Ports, Pipelines, and Policy: Insights from Heather Exner-Pirot

This week, our guest is Dr. Heather Exner-Pirot, a Senior Fellow and Director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, a Special Advisor to the Business Council of Canada, and a Research Advisor to the Indigenous Resource Network. Heather has twenty years of experience in Indigenous, Arctic and resource development and governance. She has published on Indigenous economic and resource development, energy security, and politics. 

Here are some of the questions that Peter and Jackie asked Heather: Does Canada have defense and security issues in the north? Politicians, including our Prime Minister, support Arctic export ports—do you expect to see new export corridors to the north? The Russians ship LNG from the Arctic, so why not Canada? What are your concerns about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s climate policy, as outlined in his Liberal leadership and election platforms? What are the issues with Canada’s greenwashing rules that were made law about one year ago? How would you recommend Canada move forward with speeding up the development of large projects—should the Impact Assessment Act (Bill C-69) be scrapped or just modified? What are the prospects for deploying small or micro nuclear reactors (SMRs) in the north? What does the future hold for Indigenous equity participation in major projects? 

Content referenced in this podcast: 

• Northern Corridors: Hype or Hope? Macdonald-Laurier Institute, April 2025 
• Heather Exner-Pirot: Mark Carney’s climate plan is already outdated, The Hub, February 2025 
• Canada’s Greenwashing Amendment: A failure of process and policy, Macdonald-Laurier Institute, February 2025 
• From emergency to miracle – Germany’s LNG Acceleration Law shows that Western states can still build when they need to, Macdonald-Laurier Institute, January 2024 
• Learn more about Ontario Power Generation’s SMR project, including a video of the site preparation progress, Spring 2025 

Please review our disclaimer at: https://www.arcenergyinstitute.com/disclaimer/

Check us out on social media:

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LinkedIn: @ARC Energy Research Institute

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Episode 285 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. It is May. The month of May and it is campground season.

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah, that’s right. So this is-

Peter Tertzakian:

This is the time of year we talk about Jackie’s campground reservation experiences.

Jackie Forrest:

Exactly. And this is running after the May long weekend, so maybe someone has been camping. Yeah, this year is not going great. I got some of the sites I wanted, those federal sites, but these provincial sites, I’m trying to get some in BC, are almost impossible to get. You have to get them three months to the day that you want them, and then you log in at 8:00 in the morning and you sit there hitting the button and then in an instant they’re gone. Somehow, other people got them. So, so far my camping is 50/50, kind of mixed.

Peter Tertzakian:

I’m aging myself because when I used to do a lot of camping, there was no such thing as reservations. You just showed up and there was places available, but those days are long gone.

Jackie Forrest:

No, it’s not-

Peter Tertzakian:

So what do we do? We go further afield, we go further north, maybe go camping in the Arctic or… Well, actually speaking of the Arctic, we need to talk more about it. We’ve got a new prime minister that wants to talk about the Arctic and build out there. We had Chris Avery talk to us about Churchill and we’ll talk a little bit more about that. But I think we need to go even further north and question or talk about the possibilities of building infrastructure into our vast north. I’ve been up there myself, I’ve been as far north as Inuvik, been to Yellowknife many times, actually love it up there and want to go some more. But in terms of infrastructure development, we know it’s challenging. So this week, we have a special guest who is an expert on the Arctic amongst many other energy issues and infrastructure issues. So we’re delighted to welcome Dr. Heather Exner-Pirot, Senior Fellow and Director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment at the esteemed Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Welcome, Heather.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Delighted to be here.

Jackie Forrest:

Great, Heather. Well, we’re excited to have you on because we’ve really noticed a lot of your writing on energy issues and not just the north, and we’ll get into some of those. We’ll start with the north, but you’ve been a commentating on a lot of issues that are close to Peter and I and things we talk about. So we’re really happy to have you on today. But maybe you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and how living… I think you’re living near Calgary. Did you become an expert on Arctic economic issues and indigenous issues?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah, great story. So when I was finished up my masters and was looking for a job, something called University Arctic opened up at the U of S. It was about a consortium of Arctic universities across eight Arctic states. And I had been interning in Geneva and looking for an international NGO job. And lo and behold, the one in Saskatoon was about the Arctic. And then I went on to do my PhD research on that. And that was at the time of the last commodity cycle when the Arctic was, as we say, hot. That was when the Russians planted the titanium flag, when Stephen Harper was talking about using or losing it. So this whole cycle that we’re seeing today, we saw about 20 years ago, and I was writing my PhD in political science on it at the time and started to… Yeah, so that’s when I started to get into the Arctic.

And at some point, we were all talking about Arctic security. The first paragraph of every article about the Arctic was about climate change, opening up, a scramble for resources, China and Russia trying to get our resources. And at sometime, the commodity cycle busted and you had to acknowledge that there was no scramble, there is no race. In fact, the Arctic is so difficult to develop in, commodity prices have to be so high, really, we have a problem of not enough development. Not too much development.

