency out of the system from that as well. So advances in storage are not necessarily a huge game changer to the same extent as advances in the cost of generation from wind and solar resources.

Tom Clark: From your perspective again, Alberta, Saskatchewan, any of the provinces in this country that are involved in the oil and gas industry, should they be looking forward to a bright future or is it going to be pretty rocky ahead?

David Hobbs: Well I think it’s always going to be rocky if you’re not the low cost producer. And the truth is that the low cost producers, for the most part, are the Middle East OPEC members. So, I think it was the Saudi energy minister who talked about the last barrel of oil consumed on earth will probably have been produced in Saudi Arabia because they are the cheapest producer. But if you are at the high end of the cost curve, it’s going to require ingenuity, innovation and just downright hard work to stay in that market. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to see the oil industry shutting down or the gas industry shutting down. It’s going to evolve. It’s going to become more environmentally conscious. It’s going to do the things that it needs to do to regain the trust of the populations that it affects.

Tom Clark: That’s necessary.

David Hobbs: That’s absolutely essential. If the industry can’t be trusted and the oil industry is right there with pharmaceutical companies and politicians in terms of public trust. And if it can’t police itself better to make sure it doesn’t get defined by the bad actors by helping to police the bad actors itself, then it’s going to be a long hard haul to regain public trust.

Tom Clark: David Hobbs, awfully good talking to you. Thank you so much for joining us.

David Hobbs: Well I’m delighted to have been able to. Thanks, Tom.

And coming up next, Plane Talk with Geoff Regan: What his father taught him about politics and what he did to find his own voice.

Tom Clark: Welcome back. Nova Scotia Liberal MP Geoff Regan was elected Speaker of the House last fall. He comes from an East Coast political dynasty. But before he could join the so-called family firm, he needed to find his voice. I took the Speaker up last week for a little bit of Plane Talk. Here is it:

Tom Clark: Alright, well you feeling luck?

Geoff Regan: I feel good.

Tom Clark: Well that’s good. Geoff Regan—

Geoff Regan: Yes sir.

Tom Clark: Good to have you on Plane Talk.

Geoff Regan: Thank you Tom, great to be here.

Tom Clark: You come from an incredible political family. You yourself have been an MP. You’ve been a cabinet minister. You’re now Speaker of the House of Commons. Your wife is a cabinet minister in Nova Scotia. Your dad was the premier of Nova Scotia. Was this something that you had always thought about in your earlier years that politics would literally become the family business?

Geoff Regan: Well, there were times, but there were also a lot of times when I thought it wouldn’t be the route that I would choose. When I was in my teens and even the very beginning of my 20’s, I didn’t feel that I would be comfortable speaking in front of an audience. I was nervous. I had a bit of a speech impediment.

Tom Clark: Well you had a stutter.

Geoff Regan: Well you know what—the word apparently that the speech pathologist used for this is cluttering. And I probably show signs of it here and there from time to time. But I would kind of speak too quickly and not pronounced every ‘syl·la·ble’, right?

Tom Clark: Right. How did you overcome that?

Geoff Regan: Well, I was 22 and it sort of struck me that this was an issue that I had to deal with and there was a Nova Scotia hearing and speech clinic in Halifax that I just dropped in at and talked to them and they started putting me on a course basically where they taught me a few things and helped a lot. That helped a great deal. The other thing that helped me a ton was Toastmasters which of course is a club where you learn and practice the different various skills of public speaking.

Tom Clark: What did your dad teach you about politics?

Geoff Regan: How long do we have?

Geoff Regan: Of course there’s a lifetime of stories and lessons, but what comes to my mind is the times when we would be watching election nights. And he would say look you see that Conservative MP and Ontario just went down to defeat or that NDP member from Saskatchewan that was defeated, that was a good member, but the trend was against them. But that helped me certainly in ’97 when I took what I like to call my ‘involuntary sabbatical’.

Tom Clark: That’s when you were defeated.

Tom Clark: Yeah.

Geoff Regan: You could call it that, I suppose.

Tom Clark: Under what circumstances do you lie?

Tom Clark: Wait a sec. You know your kids are watching.

Tom Clark: Here we go. Did you ever do stuff that Speaker Geoff Regan would say stop that?

Geoff Regan: Yes.

Tom Clark: Oh.

Geoff Regan: Occasionally I did, but I was not one of those who was noted for heckling. It was reasonably rare, so yeah you could say well you know you’re a hypocrite, you used to do it yourself.

Tom Clark: I didn’t say that.

Geoff Regan: No, but I’m saying—

Tom Clark: You’re saying that.

Geoff Regan: A person could say that. Fair enough, right? However, I didn’t do it very often and I do take this whole thing very seriously.

Tom Clark: There is an apartment for the Speaker on Parliament Hill. Have you ever spent a night there?

Geoff Regan: Yep, one night.

Tom Clark: One night?

Geoff Regan: I tried it, yeah.

Tom Clark: What happened?

Geoff Regan: Well the House was going to sit till midnight and when the House concluded. I went to the apartment, went to sleep at about 12:30. Sometime around 3:30 in the morning what sounded like a masonry saw started up. I actually put in ear plugs. That didn’t help. So imagine me at 3:30 in the morning walking down to the guard’s desk under the Peace Tower in my pajamas and bare feet, knowing there’s only the guards there and me to say to them listen, can you guys do something about this and get this noise stopped? Well 15 minutes later it did stop and I went back to sleep. Well in fact at 6:35, the noise we’d gotten so familiar with, the bang, bang, bang started when they were breaking rock, right? So it was a rather short night.

Tom Clark: Single best thing about Speaker of the House of Commons?

Geoff Regan: One of the things that I do is to have dinners. Next Monday night, I’ll have I think 12 or 13 MPs for dinner in the Centre Block. And the conversations among Members of Parliament when you get them relaxed and the TV cameras aren’t on them and they aren’t in Question Period, they can be very interesting.

Tom Clark: And maybe a little bit of the Speaker’s scotch on the table too.

Geoff Regan: A little lubrication, well maybe a glass of wine or something, we’ll see. But you know when you ask about their backgrounds and get them talking, that’s really pleasant.

Tom Clark: When you were elected Speaker—tell me the truth now—did you stand in front of the mirror and practice saying order, order?

Tom Clark: That was a good beginning.

Geoff Regan: It was a good beginning. But when you’d get up in the chair, it’s kind of daunting to look—you know it’s a different view than you’re accustomed to having as a Member of Parliament. You’re up higher. You suddenly have that responsibility and you really feel it. It’s a daunting moment. There’s no question about it.

Tom Clark: Geoffrey thanks very much for doing this, great to have you on Plane Talk.

Geoff Regan: My pleasure, great fun.

Tom Clark: Well that’s our show. I’m Tom Clark and we wish safe travels to the Duke and Duchess and their family as they head back home after their royal tour of Canada.