Liberation Day Aftermath: Trade Wars, Oil Prices, and Canada’s Election
This week on the podcast, Jackie and Peter discuss the significant volatility in the financial markets due to the escalating global trade war unleashed by President Trump’s “Liberation Day” on April 2nd. Economists and banks are sounding the alarm about the increased risk of a global recession. At the same time, oil prices have fallen by about $US 10/B due to fears of a recession and news that OPEC+ is adding more supply than expected into the market. In Canada, the uncertainty is further compounded by the upcoming federal election scheduled for April 28th, 2025.
Content referenced in this podcast:
- Financial Times, “In charts: winners and losers from Trump’s new tariffs” (April 4, 2025)
- BNN Bloomberg, Trump’s tariffs to send U.S. into recession: JP Morgan (April 6, 2025)
- Polymarket, “ US recession in 2025?”
- Reuters, “OPEC+ unexpectedly speeds up oil output hikes, oil drops” (April 3, 2025)
- 338Canada, Canadian Federal Election Polling
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Episode 279 transcript
Disclosure:
The information and opinions presented in this ARC Energy Ideas podcast are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to the disclaimer link in the show notes.
Announcer:
This is the ARC Energy Ideas podcast, with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest, exploring trends that influence the energy business.
Jackie Forrest:
Welcome to the Arc Energy Ideas podcast. I’m Jackie Forrest.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I’m Peter Tertzakian. Welcome back.
So we record Monday morning, April 7th at 7:22 just before the opening of the markets on Friday. Of course, the markets fell on Thursday, they fell with Tariff Liberation Day in the United States. So we’re going to talk about that. It’s really hard now where I have to timestamp the actual podcast because things are changing so quickly. So we’ll try and keep the conversation to a longer time horizon than just one day, because by the time you download this as our audience, it’s going to be out of date, even within 24, 48 hours, something’s going to change who knows what with the tariff situation, isn’t that right?
Jackie Forrest:
Well, I think the details, but I think you’re right, the broader sort of long-term trends, and for sure there’s a ton of uncertainty. I was just looking at all the information last night and being like, wow, it’s really hard to make decisions, and I think that in itself is going to result in a slowdown of the economy.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, it’s the uncertainty, the anxiety creates paralysis, and people just sort of, what do we do? So tariffs, we’re going to talk about that, oil price down to the low of $60, that’s WTI oil price, and the Canadian election. A lovely set of very happy topics.
Jackie Forrest:
This is why no one can make a decision.
Peter Tertzakian:
So where do you want to start?
Jackie Forrest:
Well, let’s start with the Liberation Day, which is more been like a market shock day. I’m sure all of our listeners have been following this closely, but as you know, tariffs were announced, and on average, there’s some estimates now that when you put it all together and you look at all the goods that come into the United States, they’re looking at about a 23% tariff on everything on average that comes in. Certain countries, like Asia really got hit hard, 25% for some countries, even into the 45% for places like Vietnam and Cambodia.
I will put a link to an article from the Financial Post that does a good job of looking at the size of trade, like a bubble chart with the tariff that came down. And you can see that Asia’s really kind of taken the biggest hit. Europe is around 20%, and of course, Canada didn’t have any additional tariffs, but of course, we already had some, facing 25% steel-
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, the 25%, yeah, the steel and aluminum, yep.
Jackie Forrest:
And non-USMCA compliant exports also having tariff-
Peter Tertzakian:
Right. But this is, it’s not that we are without a consequence of Liberation Day. I mean, this is leading to global economic slowdown. Some economists and bank CEOs are calling for recession either globally or within the United States. So it all has very negative, at least, attitudinal consequences, I’ll call them, and we’ll see how it transpires over the next few days, weeks, and months.
Jackie Forrest:
There’s been a few articles in terms of expectations of how this will affect growth. We’ll get to that, but I did want to say one more thing worth noting that’s relevant for Canada, is that these tariffs for other countries don’t include oil and gas and refined products. They’re exempt. So I think that’s a positive sign in that the government in the US is recognizing they don’t want to put tariffs on energy imports because it’ll influence the cost of energy and inflation. And so I think that’s also a sign that Canada maybe will continue to see lower or an exclusion if they’re USMCA compliant for oil and gas imports into the US.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, no, that’s a positive thing because the price of oil, as we’re going to talk about, has dropped quite dramatically, and that reflects the sentiment of a global economic slowdown, and the number one variable that affects oil price demand on the demand side is the global economy.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. And the markets are certainly…
Peter Tertzakian:
Certainly.