Jackie Forrest:

Okay. Well, Peter’s started the interest saying he’s been to the north, but actually I think it’s even hard… Forget about doing energy development for Canadians to get to the north, and I’ve always wanted to go to the north, but every time I’ve looked at a holiday up there, it’s like I might as well do an African safari. It would be cheaper. So that’s why I was wondering if you’ve watched this show, North of North. I started watching it. It’s a Netflix show, I guess it’s a fictional community in one of those northern islands, kind of just west of Baffin Island way up in the north. And it’s a comedy, but what I loved is seeing the scenery and a bit of a window to the life that people have up there, which most Canadians haven’t seen. So anyway, I just thought if you’d seen it, and is there a way that we can get more tourists up there? I was thinking… We’re going to talk about getting more sovereignty over our north. Could tourism, like creating the infrastructure to support tourism, be one way of doing that?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah, I watched the first few episodes of that too, and it is kind of great to see what life is like a little bit of a window. In terms of tourism, you may… Iceland has been a huge success story. Iceland is a small island in the middle of the North Atlantic, but it’s become economic. It’s only I think 400,000 people. So it’s become a huge tourist hub. It’s their top industry. Greenland has been developing a tourism industry as well. And now in Yukon and Yellowknife, it’s actually a reasonable… Yukon has a pretty good tourism infrastructure, but it is expensive to get to. Nunavut in particular is expensive, and there’s a big carbon footprint, frankly, with getting tourists up to the north.

Jackie Forrest:

Right. Well, because we have so few that go up there.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yes.

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah. So you are a member, looking at your bio, of a lot of groups including the Global Arctic Mission Council on the Canadian Defense and Security Network and many other long organizations. But just tell us, what is the defense and security issues in the north? Do we have issues? Are there real signs that Russians are coming into our area or what are we concerned about?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah, great question. I think kind of at a superficial level, there is a sense or a fear in Canada that our sovereignty is at attack, that if we don’t use it again, we’ll lose it and that somehow the Russians will take over, the Chinese will start mining or drilling in the Northwest Passage. Those are things I’ve actually heard in-house committee testimony and that’s not exactly what the problem is. So usually the logistics of having an actual on the ground military conflict in the Arctic, particularly the Canadian Arctic, are so difficult. And it was an old joke from a Canadian general that if someone invaded our Arctic, our first task would be to rescue them. You just can’t survive long. You don’t have the logistics supply chain to survive. But the real legitimate issue that we have, which is why the Americans keep pressing us on NORAD, is this fear of hypersonic missiles coming over, that it is a shorter flank, attack vector as they would describe it of Chinese and Russian missiles, and as they develop better faster equipment, our radar has not been equipped to detect it.

And so a real sense of urgency of putting up kind of those monitoring surveillance stations, modernizing NORAD so that we can have plenty of time to detect them, that we could respond in case they did send something. And the real purpose is to deter, that if they know that we will detect whatever they send and it will not be successful, not hit targets in the south, just don’t do it to begin with. But if we are vulnerable there and we are right now, that ties our hands a little bit in how we operate, for example, in Taiwan.

Peter Tertzakian:

So this is the detection part of it. And I mean, I’m old enough to remember NORAD and all of the things that were put up there as a consequence of the Cold War. We do have countries like Finland, the Finns and the Scandinavian countries, even the Russians, are active up there with their military activities and their special groups, army groups that are up there. What do we have up there?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah, I mean, you have to appreciate that the Canadian Arctic is very vast, and radar stations is one, and we’ve had… The DEW Line is what you’re familiar… Turn into the North Warning System. But in terms of having a suite of, for example, F-35 that you could intercept something with, you can’t just stick one here and one there. You need to have a base with everyone that’s qualified to maintain it, pilot, operate it. And so that’s why we’ve put a lot of our NORAD bases further south, where you have more access to infrastructure, where you have more access to personnel. So we are lightly staffed, militarized in our Arctic, but we do have Canadian Rangers, which are kind of our ears on the ground. And the difference between… Yellowknife is still a couple hours of flight away from the one corner of Yukon or the other corner of Nunavut.

So in some ways people argue, “You’re just as good having it in Trent or in Winnipeg or Cold Lake,” that you’re not… Given the size of the region, you’re not much worse off. But anyways, on the European side, I just have to point out the reason why we talk about Russia being this Arctic power is because they put their northern fleet, which has most of their naval, nuclear capabilities on this peninsula, around the Barents.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yes, exactly. On the Cold Peninsula. The reason they do that is because that is open water year round. That is Russia’s only access to the North Atlantic year round. And so it happens to be in the Arctic, but it’s not to protect the Arctic, it’s because that’s where the Russians have their counter nuclear capacity vis-a-vis NATO. So it has been a militarized region, but it’s not to protect the Arctic, it’s to protect, basically, Russias-

Peter Tertzakian:

But even so…I mean, I don’t don’t know exactly what the latitude is, but it’s not that much further north than say Oslo, Stockholm. Those are all at 60 degrees, which was the border of the Northwest Territories and Alberta. The real north is in Russia’s… Is still further north than that, right?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

And that’s why… I listened to your podcast with Chris Avery, and this is a common assumption that in Canada, the further north you go, the colder it gets. And that’s true, but that is not exactly true on the European side. The way the Arctic is different between Russia, between North America, between Europe, is very much a condition of currents. And you have warmer currents on the European side than you do on the Canadian and on the Eastern Russian side. And so I’ve been up to Kirkenes and there’s green grass and people have backyards all the way up. It really looks like Northern BC to some extent. It’s a very different Arctic than the Canadian Arctic. And so it’s not latitude that makes you cold or remote, it’s other geographic conditions. And we are by far the most Arctic of the Arctic regions.

