The News Rundown

Email shows B.C. energy minister wants 'big and shiny affordability measure' linked to climate plan

An email memo dropped by BC's NDP Energy minister in the legislature and then picked up by a BC United member and shared with the public shows a candid look at the government's real thoughts on the carbon tax, and how it's desperately trying to gain support for the increasingly unpopular tax in a time of an affordability crisis.
At the centre of the email is a hydrogen plant proposed by an Australian billionaire near Prince George. The $2-billion project has the potential to kick-start a highly-coveted “green hydrogen” market, which would generate more than 250 direct jobs, help decarbonize major sectors of the economy and give the province a homegrown zero-carbon fuel for use locally.
The entire venture, by billionaire Andrew Forrest’s company Fortescue, would be a great economic stimulus for what Premier David Eby says is “a city that desperately needs the kind of jobs that he’s proposing to bring forward.”
Eby said of the project: “The mayor is in support, the local First Nations is in support, I am in support. Mr. Forrest needs 1000 megawatts of electricity for the project that he has proposed, and that is massive. The challenge for us is we want those jobs, we want this plant, and we’re entering into discussions and negotiations with Fortescue.”
The NDP are trying to spin the email as proving how hard the government is working to address affordability issues, which is some interesting pretzel twisting. The Opposition, which released a copy of the email Thursday, said it’s evidence the NDP is using the carbon tax as a “political slush fund” for partisan gain, not to address climate change.
The minister, Josie Osborne, sent an email to herself on Nov. 22 at 7:13 a.m. saying Premier David Eby is “looking for a big and shiny affordability measure for (the next) budget” and that her office is considering returning a portion of the carbon tax to people through a CleanBC rebate on their monthly B.C. Hydro bills. CleanBC is the NDP name for the plan to reduce carbon emissions in B.C.
Osborne said she sent the email to herself based on ideas floated by an unnamed adviser. Osborne printed off a copy email Wednesday and dropped it somewhere in the hallways of the legislature, which she called “her mistake.” It was picked up by a rival B.C. United member. She confirmed that handwritten notes on the email are hers.
The memo comes during a heated debate over the future of the carbon tax in B.C. following statements from B.C. United Leader Kevin Falcon that he would freeze the carbon tax and remove it from home heating fuels and from B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad, who promises to scrap the tax entirely. Both say the carbon tax is crippling the economy and hard-working taxpayers.
B.C.’s carbon tax was North America’s first, implemented in 2008. It rose to $65 per tonne of emissions in April this year, and a federal mandate will see it at $170 per tonne by 2030.
A recent poll, conducted by Innovative Research Group and commissioned by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, found 49 per cent of respondents opposed B.C.’s carbon tax, compared to 24 per cent in support.
Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was in Duncan, BC on the Island a week ago and led a loud cry to "Axe the Tax", which referring to BC he can't actually do as unfortunately the federal carbon tax does not apply to BC residents as BC's carbon tax is already set higher than Canada's. Still, Poilievre believes that the federal tax could still be argued to have an impact on B.C. residents by indirectly raising prices on items produced elsewhere.
However, it's interesting how the leaked memo also shows how the government negotiates with companies that it wants to come here and set up operations. The memo says the government is looking for “leverage” with companies like Fortescue Future Industries, an Australian company that is awaiting provincial environmental approval for a hydrogen and ammonia production facility in Prince George.
From the notes: “You’ll either … pay B.C. Hydro $1 billion under the existing tariff OR agree to scale down size of your project, prioritize hydrogen for domestic supply and build some of your own wind turbines to power the project.” The tariff refers to B.C. Hydro’s fee for major new industrial projects to tap into its power grid.