Jackie Forrest:
… saying there’s going to be issues there. So as of end of day Friday, if we compare to April 2nd before Liberty Day announcement, overall equity markets globally were down around 6%. And we just see that Japan, because Monday is coming to an end in Japan now, has doubled that, so they’re down about 15% from April 2nd. I expect we’ll see more of a slide in the equity markets here.
Now, oil and gas is actually taken a bigger hit because of the price of oil has come down at the same time of the fear of a recession.
Peter Tertzakian:
Right. I look at those equity markets, I mean, we’re panicking big time, and it’s certainly not good. As I say, it affects the psychology, but they had run up very dramatically in 2024 and certainly in the latter part of ’24 into ’25 post-Trump election because of the optimism about things.
So in fact, I think we’ve shed all the gains that were made since early 2024. So in other words, one year’s returns have been wiped out in the equity markets. It’s not good, as I said, because it more affects the cost of capital psychology spending by corporations. But when you actually look at a long-term equity chart, it’s still not as if it’s a major impact.
Jackie Forrest:
Right, for people that have been in the market for a long time.
Now, the markets are reacting though to the view that we’re going to potentially have a US recession and global recession. I haven’t seen very many forecasts yet, but J.P. Morgan came out expecting that the US economy was going to grow by 1.3% in 2025 previously and will now be negative 0.3%, so a recession. That’s the average for the entire year. And so I think you’re going to see more… I looked at Polymarket last night, they have a question; US recession in 2025, question mark. It’s nice and simple. It was around 66% last night, and it had gone up a lot over the last several days. It was kind of more in the 30 to 40% range before.
Peter Tertzakian:
So we’ll see where it goes. It’s just too early in the days. I think you’re going to see some form of capitulation in the White House in terms of this tariff situation, even though President Trump over the weekend basically said, it’s the medicine the world needs to take. But we know from our own Canadian experience, so there’s a flip-flopping, and one day it’s absolutely tariffs are coming, and then the next day it’s okay, you get a month reprieve till we talk this over, and then the next, when the month goes by, there and then again it’s we’ll give you another month. And so we’ll see.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, that’s an important point. Unlike other downturns like the financial crisis or COVID, this is kind of voluntary, this is by the stroke of a pen, we could change this. We know that Trump can change his mind, we’ve seen that before. So I think there’s some bookends in terms of where this goes. One is it’s the tariff arms race scenario. I’ll call it, where there’s this escalation of tariffs, the US putting on tariffs, China, you saw that over the weekend, countering, maybe the US countering again. You see that globally with a bunch of different countries, and it could get pretty bad.
And then there’s this de-escalation sort of scenario where Trump changes his mind. We did see also those anti-Trump protests in the US and in countries around the world, and this economic uncertainty that’s being created, he starts to sort of rethink his strategy. You could see both of those happening. It’s hard to really know what the probability of either is. I know there’s a lot of pain, and because this is something that could be changed fairly quickly, it makes me think that there is potential for that.
Peter Tertzakian:
There’s potential. And the market is certainly sinking as we’ve talked about as we speak. However, if I look back at the four financial crisis that I’ve witnessed; the crash of ’87, the Enron crisis, the financial crisis of 2008, and then of course, the pandemic. Certainly the financial crisis and the pandemic, we actually saw the markets freeze up, liquidity actually dried up. And so this is not the case at the moment where the markets have frozen, the markets are just trading, and they’re just falling, and there’s a lot of liquidity, there’s buyers and sellers and so on. It gets a lot more serious if the markets, particularly the credit markets start to freeze up. And that’s not the case at the moment. So again, on an optimistic note, we shall see how this all plays out, and when we’ll see some sense of stabilization in the markets.
Jackie Forrest:
All right. Well, you forgot about when it comes to the oil markets, there was a downturn in 2015, the OPEC price war downturn.
Peter Tertzakian:
Oh, right. Well, that was specific to the oil markets.
Jackie Forrest:
Specific to oil markets. So let’s move on to our next topic, which is the oil price coming under pressure here. Now, there’s two factors here. First of all, a recession is bad for oil price. It would be softening anyway because less economic growth means less oil demand growth and potentially an oversupply. But OPEC made it even worse with an announcement around the same time on April 3rd, just after the Liberation Day announcement that the eight members of OPEC have decided instead of raising their output by 135,000 barrels per day in May, they’re going to actually raise it by 411,000 barrels a day. So adding about 300,000 barrels a day of additional supply into a market that looks like it’s going… it was already oversupplied. And with this potential for a recession, that’s even getting worse, and then this isn’t helping.