Jackie Forrest:

Okay, well you talked about that ice-free component because they have ice-free ports that go much farther north. And so of course, we’ve had lots of talk about building more Arctic ports, including Mark Carney and the Liberals and their platform. They want to increase the Arctic shipping of things like commodities, like oil, gas, maybe even grains. And you actually wrote a great article, which we will put a link to, April 14th this year, Northern corridors: Hype or hope? I do recommend people have a read of it. But you talked about that this isn’t a new thing that we’ve been talking… You had a news article from 1953 that proposed northern development from the Prime Minister John Diefenbaker at the time. So tell us, do you think that we are going to start seeing big export ports out of our north?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

I mean, no, not big export ports. And in the article I point out and… Churchill was developed in 1930, and so it’s been around for almost a hundred years. It had been planned even for decades before that, since the 1890s when we were settling Western Canada, people were thinking of all the places you could have ports to. And it’s never really taken off. And I think there has been an assumption that as we have climate change, sea ice is melting, that now these ports are opening up, became more viable routes, and that is not exactly what we’re seeing on the ground. That certainly, climate change has affected the Arctic. Certainly, sea ice has melted, but it has melted in ways that actually generally make it harder to ship, that the old kind of stable sea ice has largely melted in the summer, but the annual sea ice, it’s much thinner, comes back every year because the earth tilts at 23 degrees and it is dark and cold up there for three months of the year.

And that will always supersede other dynamics that you have. If it’s dark for three months, you will have ice come back and grow. And so what we have is a younger ice that is less predictable, that is burgier, that is flowing into choke points in ways that we aren’t totally able to predict and has actually made it more expensive. And this all comes down to insurance. Are the insurers more or less likely to insure this Arctic shipping than they were 10 or 20 years ago? No, they’re not. And this isn’t just a Canadian phenomenon of, “We can’t build things. We don’t do things here.” We’re seeing the same on the Russian side, that the way that the Arctic sea ice is melting is making it, again, more expensive, more unpredictable and more difficult to navigate.

Jackie Forrest:

And you talked about permafrost too. We learned from Chris Avery that one of the issues with the rail line is permafrost tends to heave in the winter and those issues get worse with climate change as well.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah. So I think there’s a superficial sense that climate change what was… On ice was what was preventing resource development in the Arctic. And there’s a lot more that goes into remoteness that makes it expensive to do. For example, mining in the Canadian Arctic than just climate change and sea ice. Most of the deposits… Because most of the land is interior. And so where you have to develop linear infrastructure in the Arctic, that gets extremely expensive. So it’s not only is the shipping not getting easier, but we have melting permafrost which makes things like building roads and railroads much more expensive. So even though you can do it and they’re doing the Hudson Bay Railroad and you can do the road from Tuktoyaktuk to Inuvik, but it’s more expensive to do so. So if you’re a mining company looking to develop and you have to do linear infrastructure, that’s harder.

The other thing they’ll often do is just use an ice road and that season has to be very cold for a couple of weeks before… It has to be a very thick layer before you can drive these big trucks on it. And that season with climate change has actually gotten shorter. And so last year was actually… We had a very warm fall. You guys remember that? It was warmest year on record. My husband works at one of the drive-in mines in the Northwest Territories actually. And they had, I think, about two week later ice road season than they would expect and they would plan for, they were starting to run low on diesel. And then just the logistics now of, what, turning an eight-week season into a six-week season, all the trucks, all the storage, all the warehousing they had to do. Again, it’s just logistically more difficult. But these are the infrastructure challenges. If the commodity price is high enough, you can get around all these infrastructure challenges. The commodity price has not been high enough for at least a decade.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, let’s get back to the vastness. Flying up there. I mean, you’re just flying. You fly and you sort of tap your fingers on the table of the airplane seat and just go… You look out the window, it’s just snow and ice for several hours flying from Edmonton. So I mean, it’s just the logistical challenges and the costs of building up there is just huge, right?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah. I mean, so the mines that we have… And I’ll focus on resource development because of your show, but it applies equally to communities and to military bases. Where we have developed mines in the territories… There’s eight mines in the territories right now. One is an iron mine, so heavy, but it’s because there’s world-class deposit about a hundred kilometers from tidewater on Baffin Island. And so if you can have a deposit, and this has happened a few times, we’ve seen it with Voisey’s Bay, we see it with a nickel mine in Northern Quebec. We’ve seen it with Polaris mine before. Now we have it with this iron mine in Baffinland.

If you’re close to tidewater, then okay, you can store and you can stockpile over the course of eight or nine months and then you have your shipping season for three months when the ice has opened, that’s fine. The other seven mines are golden diamonds. And that’s because you don’t need a railroad or a road to ship out golden diamonds. They actually ship it out by plane because the weight to value ratio is so good for gold bars and for diamonds that it makes sense. So it has been very difficult to develop base metals or iron in the Arctic because you just need so much more infrastructure to get it done.

Peter Tertzakian:

So let’s extend that to, say, liquefied natural gas, the Russians building their Yamal facility, which I think is about the same latitude as Inuvik, out to roughly 70 degrees north. And I know you just said that there’s differences in the Arctic depending upon which hemisphere, east or west that you’re in. But can you talk about ideas actually like deep back to the 1970s of building something like hydrocarbon exports, whether it’s LNG or oil or otherwise?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah, well, I mean your listeners will probably be familiar that Alaska did it in the ’70s, kind of in the wake of the OPEC embargo when the United States was looking for domestic sources and we knew it was in Alaska. But have a look at a map of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The resource is actually on tidewater, it’s on the north slope in Alaska, but it is so difficult to ship from that part of the Arctic that they actually built an 800-mile pipeline going south to cut to… Valdez is actually the port-

Peter Tertzakian:

It’s south…

Heather Exner-Pirot:

… close to Anchorage. And Anchorage’s port is open pretty much year-round. It’s pretty much a year-round open port. So we’d rather build an 800-mile pipeline across Alaska, the entire state, than ship out of the Arctic. Now when people talk about Churchill or about exporting LNG from northern ports in Canada, we always say, “Well, the Russians do it.” And that is true. So let me tell you about Yamal LNG. One thing is that it’s just an absolute world-class monster resource. That Russia has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas and 80% of those are in its Arctic and its resource happens to be on the Arctic, on tidewater, and that Yamal Peninsula and across from it, but it has a warm current, most of it was intended to go to Europe.

This is a richer market, better market, closer market. Europe needed the gas. And that is a warmer current and you have a longer season and they did get some ice strength and LNG carriers and the intention was to go to Asia in the warmer summer months. And now obviously, that’s posing issues for them and certainly economic issues. But the point I’m trying to say is the path to go west out of Yamal Peninsula to Europe is a lot easier than the path to go out of any place in the Canadian Arctic with LNG. So not only would you need your own fleet of ice strength and LNG carriers, but you would be ice blocked for several months of the year as the Russians are from going down the northern sea route east towards Asia for several months of the year.

Peter Tertzakian:

Right.

Jackie Forrest:

And you had one other point actually that’s worth mentioning is the reason they developed it there is the gas resource is there. Here we’re talking about taking gas from Northern BC and moving it all the way to the Arctic, right?

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, this is a whole separate discussion. I would time out on that because my first summer job, most people don’t know, was mapping the gas and oil reserves of the Arctic and there was drilling done in there in the ’60s and ’70s and basically the wells have just been capped and shut in and abandoned. But the resource is huge in Canada too.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

It is, and I just want to build on that point, Peter, because that is true, we absolutely are natural gas rich in Northwest Territories and in that Inuvik region, we had thought about the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline probably when you were down there, but what happened… And the last time the Arctic was hot, when I was writing my PhD, we remember, oil prices hit $147 a barrel. And gas was also equally high. And that’s when we were all focused on the Arctic. Shell had its ill-conceived Arctic drilling program. I think they lost $6 billion on that. There was drilling off the coast of Greenland, never went anywhere. What happened was the Shell Revolution came online and all of a sudden the business case for natural gas development and the Arctic and for oil development there just collapsed. Oil sands also came online. So no one is going to invest in Arctic oil in Canada or Alaska or anywhere when you can just invest into the oil sands.

Peter Tertzakian:

Or our Shell resources in the Montney. For sure.

Jackie Forrest:

Now before we leave the topic of the Arctic though, you are optimistic on one particular example. So Gray Bay Road and Port, which I had never heard of until I read the liberal platform. So it was actually listed as a potential nation-building project. Tell us why you may be a little bit more optimistic on that one.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah. And I listened to your show with Chris Avery and I think he’s great and he’s doing a great job for that port. I think there is a case for exporting some critical minerals out of Manitoba that are produced near to that region. And the same with Gray’s Bay, that if you can produce some critical minerals or gold or whatever you need to do from around there, go ahead and that makes sense. And again, you can stockpile it. You don’t have to worry about seasonal shipping. But what’s happening in Northwest Territories that I think is underappreciated is that they have three mines, three diamond mines, and those are all nearing the end of their lifespan. And the commodity price of diamonds has also just absolutely tanked. And so we expect that the first one, Rio Tintos will close in the first quarter of 2026 and the other two will close likely by the end of this decade.

That’s a quarter of Northwest Territories GDP. There may be a small mines in the pipeline, but there’s nothing to replace the size of that diamond industry. So NWT now is really looking at, “How do we replace that portion of economy, how do we build something else?” And the solution that has come up is this Arctic Security Corridor, so to develop road infrastructure, linear infrastructure from Yellowknife going all the way to Grays Bay, into Nunavut. And so on the one aspect, the territories, they want these big infrastructure projects, they need federal support. So one of it is that you would have to have federal support if you wanted to do this. It would open up the region to mining, but they wouldn’t show up in Canada’s GDP. But it’d be very important for the region and for the territory.

And so everyone’s pitching, the time is right to pitch nation-building projects. They’ve aptly smartly named it the Arctic Security Corridor to get a little bit higher off the list and it would open up the region to development. So I’m absolutely not against it. You have to think the cost benefit for the amount of mining that you get, is it worth maintaining that linear infrastructure? But certainly, I can see why the territory and the Inuit of the region are advancing it.

Peter Tertzakian:

So how much of that road is an ice highway versus a paved highway?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Well, I think they want to make it a permanent road, and they did do that with the Inuit Tuktoyaktuk Road to make it, as they call, all season. Now, I think in the spring it’s very challenging, but that is the idea. One thing about the diamond mines, they shared a winter road and it costs millions of dollars every year to build it, and they never did make it into a permanent road. And now there’s a bit of a sense that that was a mistake that given all the money that you put in for 20 years into building this winter road, you could have maybe invested a bit more upfront to make it a permanent road and then you would have some more road infrastructure for some other deposits there. So I think the intention with this one is to make it permanent all season.

Jackie Forrest:

Okay.

Peter Tertzakian:

Have you seen that show Ice Road Truckers?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

I very… Yeah. A little bit. Yes.

Jackie Forrest:

Heather’s too busy working.

Peter Tertzakian:

Speaking of shows Jackie.

Jackie Forrest:

On a similar topic, I was just reading an article that you got to get your Canadian diamonds now and that they’re etching what mine they came out of because there’s going to… I actually didn’t realize that those diamond mines were kind of nearing end of life, so they’re like going to be a rare commodity. Okay, well let’s switch topics to Mark Carney’s climate plan. You actually wrote something on that in February, 2025, and this is before he became a leader of the liberal party and he had published a climate plan as part of the platform he was running under to get chosen as the leader. And it included things like a carbon border adjustment tax and sustainability guides requirements to do more sustainability reporting. And you wrote that it was outdated. So do you still think that where we are today?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Well, I think everyone thinks that now. Times have changed. And let me just say from our previous conversation to this and how I moved from the Arctic to energy myself is following the Arctic and everyone talked about this resource race and commodities boom and scramble for the Arctic. And at some point I realized this wasn’t in fact the case. In fact, amongst all my colleagues, all of us social scientists, not one of us knew very much about resource development. Certainly not the economics or the business of it. You maybe know the indigenous rights impacts, but we were not well versed in the business of resource development and how difficult it is. And so I became, I guess, a bit of a contrarian in the Arctic space or looking at the resource sector, I think from a different perspective of others and seeing a lot of narrative on the Arctic that just was not realized in actual fact and reality.

And I think that’s how I came into the energy space was seeing that same, I don’t know if you would call it bias or just a perspective that I didn’t think was fulsome into accounting for what the industry was really facing or how energy is actually developed and implemented. So the conversation has changed dramatically in a few different ways. I think one post-COVID, where we moved down the hierarchy of needs, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from kind of self-actualization towards really just focusing on your material needs, that changed the conversation on energy really to move towards affordability. Then you had Russia invade Ukraine and that really turned the conversation towards energy security and now energy has become much more pragmatic and we have seen Greenlash, we’ve seen some of the promises of renewables not coming to the same fruition or cost that we had hoped as we saw happen with Spain as Germany has been saying.

And so when I saw Carney’s climate plan, as… I say in the article, this could have been written in 2019, “Were they not aware of what had happened with COVID, what had happened with Russia, what happened with the pushback the deindustrialization of Europe? Are we not incorporating this into our policies?” And I have to say, I’ve been very influenced by you, Jackie, and you, Peter, of calling some of this out that 10 years on from the Paris Accord, we have some learnings. What we thought in 2015 is certainly not what we think in 2025 and we had better see our policies and our political leaders adjust for that. And we aren’t sure how much Carney is going to adjust for that or not.

Jackie Forrest:

Right. Well, Peter knows I have taken on the project of listening to Mark Carney’s values book. I actually tried to read it in 2021, but I just couldn’t get through it and I’m almost through, I’m ON hour 23 out of 24, but actually his climate thinking was very similar in that book. He has a couple of chapters where he really goes onto his ideas around energy and climate, but it got me thinking just as your point, actually, a lot of people had those ideas in 2021. The problem is the rest of the world isn’t all doing the same thing. So if Canada continues down that path, the cost of our energy is going to be higher than our competitors who aren’t doing that. And so I think it’d be interesting if I ever get a chance to talk to Mark Carney about it, if his views have changed, certainly from the policies he put forward, I would say they’re pretty consistent with what he talked about in 2021. But of course, we have the real realities of other things in our economy right now that are going to be priorities as well.

Peter Tertzakian:

You talked about green lashing just a few moments ago, and then there’s greenwashing, and you published in February, 2025, a report which we’ll post also as well, Canada’s greenwashing amendment referring to Bill C-59. You pointed out the pros and cons of the process, largely the flaws and also even called it greenhushing as it hurts investors who can no longer assess the carbon risk of a company, which is something that Jackie and I have talked about a lot. Talk about that report and do you think now with this new liberal government that there can be something done about C-59?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah, I hope so. So in the paper we go through all the ways in which it is flawed, and almost Orwellian, our good friend Tristan Goodwin called it Orwellian and I agree. So the things that the greenwashing amendment did is a series. So one, it gives private rights of action. So before it was competition law, your competitor could file a complaint with a competition Bureau. Now it opens up to everybody and we know who everybody is in this case. A lot of the environmental NGOs who’ve already written manuals on how to use the competition law to be able to file complaints about oil and gas companies, that actually goes into effect June 20th. So it’s a one-year process from when the legislation passed to when the private rights of action come into play. And that is obviously very scary. Why is it scary? Because you don’t have to lie to be found a foul of the amendment.

You have to not be able to prove your claim with internationally recognized methodology. What is internationally recognized methodology? They don’t define it. They don’t say what that is. For some things in new technologies, in battery tech or in carbon tech, there is no internationally methodology. These are new things that don’t have a whole international system around them. They also introduce a reverse onus. That means if somebody files a complaint, which I just told you can be just… Anybody now can file a complaint. It’s up to that oil and gas company or that business to say why what they said was proven was true. And even if they can do that, that will likely take hundreds of thousands or more in legal fees. If they’re found a foul, and this is the fourth thing, there’s a very punitive fine.

So if they can’t prove their claim and they say you can’t have aspirational claims, that’s literally the guidance from the Competition Bureau. No aspirational claims about the future, about environments. You can’t say, “We’re on our way to meet 2050,” because you can’t prove what you’ll do in 2050. If they are found a foul, the fine is $10 million or 3% of your global gross revenues, whichever is higher. If you’re Cenovus or CNRL, you’re talking about a billion dollar fine. That’s 3% of their gross for making a claim that you just can’t prove with international recognized methodology, which they have not defined.

Peter Tertzakian:

I haven’t followed this because… How old is C-59? When did they pass that thing?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

June 20th-

Peter Tertzakian:

June 20th…So we’re coming up to a year. I mean, has there have been any challenges, lawsuits, complaints filed, fines, anything, what’s happened?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Well, the Competition Bureau was already well-equipped to do this, and we had the Volkswagen Diesel kind of debacle where Volkswagen was-

Peter Tertzakian:

Dieselgate. Yeah.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah, they received a very heavy fine through the regular… And Keurig also, they made some claims about their pods, were investigated and received a fine. Now, what happened on June 20th is everyone just took everything down from their websites and the Competition Act also expanded. So it wasn’t just your business activities, which is normally what Competition Act be regulating, but all of your communications could be to your investors, to your stakeholders, to the government. And so everyone just took all this down. What’s interesting is just last week RBC said that, “We were no longer going to have the sustainable finance reporting because we’ll be a foul of the greenwashing amendment if we give this…” So no one in Canada… This should be the opposite of what… If you care about the climate and climate policy, no one in Canada is willing, their lawyers are telling them, “Don’t talk about this because you may very well be subject to-

Peter Tertzakian:

But there haven’t been any legal tests-

Heather Exner-Pirot:

No. Well, so the private rights of action going to… Everyone has their eye on that June 20th date when these private groups can start to make complaints. Right now, only Competition Bureau can direct those complaints. After June 20th, that’s when people fear it’ll open up.

Jackie Forrest:

Plus, there are some draft proposal to try to define a little bit better, what you can report and how you report it. But I would just say… I sit back this, this is just a real mess, right? This hurts investors who can no longer assess carbon risk as much as it hurts the companies. So I go back to Mark Carney, he’s a real believer in sustainable transparency, having information for investors to assess the risk of investing in a company. Well, today, investors don’t have that. So I really hope that we can kind of make some changes here because it hurts the companies too because now they can’t even talk about what they’re doing in terms of improving their emissions. There’s no information available at all.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah. And you guys are… You all know Kevin Krausert of Avatar Invitations, he put in a really good submission and wrote an op-ed on it. But for him, and for those in Cleantech, what you’re selling is the idea that you’re proving some kind of technology that will reduce emissions in the future. And so it’s really those Cleantech innovators that are most harmed. If you’re oil and gas, no one’s investing in you because of your emissions profile. So okay, they just aren’t going to talk about it. But the ones that are actually where their business case relies on the fact that they can somehow reduce more emissions with the new technology in the future, those are the ones that are really handcuffed with this.

Jackie Forrest:

Well, I would say too though, even those investors in some of the oil and gas companies are handcuffed because they can’t assess their risk anymore either, right?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

No. And in indigenous stakeholder relations, I know, when you’re trying to communicate to your indigenous partners that you are responsible, you are reliable, that you’re making best efforts at reducing emissions, you can’t communicate to those indigenous partners either unless you have internationally recognized methodology to support what you’re saying. So it’s also harming industry’s ability to communicate to your indigenous partners.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, let alone harming free speech as a broad principle in our society here, in our democratic society. So where should we move on to? How about Europe and LNG?

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah, this is a great conversation because we’re just hitting every topic right now, but you also wrote something in February of 2024. We will put a link to this. For all of these publications, we’ll put a link. From Emergency to Miracle: Germany’s LNG Acceleration Law, and you really dove into what Germany did to speed up the ability for them to build infrastructure like those regasification terminals that they needed when they were getting off Russian gas. Of course, there’s a huge debate in Canada right now. Some argue that we should just scrap this Bill C-9, which is actually called the Impact Assessment Act now. Others like the liberals are committing to making it shorter, like two-year reviews, but the industry and the conservative party want six-month reviews. So you’ve spent some time looking at what Germany did and have an understanding of our indigenous requirements for consultation, especially from the federal government. What do you think we need to do here? Do we keep the existing one and improve it? Do we scrap it? What’s the best option?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah, I think it’s unconstitutional in the first place, and the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional. October, 2023, the federal government made some amendments, but Alberta doesn’t think it’s constitutional. Neither does Saskatchewan. They’re already preparing their next challenge. So something I think has to be done with it because not only is it unconstitutional, it’s bad policy, and it’s been said many times that under the Impact Assessment Act has passed in 2019, only one project has actually been approved under its auspices, Cedar LNG. And so a lot either just never got proposed because the proponent didn’t think that there was any way forward. There was too much risk, no light at the end of the tunnel or it’s still in process. So I wrote that German LNG paper because in the west, I would say in the last five years, we’ve all been handwringing that it seems like we can’t build anymore.

And it’s not just a Canadian problem. It’s certainly an American and a European problem also. And so to have an example where the Germans did build something big, a major project in just 10 months, so we know that we can do it, we just haven’t done it. I remember also thinking that when the number one highway washed out in BC, that we rebuilt it within weeks, and I thought, “We can do this.” It’s not an issue of capabilities, it’s an issue of regulatory. So in terms of what we can do to build major infrastructure, I don’t think there’s any way you can do to consult in six months unless the proponent did all that prep work ahead of time and had those indigenous partners at the beginning. Let’s walk before we run. Right now, we’re averaging, depending on how you count, 6, 8, 10 years for a lot of projects.

So I would love to see two, but you know what, four years and three years, that’d also be a lot better than what we’re seeing now. But I think, really, the top thing is for the federal government to state it’s jurisdictional lane, this easiest thing, the low-hanging fruit that a liberal government could do if we’re just a little bit less ambitious than we would with the conservative government, is narrow the projects list. The Impact Assessment Act comes with a projects list of projects that will go under that federal assessment, narrow it so it’s clearly projects just under federal jurisdiction. It wouldn’t include mines, wouldn’t include refineries, wouldn’t include oil sands. Narrow it to their jurisdiction and let the provinces regulate all those other projects.

Jackie Forrest:

Right. Yeah, because this list that has things that are just within provincial borders like oil sands or mining projects. So-

Peter Tertzakian:

But the question was sort of targeted at the federal level, build a list, build a project list, but then there is the provincial level, which you just alluded to. So what are the challenges provincially?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah. Well, this is a great question because we have focused, and certainly I have focused, it’s easy in Alberta to hammer on the federal government for interfering, and they have not been helpful. But when you want to devolve that jurisdiction back to the provinces, which is their constitutional right and their constitutional lane, well, you better hope that the provinces are good at regulating these things too. But if you’re operating in, I’ll just say for example, British Columbia, you don’t have maybe the most responsive energy regulator either. And the Fraser Institute actually does a great survey both of energy jurisdictions and mining jurisdictions, and a handful of Canadian provinces do well, mostly, we don’t. So we do want to see improvements at the provincial level also, but I’ll give you some good news, is BC was maybe considered the hardest jurisdiction or the most burdensome jurisdiction for especially oil and gas development for resource zone in particular.

EB has been saying and doing a lot of the right things. They did put in a fast track list after all the Trump terror threats and then has moved the needle on things in Enbridge. I heard the VP from Enbridge saying they had a project. It was put on the fast project list, it was Aspen Pipeline into provincial pipeline system and moved it forward faster. They had FID at the construction. They’re constructing now just within months. So it is possible for the provinces to move faster. I think bureaucracy needs to come along, the regulators need to come along, but everyone needs to have hands on deck.

Peter Tertzakian:

Okay, LNG, let’s move on to nukes.

Jackie Forrest:

Right. Well, and I do want to add, Heather, just breaking news in the last few weeks, finally, we found out what these Ontario small modular reactors are going to cost. That was something that was always missing. So they announced that the four units together will cost $21 billion Canadian for 1,200 megawatts of capacity. Now, the first one’s going to be more expensive. They’re assuming by the time the fourth one’s in to this complex, the cost will come down, but that’s the collective cost. Now, that sounds like a lot of money, but you got to think that these are going to be working for 40 years. And so this levelized cost analysis is usually done to look at different types of electricity. And if you think it’s a 40-year thing, that they think the levelized cost is 15 cents a kilowatt-hour, which they say is fairly comparable to wind, solar, and batteries.

And by the way, that 15 cents a kilowatt-hour includes the government investment tax credit, which means the federal government’s going to pay maybe 30% of the capital cost of that. Now, I went to look at this, the most recent big nuclear plant built in North America, that’s the Georgia Vogtle Plant, which was about twice the size. But when I correct for capacity and the currency, it’s actually pretty similar in cost to what Ontario Power Generators is talking about. Now, these SMRs were supposed to be cheap and small, and there’s actually a video where… I’ll put a link to the video in the show notes. They’re certainly not small. They show a drone video footage of what the construction site looks like right now, they’ve actually started a lot of the groundworks, and I wouldn’t say they’re cheap, but maybe they’re comparable. Maybe they’re in the money in terms of what your other options are.

Just for comparison, natural gas, levelized cost, depending on where you are, could be maybe as low as 10 or 9 cents. So their natural gas would be cheaper potentially, but doesn’t have 40 year life either. So anyway, with that background, Heather, I just thought I’d give that, we talk a lot about SMRs coming across the country. Saskatchewan talks about them, Alberta talks about them. Maybe this gives us a sign, by the way, if they can do it for this cost, because often the initial cost ends up not being the final cost. Do you think there’s potential for nuclear energy in Canada, including the north, at that type of cost level?

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah. Well, I mean, the OPG ones are a special case, and you have to remember that this is a first of a kind, and as they often say, “This first in G7, really building an SMR,” and so your first is obviously going to be very expensive, and until you probably get to N of 12 or N of 15 where the cost curve starts to come down, and we sell that with solar, you see that with every kind of technology. And so OPG is taking a risk. They are being a first mover. I think they’re hoping to see dividends on some of the servicing that comes out of it. They already have a deal with Poland. They have a deal with Saskatchewan. They have a deal in Tennessee Valley Authority who’s moving ahead with this model, which tells me that they must have some confidence actually of what’s happening with OPG instead of turning away.

So OPG and GATAS, you’re trying to get to that Nth of 12, Nth of 15th where you get the cost curve down and then it starts to get cheaper. But in terms of… That’s the 300 megawatt on grid nuclear plant. What I’m interested in for the Arctic is the microreactors, and those are often maybe a 15 megawatt. Maybe you can stack a few of those when you’re talking about microreactors. And why is that important? Again, I’m going back to the cost of doing mining and the logistics of that. Right now you have to use diesel, and we can dump on diesel because it’s polluting and it’s bad for air pollution, all those things. But it really is a phenomenal fuel for the Arctic in that you can store it and you can store it all year. It’s reliable at minus 40 in the dark.

You can use it for your transportation fuels. You can use it for electricity generation, and you can use it for your heating one fuel in one tank in one community. And no other source of energy is anywhere near providing all those tools for remote community or for a remote mine. And right now, a lot of those remote mines, just to give you some perception of the scale, bringing about 60 million liters of diesel a year, that’s what they need to operate for the year. So just imagine the cost, $16 million of diesel, they’re having to build the ice road, having to warehouse it, run the generator. At that point, then you start to think, “Maybe a microreactor isn’t so bad. Maybe a microreactor is competitive with that kind of thing.”

The additional advantage of a microreactor can’t do everything diesel can do, but in terms of security, you can bury the microreactor, whereas a diesel tank just sitting there, adjacent, for example, a NORAD station or a small base, is really a sitting duck and a potential explosive. You know what I mean? If you just hit that diesel tank, everything goes. So there are some benefits to microreactors that I think a country like Canada really needs to explore. It’s the only way we’re going to get off of diesel at any kind of significance, but there’s so many other great reasons to advance microreactors.

Jackie Forrest:

Well, and I understand there is a trial at Chalk River right now for a fairly small unit. Any idea what the costs of that are looking like, or-

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Well, I… No, and they’re pretty close, holding it to the chest. The one I’ve been watching is Westinghouse eVinci, Saskatchewan Research Council has already committed, has sent an MOU to host that as a demonstration project to be the first one. There is some indigenous groups starting in Saskatchewan lining up to want to host that energy generation. Obviously, energy is very expensive in northern Saskatchewan. So we are seeing some models move ahead. CNSC is licensing some models already, helping the… As they move through the process, making sure that they’ll be able to be regularly at the end of it. And so I often ask, “How much does it cost?” There’s been some feasibility studies. But yeah, until we start. And again, until you see the 5th or 6th, don’t tell me what the cost is for the first of kind. I know it’s going to be expensive. What does the 8th or the 10th or that series look like?

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, and the reality is there already is micronuclear reactors up in the Arctic and they’re in submarines. In the American and Russian submarines. So there’s already-

Heather Exner-Pirot:

And floating nuclear plants in the Russian Arctic, by the way.

Peter Tertzakian:

So this is nothing new. It seems to be like something that’s potentially to keep our eye on and follow. Do we have time for one more question? Should we talk about indigenous matters, which you’ve written about extensively? We… Well, at least certainly I see a lot of momentum behind indigenous owned or indigenous sponsored projects. Cedar LNG is a great example. We’ve had Chief Crystal Smith on our program before. The new federal government, and a liberal plan is suggesting with another 5 or $10 billion in loans. Maybe just talk about that, but also talk about the point at which you think that these indigenous led initiatives, which are very impressive and have gaining momentum, are almost in a self-sustained economy where they can finance themselves and we have true lift off.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah, great question. So this loan guarantee program has been a huge boon to provide indigenous equity, and especially linear projects and electricity generation, a kind of project that gets a long-term contract and has very low risk. So anything that a utility would do has been a good fit for these loan guarantees because the government wants a very low risk project. When you start to get to think about mines or upstream oil and gas, that’s a very different risk profile and maybe isn’t a great fit for the loan guarantee, but would be a fit for some other kind of policy. So now we’ve seen Cedar LNG, we’ve seen quite a few hydro projects that were indigenous led, indigenous owned, and now the next big LNG project, Ksi Lisim is being led by the Nisg̱a’a as well as the Prince Rupert Gas transmission. So for $10 billion in capitalization, if you think about the multiple of that in your capital stack, that’s a lot of projects.

And in some cases, an ACCO or Hydro‑Québec have actually funded where you didn’t need a loan guarantee program that they came in and helped fund that equity, TC energy, that kind of thing. So lots of potential there. Not every project is a good candidate for equity. So it doesn’t need to be the gold standard. It’s not the solution to every project to get that indigenous involvement. Not every Indian community wants to be an equity holder in a project that does involve some different risks and different commitments, but it’s been a great solution, especially for linear projects and especially for pipelines.

Jackie Forrest:

Yeah. But mining projects, I guess it’s not a great fit because there’s no guarantee for the next 20 years what you’re going to make off of mine.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Now, this is where we come full circle, Jackie, because I think the microreactor is a very good fit for the loan guarantee model because the community could own the microreactor, sell that electricity to the mine, it gets off the mines books. That’s less capital that they have to put into the project, but they can provide that guarantee price of electricity regardless of the volatility of the commodity.

Peter Tertzakian:

Well, Heather Time’s up, but we could talk for a lot longer, as it is with many of our podcasts. We’ve covered the waterfront from Arctic, Arctic LNG, Bill C-59, C-69, nukes, small modular reactors nukes, microreactors, indigenous issues, and the list goes on. So I think we’ve just had covered the waterfront, if not the Canadian-Arctic waterfront, which is very long. It’s been a great conversation. Thank you so much, Heather Exner-Pirot… Or should I say Dr. Heather Exner-Pirot, Senior Fellow and Director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Thanks so much for joining us.

Heather Exner-Pirot:

Yeah. It’s my pleasure. Thanks, guys.

Jackie Forrest:

Thank you. And thanks to our listeners. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on the app that you listen to and tell someone else about us.

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