The note also says the tariff “requires mega loads to pay for the incremental costs of new transmission and generation required to supply them,” however there’s “legal uncertainty” and “it would make most projects uneconomic to proceed.” In handwritten notes on the back of the memo, Osborne muses that the government could “tweak (the) tariff” and use it as a “stick” during negotiations with private industry.
There are two major problems with the advice given in the leaked memo. First, It floats the idea of shrinking the Fortescue project as a solution — when in fact the premier is saying publicly he wants the full thing, with all the jobs and all the benefits to the provincial economy.
Second, It also looks an awful lot like a threat to Fortescue, which can, and is, looking at other locations in Canada, perhaps where provincial governments might not put such amateur ideas into writing and then let them fall into the hands of their political opponents.
Mike de Jong, B.C. United MLA for Abbotsford West, said during question period the memo shows evidence of the government’s “plans to politically manipulate B.C. Hydro to stall collapsing support for CleanBC.”
de Jong said: “I think it paints a very troubling picture of how business is conducted within this government. The whole approach seems to be to intimidate the folks that we’re trying to attract to invest here in British Columbia.”
So why would Osborne, and an advisor, be flirting with the idea of kneecapping Fortescue when the premier is out cheerleading to bring it home? Well, the answer is simple. BC Hydro doesn’t have enough power.
The government hasn’t built enough power generation and transmission lines to feed all the new clean, green, energy projects it is trying to entice into the province to help it meet its future climate pollution reduction targets. That’s even with the new projected power from the Site C dam, which the NDP threatened to cancel in opposition.
The gap between what the NDP government wants — a utopian future of all electric vehicles by 2035, and a decarbonized economy — and what its power grid can actually handle is very large indeed.
On whether the government is considering changes to B.C. Hydro’s tariff system, Eby said the province is looking for ways to meet the massive demand from companies that want to decarbonize by using electricity.
“It requires us to be in negotiation and discussion with companies. It requires us to deal with things like cryptocurrency producers that use a huge amount of electricity, and don’t produce any jobs,” Eby said.
“It’s important for us to look at the entire structure of B.C. Hydro (and ask) how do we deliver this electricity, how do we build new generation capacity, how do we meet the demands that are out there, and how do we negotiate with companies that want to locate here to make sure that British Columbians who pay those hydro rates aren’t paying for that expense?”
It’s ironic, de Jong said, that the NDP were strongly against the Site C hydroelectric dam and other energy projects but now finds that we are facing an acute shortage of electricity and the NDP are still scrambling to find alternate sources of energy in the province.
Even with Site C scheduled to come on stream in 2025 — and a proposed call for independent power in the spring — Hydro will struggle to meet all the calls for electrification of the existing economy and to power myriad proposals for new industry.
The memo highlights the government's worries: “I worry that B.C. Hydro is trying to dump their problem onto us. Then we’ll have like 10 proponents knocking on our door lobbying us.”
The energy minister, appointed a year ago thus discovered what any of her predecessors could have told her: B.C. Hydro is inclined to operate as an empire unto itself.
Osborne continued the dialogue with herself: “Right now we have no framework to adjudicate between projects fairly and we don’t have ministry capacity to engage with each of them.”
But neither could the ministry just deny the applications: “We know that Premier David Eby won’t want to say no to anybody!” Leastways, not with an election less than a year away.
So, to recap, the New Democrats would offer the electorate a Hydro rebate to placate public anger over the carbon tax. They would also play hardball with a would-be investor to the tune of $1 billion.
Osborne tried to make light of the memo when talking to reporters. The contents came from an adviser, who she declined to name and merely represented ideas that were circulating inside the government. Her memo's words spoke for itself — and showed what New Democrats say when they think no one is listening.
Supplementals:

Alberta and the federal government have put in place restrictions for what publicly funded research institutes can do with China and in this case today we’re looking at Huawei yet again.
Huawei was the company that was trying to have its products installed throughout the nation's 5G infrastructure and was shut down after China’s influence within Canada became known.
Now one of Canada’s top AI researchers is launching a new non-profit research lab in concert with Huawei Canada worth $4.8m.
Richard Sutton, a professor at the University of Alberta and a pioneer in the field of reinforcement learning, says the Openmind Research Institute will fund researchers following the Alberta Plan, a 12-step guide he co-authored last year that lays out a framework for pursuing the development of AI agents capable of human-level intelligence.
There is of course question as to how much influence Huawei and ultimately the Chinese Communist Party would have but even in relationships where the CCP and Huawei is at arms length, their power still weighs.
Jim Hinton, a Waterloo, Ont.-based patent lawyer and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, said Huawei’s involvement with Openmind raises concerns. “Even if the money is coming with as little strings attached as possible, there is still soft power that is being wielded.”
Ottawa restricts funding for all research collaborations between publicly funded universities and entities linked to national security risks including China.
The Alberta government has similar restrictions at a provincial level and has limitations on who universities can research with.
This is why Sutton is setting up a non-profit research lab.
At this point it is clear that the governments are starting to see the threat that the Chinese Communist Party poses to Canada and have put in restrictions.
But it’s now evident that researchers can get around them and still conduct research that may indirectly benefit our adversaries.
Sutton has the best intentions in mind in terms of researching AI and also hopes to show how “things could be really good” and that it could counter the existing narratives.
He said, “this is a case where the interaction with China has been really productive, really valuable in contributing to open AI research in Canada.”
He also said that any work he does including research for Openmind will be open-source and no one involved will pursue intellectual property rights.
This means of course that the research will be in the public and anyone, including China and Canada could benefit.
He did admit though that Huawei was willing to be so open.
Huawei did not comment on the story.
Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a senior fellow at the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa, said that this is what Huawei does and it is China pushing the envelope.
“Companies linked to China’s military, like Huawei is, will try to find other ways around the federal rules, including directly funding researchers outside university institutions. It appears Huawei is doing exactly that,” she said.
The Openmind Research institute as it is called will pursue intelligence, an AI that would be capable of complex decision making and achieving goals which is a huge step up above the chatbots that we see today.
The governing board for Openmind will also include U of A computer science professors Randy Goebel and Joseph Modayil who also have experience working in the field at Google’s DeepMind.
The research agendas will be set separately, they say, from funding sources which is one further way of adding distance between the research and Huawei.
The briefings involved also state that Openmind researchers will be natural candidates for founding AI startups and commercializing research outside the non-profit. Though nothing is said at this point about what Huawei would expect out of this.
But it doesn’t need to since the nature of open source is that anyone can benefit from it.
This is in line with Sutton who is a proponent of open source and feels that the focus of ownership and intellectual property can slow down innovation.
Openmind is “adamant” that Huawei cannot influence the non-profit’s research, he added, and said he would decline further funding if the company attempted to do so.
This raises an important question: should there be legislation in Canada that prevents any research from being undertaken with adversaries of Canada?
Given the other crises that the country faces it is unlikely we’ll see any response to this but it is certainly something interesting to ponder.
Supplementals:

https://archive.is/e9zVc

Key highlights from the Liberals’ 2023 fall economic statement

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland tabled her fall economic statement on Tuesday, updating Canadians on the country's financial health and introducing some new measures to target the housing crisis. By all accounts, it was not a good update, with even noted Liberal-friendly journalist John Paul Tasker with the CBC calling it 'gloomy'. What exactly does it mean for Canadians?
Well, to start, there has been $20.8B new spending since the spring, which makes it a $40b deficit this fiscal year, with $488.7 billion total government spending through the end of March 2024.
Next year's projected deficit is around another $38.4B— a $3.4B increase from the government's previous projection.
Freeland's document suggests Canada will avoid a recession but predicts economic growth will slow to a crawl. Unemployment is set to rise nearly a full percentage point next year and tens of thousands more people could be out of work. Most of the new spending is earmarked for new housing initiatives, such as low-cost loans to builders, and climate-friendly projects.
Freeland is pitching the increase in the deficit as smaller than in years' past and as a sign of fiscal prudence. Sure. We've heard this before. The federal Liberal government has run a deficit every year since it was elected. It posted even bigger deficits during the COVID-19 pandemic as it scrambled to shore up an economy on the ropes during an unprecedented health crisis, but it put itself into a bad economic position to do so by increasing deficit spending in the 5 years before the pandemic too.
All the deficit spending is now coming home to roost as well. Now, with interest rates at a 20-year high, the cost to borrow all that money has spiked from $20.3 billion in 2020-21 to $46.5 billion in this fiscal year. The debt service charges will march even higher in the years ahead. Carrying the debt is expected to cost the federal treasury $60.7 billion in 2028-29, according to the economic statement. That means debt service charges are now among the most costly line items in the federal budget.
The federal debt has doubled from $619.3 billion in 2015-16, the first year of Trudeau's government, to $1.2 trillion last year. It's expected to climb to $1.4 trillion by 2028-29. The government has less fiscal leeway now to address issues like the housing supply crunch because it's spending so much more on servicing that debt.
Several items in the economic statement are headscratching priorities for the floundering Trudeau Liberals, but the biggest one has to be $129 million earmarked over 5 years that the government expects to spend on an updated Canadian journalism tax credit, beginning this year.
Ottawa proposes to increase the cap on labour expenditures per eligible newsroom employee to $85,000, from $55,000. It is also increasing the amount of salary that can be claimed under the program to 35 per cent, from 25 per cent.
Why is this bailout policy being put in place for Canadian news and journalists? Notwithstanding the tough talk, Bill C-18 has been an obvious and unmitigated disaster, resulting in lost traffic and revenues for Canadian news outlets who did not take the prospect of blocked news links on Facebook and Instagram seriously. If blocked news links extends to Google – a decision will presumably be forthcoming in the next month – the effect will be catastrophic to the Canadian media sector.
News Media Canada, which was the lead lobbyist for Bill C-18, became the lead lobbyist for a bailout this past summer. In September, the organization was demanding an increase to 35% of costs at $85,000 per employee. In other words, the government gave the lead news media lobbyist in Canada precisely what it demanded.
This raises enormous concerns about the independence of Canadian media. While the government claims this is being done to ensure a “strong and independent” press, it is not hard to see how the opposite may be true. Canadian media was already reluctant to hold government to account on Bill C-18 and now it finds that more than 1/3 of its labour costs for journalists are effectively paid by the government. Indeed, this inches Canadian news outlets ever closer to the CBC, particularly if government legislation is able to extract even more support from external sources such as Google.
It's interesting to note that most media coverage on the economic statement was focused on the increase in spending on housing support, but there are little to no mentions of the journalism bailout. The Canadian media is becoming increasingly complicit in terrible coverage of the Canadian government and it's hard to take what reporting on Trudeau government blunders and scandals seriously, given where these people's paychecks come from now.
Supplementals:

Firing Line

Mayor asks Trudeau for help in battle against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Edmonton