And it kind of reminded me even of the COVID pandemic when, I don’t know if you remember, right around March of 2020, Saudi Arabia was proposing to make some cuts, and Russia didn’t want to make them. So they started a price war, and actually added supply into the market at a time when demand was dropping. So bad timing, this is bad timing too, and has obviously impacted the oil price, which has fallen from being in just above $70 to low 60. So pretty much $10 per barrel for WTI so far. I mean, of course, market hasn’t opened yet today.
Peter Tertzakian:
What’s fascinating to me is how 400,000 barrels a day, and I know that’s just the supply side, but 400,000 barrels a day is, we’ll call it .4% of world demand of 100, 103 million barrels a day. That .4% of change on the supply side creates a 5 to $10 drop in the price of oil.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. Well, and I think it’s the combination though because…
Peter Tertzakian:
It’s the combination.
Jackie Forrest:
… there’s recession fear. And I’ve only had one estimate so far, but according to the Bank of Montreal note, they reported that energy aspects has put out a note calling for a million barrel per day demand hit based on Trump’s latest tariffs. So we already had an outlook for about a million barrels of surplus supply in the market in 2025 when you consider we were having some economic growth, but non-OPEC was growing, and Saudi and others were putting more supply into the market. So now we’ve got potentially another million barrels a day of oversupply because demand isn’t growing anymore. And now this extra 300,000, and where does it go from here? This is just next month. They actually had expected to increase their supply throughout the year, and does that mean they’re going to accelerate even more supply coming back faster? So I know what you’re saying, but I think there’s kind of like this uncertainty too.
Peter Tertzakian:
What I was saying is that, okay, so a million barrels a day at demand loss, 400,000 barrels a day incremental supply. So now we’re talking 1.4% change, and the supply-demand balance leads to the price of oil going from $70 to $60, which is a seventh, which is 14%. So 1.4% change in the supply-demand balance causes a 14%… I mean, this is why we say in the business of oil and gas, it’s priced at the margin. In other words, very small changes in the supply-demand balance creates very big swings in the price of oil, and it can go the other way.
So what we’ll look out for next is what happens on the supply side in the United States in particular, because if we look back at the pandemic, we saw that the Permian and places like that where there are very steep decline rates, that the moment you stop drilling, all of a sudden you start to see the declines kick in, and it didn’t take very long during the pandemic.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. Well, and we could… if this escalates more, this trade war, and it turns into more of a global recession, we could see prices fall further. And you’re right, that’s the one thing that’s different now compared to maybe past oil market downturns, is that the supply response will be quite quick and hopefully rebalance the market.
I mean, there’s another potential change here too. According to the media reports, Saudi is adding this production because they’re unhappy with the cheaters, people that are producing over what they’re supposed to be, specifically Iraq, Kazakhstan, and even Russia. Kazakhstan is the worst offender, apparently exceeding their quota by 700,000 barrels per day in March. So maybe those countries fall into line here a bit more, and that solves the problem as well.
Peter Tertzakian:
That’s a movie we’ve seen before too, and eventually there’s an end to the movie, and there’s discipline starts to fall back in.
But look, I think it’s going to be a rough year for the oil price because there’s just so much uncertainty. And so now we’re in the 60 to $70 range. We’ll see if the economic numbers start coming out worse. Certainly there’s a chance it’ll go below 60. But if it goes below 60, now all of a sudden we have definitely the prospect of production declines and the self-regulating mechanism, because the large part of oil supply growth has come from these highly elastic fields, from the shale producers, the oil producers in the United States, and even here in Canada, there’s some of that.
So the ability for the supply side to react to the demand side is much greater than it used to be. The price signals, in other words, will self-remedy the price. And I think the long-term price of oil doesn’t change. I think it’s still around in the high 60s to low 70s in that range. That’s what you need to keep the production to meet the baseline of demand in the world these days.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. Well, and this is opposite by the way of what Donald Trump wanted. He wants to see the US grow production, and this is if we see prices at this range, and especially if they go lower, we’re going to see non-OPEC, including the US, which has been a big part of non-OPEC growth, go the other direction here.
Peter Tertzakian:
So what do you think of this theory marginally, a conspiracy theory that the Trump administration has asked the Saudis to open up the spigots so that the price of oil comes down, the price of gasoline comes down, and helps to mitigate some of the inflationary effects of the tariffs?
Jackie Forrest:
Well, they’re inconsistent because they want that, but they also want supply to grow. So I guess we’ll have to choose which is more important.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, well, drill, baby, drill was already a contentious issue within the oil and gas industry, the American oil and gas industry, because $70 is not really enough to drill, baby, drill, in other words, aggressively ramp up drilling. So now we’re at 60. There’s no way that either there’s the cash flow available or the appetite to drill a lot more because the returns just aren’t there.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, yeah. So competing priorities here.
I mean, the one silver lining maybe of this whole thing, if there can be one around the oil markets, is that we’ve had an overhang since COVID where OPEC has just been sitting on a whole bunch of spare capacity, and non-OPEC, including the United States, mostly the United States, has been growing too much and not allowing OPEC to get their barrels on the market. So if this kind of period of where non-OPEC declines a bit, allows OPEC to get more of their supply onto the market, maybe that sets the oil market up for a more healthy, balanced scenario going forward.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, I think it sets it up for, as I said just a few minutes ago, a more responsive supply side, which is where I think we’re at. And that is the big difference between today and past eras, is that the amount of unconventional or shale drilling that is out there with very steep declines is enough that when the drilling stops, the declines kick in.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. And it doesn’t take many, many years to balance to market.
Peter Tertzakian:
And by the way, in 2014, ’15, the world had just come off a big spending, probably a 10-year spending binge, including in the Canadian oil sands where there was some, at that point, I think cumulatively $250 billion spent, and all these new facilities were coming on in the market. We don’t have that right now. There hasn’t been, other than places like Guyana and a few other places in the world, there hasn’t been a lot of big spending to create a surge in background capacity.
So I think that the oil markets today have been relatively balanced. Yeah, OPEC at the margins manage that supply, but I think the supply-demand balance is such that the pricing at the margin can work the other way. In other words, a few hundred thousand barrels of production loss will kick that price right back up.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. I think you’re right, but I do think there’s a period here where they’re sitting on a lot of spare capacity. I’m just looking at the latest numbers. I know not all of this is real, but the official numbers are like 6 million barrels a day of spare capacity in the OPEC+ group right now. So I think we need to get that down lower. And then I think I agree with you that for sure the non-OPEC side is going to respond to low prices, but for a while, OPEC will have enough spare capacity to fill the void. But eventually the market, I think, will be in.
Peter Tertzakian:
I’ve always commented in the past, that spare capacity, I mean, it’s gone as low as 3%. So 6 million barrels a day is about 6%. But if you think about the global oil supply chains as a manufacturing line, 6% spare capacity is really not very much. In the manufacturing world, you try and have that 10 to 15% because you have downtime, you have maintenance and repairs and all those sorts of things.
So 6% is still pretty thin, and we know all of that 6% isn’t the best quality oil. As you draw down on that spare capacity, you get into the lousier and lousier grades and qualities of oil. So not all oil is the same.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah.
Peter Tertzakian:
Jackie’s looking at me as if I’m overly optimistic, but I think this is a different market, this is a very different market that has evolved for oil going forward. I think it’s much more elastic to the price signals out there. It’s price at the margin, and so stay tuned.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay. Well, with that, I just got breaking news on my phone that North American stock markets are plunging, but let’s move on to topic three, which is the Canadian election and some of what we’ve learned about energy policy so far. There’s so much going on with the election, and I’m not going to talk about some of the broader policies that are out there, but I think it’s probably worth just revisiting the poll numbers and a little bit about what we’ve learned about energy policy so far.
Peter Tertzakian:
Okay. So I’ve been the barrel half-full optimist or cautious optimist on what’s going on here, so I don’t know what to say about the Canadian election.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, it does appear that the Liberals continue to be pulling away here in terms of the polls. So latest numbers from that three-
Peter Tertzakian:
338Canada.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. So I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Mark Carney at 44%, and Pierre Poilievre of the Conservatives at 37%, and it will take 172 seats to form a majority. And they have a seat projection for the Liberals at 195, and then there’s a range, 167 to 226. So it’s looking right now like they have a pretty good chance of getting a majority. And the Conservatives right now are 122 in terms of the seat projection, which wouldn’t get them anywhere even close to a majority.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. Well, I’m not going to call it because as we know, anything can happen in these elections, especially in the last week or two. We’re not in the last week or two yet. What are we actually? We are…
Jackie Forrest:
I think we’re two weeks in, so the actual date is April 28th.
Peter Tertzakian:
The 28th. So we’ll see. Maybe the next couple of podcasts, we’ll start to make a call on the election. What about the energy policies? Is there anything new there?
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. Well, I think there are. I mean, Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives have come out with a bit more clarity in terms of some of their energy policy.
I would say with Mark Carney and the Liberals, there’s things he’s saying in media reports and things like that, or when he came to Edmonton a couple of weeks ago, but not as formal, but I thought we could go through some of the five major topics. The oil and gas emissions cap, the Conservatives have clearly said they’re going to repeal that policy. Mark Carney says he’ll keep, but when he came to Edmonton a couple of weeks ago, he said he will want to work for increased flexibility working with industry and funding carbon capture storage. So it’s not like he’s got it… These were media reports. It’s not like he’s got a written position on this, but it does look like there might be a little bit more flexibility in terms of how it works.
The next one topic is just generally clean energy and the carbon tax. So Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives want to repeal the industrial carbon tax, but they’ve made no statements on other policies. However, potentially things like the investment tax credits, clean fuel rags, and the Canada Growth Fund, and things that we’re supporting subsidies around clean energy, maybe they’re at risk. Just they haven’t said anything, but it’s uncertain.
With the Liberals, they’ve made no specific statements on any of those things either, the ITCs or Canada Growth Fund, but we can assume they’ll be supportive since those are policies the Liberals put in place. They have said they’re going to keep the industrial carbon tax, but Mark Carney wants to even tighten it more. He wants to put a carbon border adjustment mechanism in, he wants to explore strengthening of methane rules, and mandate corporations to do more climate risk disclosure. So I think we can assume there’s still going to be a carbon focus from a new Liberal government here.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, I think so. However, then there’s a reality of what the government can afford. There is a lot of talk about infrastructure from both parties, and there’s no question infrastructure has to be built, especially to diversify our export markets. And that includes ports, and I think from rail and pipes and so on.
Jackie Forrest:
Rail, transmission.
Peter Tertzakian:
And so it’s going to come down to, okay, what can we afford and what can’t we afford?
Jackie Forrest:
And what’s the priority?
Peter Tertzakian:
And what’s the priority? So I think a lot of these, they’re not even promises, they’re just sort of platform statements that are being made I think are going to necessarily probably change. But on things where you have anything related to the carbon tax, there’s no question in my mind that things are going to have to change there because as we’ve said many times on this podcast, it’s very complex and dense and inhibits investment.
Jackie Forrest:
But do you want it to be more strict? The liberals are implying it.
Peter Tertzakian:
No, no, well, no, no, we certainly don’t want that.
Jackie Forrest:
Improve entirely.
Peter Tertzakian:
And on the Conservative side, they’re definitely saying they’re going to get rid of the industrial carbon tax. That in itself does not repeal the carbon tax on a provincial level because the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act is the federal carbon tax policy, both retail and industrial. And on the industrial side, there’s also the provincial equivalence. So each province has elected to take all or part control of the carbon taxation.
Saskatchewan, when was it, last week. I can’t keep track of time, but whatever, it was the last week or two, basically said they’re getting rid of their industrial carbon tax. None of the other province have said that. So in the event we get a federal conservative victory and they get rid of the industrial carbon tax, Saskatchewan has already said they get rid of theirs, but none of the other provinces have said they’re going to do that. So the industrial carbon tax endures at a provincial level, and each province is different regardless of whether or not the feds get rid of it.
Jackie Forrest:
Right, yeah, so provincial leaders, and many of those have been in place quite a long time, like the Alberta one, it’s been in place for more than decade.
Peter Tertzakian:
And getting rid of industrial carbon tax is not an easy thing because there’s been billions of dollars of investments in the various provinces on the assumption that there’s value in things like carbon credits.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. Of course, those carbon credits have to have a predictable price, and that’s been an issue too.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, that’s a whole other issue, but I’m going to say it’s not easy, but there’s no question that the whole thing needs to be cleaned up, and we have to set the stage for investment into all these infrastructure projects. So that brings us to Bill C-69.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, so when it comes to major projects, there’s different views. The Conservatives want to repeal Bill C-69, which is, doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s now the Impact Assessment Act, and Bill 48, which is that tanker ban, and they want six-month approvals for applications.
Meanwhile, the Liberals want to improve Bill C-69 for one project, one approval. So get rid of this overlap between needing to do all the work with the province and then do it again with the federal government process.
So I would just say the Liberals look like pretty modest changes, where the conservatives look to kind of be more radical. And six-month approvals, we’ve talked about this, I think this would be really important for driving more investment into the country. So I do think the conservatives have a better approach at least on that.
Peter Tertzakian:
More concrete for sure. And ditto on the oil and gas export projects.
Jackie Forrest:
Right, yeah. So the conservatives are saying they want to do national energy corridor, fast-track LNG and pipelines to the Atlantic and Pacific, go ahead with indigenous loan guarantee programs to help make that happen so that indigenous partners can be part of those projects.
With Mark Carney and the Liberals, actually, it was a couple of weeks ago, I don’t think he’d even said oil and gas, but in media interviews, especially when he came to Edmonton a few weeks ago, he did say he supports building pipelines to displace foreign oil and building infrastructure and energy corridors to new export markets. And he even talked about building export infrastructure to the Arctic, which is kind of curious because we haven’t talked much about that. That actually is going to be a topic of our next podcast, is talking about the potential to have a big terminal out of an Arctic port, and there’s some issues with that, there’s ice and things like that. So we’re going to learn a bit more about is that feasible considering ice, ice breaking, cost of all of that?
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, it’s a big issue. But on the other hand, it’s not like it’s new, building northern latitude, oil and gas facilities, and Norwegians do it, and certainly the Russians do it. So it’s certainly something that I think we need to consider. That consideration of making LNG terminals in the north in Canada dates back actually to the 1970s where there was proposals. I think it was by Dome Petroleum.
So it’s not like this is new, and I think this is a Canadian problem, is that we talk about a lot of stuff, but we never actually get it done. And so we hope whichever party gets in, we start to get things done.
I certainly support this national energy corridor. I think that’s what we need. It’s a corridor for all sorts of infrastructure, whether it’s pipes, wires, and even digital wires. We need a corridor where you don’t need to have… well, it’s pre-approved in terms of the regulatory requirements, that you go straight from one end of the country to the other. But I would say the priority is getting to the west coast that offers us the fastest and quickest optionality for diversifying our export markets.
Jackie Forrest:
For oil and gas.
Peter Tertzakian:
Certainly for oil and gas, but not exclusively oil and gas. We have port expansions that are necessary for agriculture products, minerals, you name it. And the railroads probably need some help too in terms of creating the ability to transport more volumes, more tonnage.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, so when you say pre-approval, so basically a private developer would come along, and they could just start building tomorrow, and because the environmental review has already been done and the indigenous groups and all of that…
Peter Tertzakian:
That’s it.
Jackie Forrest:
… stakeholders have already bought it.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, I don’t know about tomorrow, but it’s certainly not 10 years.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, like six months or less. I do like this six-month thing. I mean, we had some great podcasts. We heard with TC Energy and with PETRONAS talking about how we really need to shorten this approval timeline to get rid of the risk associated with building major projects.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I think it’s important what you just said is that whomever can come along and build. We want to leave the competitive nature of the business, or we want to maintain some level of competitiveness. In other words, it should not be up to the government to pick and choose individual projects. They should approve the corridor, pardon the pun, but lay the groundwork for investment, and then companies can come in and get the capital, raise the investment capital to actually build, so it is not wholly dependent on the public purse to build these sorts of projects either.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. Well, I will say the Conservatives right now have the most detail around what they’re going to do here. And the Liberals, it’s pretty high level at this point, and we don’t have anything other than just sort of some comments in the media. So I do hope from the liberals, we start to see a bit more tangible plans about how we’re going to build this infrastructure in a way that attracts capital, because we can’t afford for the government to be paying for all of this stuff and addresses some of the issues that we’ve heard from on the podcast of people that want to spend money in this country, but they see it as too risky.
Peter Tertzakian:
Prime Minister Carney is talking a lot about building the infrastructure to be the biggest economy in the G7 ultimately, and certainly we would have the resources and things. It’s the potential to do a lot to grow our economy. So there’s a lot of the right signals, but on energy, you’re right, the Conservatives have more clarity in terms of what they would do.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. Well, with that, I think we’ll probably talk more about the election, obviously, as we get towards the big date here at the end of April, but I think that’s a wrap for today.
Peter Tertzakian:
Okay. And hopefully we don’t have to timestamp the next podcast because I’d like to think that what we say in endures more than a couple days.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. Well, it hasn’t been that way so far this year, so my prediction is at least the next many months might still be this way.
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