The October 7th invasion of Hamas into Israel and ensuing war been a lightning rod of controversy globally with countries responding in different ways from each other. Nowhere has this been more apparent than Canada.
This week we go to Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi and his call to Justin Trudeau for help in the battle against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Edmonton.
In a November 21 letter Sohi requested an immediate ceasefire, safe evacuation for Canadians in the region, a release of all hostages and restricted aid to address the humanitarian crisis.
He also is addressing an apparent over 3,000 emails, social media mentions and phone calls urging action to protect the safety of the Palestinian and Israeli people.
This also does extend to local concerns as well with a request for federal government support to protect “regions and cultural facilities from hate and violence in Edmonton.”
He wrote: “Locally, Edmonton is experiencing a concerning escalation of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. I have heard from many Edmontonians who are feeling unsafe. I have spoken with and heard stories from many Jewish and Muslim community members who feel and experience targeted hate at schools, places of worship and in public spaces.”
Similar calls have been repeated by big city officials including Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw who says that the city has seen a spike in hate crimes since October 7th.
The numbers in Toronto are interesting because antisemitic hate crimes in Toronto are up 192% from the same period last year and account for half or 39 hate crimes since the war begin.
Now when it comes to Islamophobic hate crimes, there have been 17 since the war began, an increase from just 1 the previous year.
Doing some math, this means that in the same time last year there were 20 antisemitic hate crimes to 1 Islamophobic hate crime.
It’s clear that since the war broke out, hate is more disproportionately affecting the jewish side.
At this point we’ll remind our listeners that hate crimes and violence against anyone is unacceptable.
For the case of Amarjeet Sohi it is very peculiar to see the mayor requesting help from the Prime Minister because it has been people like the mayor and Prime Minister that have stoked the flames of antisemitism.
Shortly after the initial attacks into Israel the mayor posted on X: “When events unfold across the globe, they can have a deep impact on people who live in our city. The attacks taking place in Israel and Gaza targeting innocent civilians are horrific. I know that many Edmontonians have friends and family in these areas, and I am extending my support and empathy to them. We stand with you and share in your hope for a just and lasting peace in the region.“
It remains unclear if the mayor has changed his mind on this given the barbaric nature of the attacks where women, children, and babies were among the butchered and executed.
The city also did not light the high level bridge blue and white which is often lit to commemorate or honour occasions.
This was a statement that was repeated by Sohi into the days after the initial attack and it became clear that barbarism was not going to be condemned.
This past week the Alberta legislature held a screening of a film for MLAs showcasing the atrocities committed on the October 7th attacks and it’s unfortunate that the mayor is not an MLA and could not attend.
It’s also slightly odd that he is asking Trudeau for help on this matter when Trudeau has also been stoking the flames of antisemitism.
First the Canadian government parroted and ran with Hamas narrative that Israel targeted a hospital in Gaza when it was actually a misfired Hamas rocket.
Secondly, Trudeau and company took a stance going against Israel’s and our allies saying that Israel needed to stop killing babies in Gaza.
This marked a tone change about 10 days ago that spurred a strong rebuke from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This story is reeking of controversy because the mayor of Edmonton is asking Trudeau for help on combating racism, hate, and antisemitism in Canada when these two have been some of the largest enablers since the war broke out.
Justin Trudeau and cabinet have also been split on the matter in that the government seems to be at odds with his own UN ambassador, former Liberal Leader and MP Bob Rae.
And of course the whole reason this discussion is missing in the media is that our media establishment has gone to great lengths to not take sides even if that means not showing the atrocities committed by Hamas and letting statements from Trudeau, Sohi, and others run unchallenged.
And why is this so important? Because Never Again should mean Never Again.
The rallying call to prevent the Holocaust from happening again is Never Again and as we’ve detailed time and time again on Western Context, Jewish people in Canada face the most hate crimes out of any minority group.
Those are facts that you don’t hear everyday and explain why we’re in the situation we are in.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

“This would give us some leverage with companies like Fortescue - You’ll either … pay B.C. Hydro $1 billion under the existing tariff OR agree to scale down [the] size of your project, prioritize hydrogen for domestic supply and build some of your own wind turbines to power the project.” - a leaked BC government memo showcasing advice on how to proceed on energy projects

Word of the Week

Leverage - the ability to influence situations or people so that you can control what happens

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Show Data

Episode Title: Leverage and Leaks

Teaser: A leaked memo shows the BC NDP’s inner thoughts, Huawei invests in Alberta AI research, and the Liberals’ fall economic statement gives more money for journalists. Also, Edmonton’s mayor asks Trudeau for support in the battle against hate crimes.

Recorded Date: November 25, 2023

Release Date: November 26, 2023

Duration: 1:03:20

Edit Notes: None

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX