The News Rundown

Saskatchewan firm's plan to export through Washington state instead of B.C. has David Eby fuming

Nutrien Ltd, a Saskatchewan based fertilizer company, is the largest potash company in the world, and truly one of Canada's global success stories. The company has however raised the ire of BC Premier David Eby, for deciding to build a new terminal at the Port of Longview, WA just north of Portland, to handle expected growth in international demand for its fertilizer products.
Eby said he was 'really disappointed' when he heard the news of the US decision over the port of Prince Rupert or Vancouver, and said that Saskatchewan potash will be hostage to the “whims” of President Donald Trump, who could impose tariffs on the exports or shut them down altogether: “I was especially surprised because there’s a lot we should be doing with Saskatchewan. Nutrien, one of their big potash producers, just announced that they want to ship potash out of Washington state.”
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said B.C. needs to turn down the rhetoric: “It has already cost us one investment in the potash industry and frankly, that is not being a part of Team Canada,” he said.
In 2016, Saskatchewan company Canpotex pulled out of a $775 million facility in Prince Rupert. Critics say the governments of Canada and British Columbia need to move faster to approve investment in facilities.
Another controversy, not mentioned by Eby, is why the $1 billion potash terminal did not make it onto the list of major projects promoted by Prime Minister Mark Carney. When the Nutrien news broke last week, the federal government voiced “surprise” and “disappointment” over the company’s decision to go to the U.S.
Federal Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon said: “Saskatchewan potash should be moved out of a Canadian port.”
He sought an immediate meeting with company executives to try to “convince them to change their mind.”
However, the company said it had been in contact with the relevant federal authorities all along and the lines of communication remained open. It won’t make the final investment decision on the terminal until 2027.
The decision to go with Longview was not lightly taken, according to the company's chief commercial officer, Chris Reynolds. He said that Nutrien weighed 30 factors including rail rates and the cost of construction. The site in Washington “came out on top” every time.
Longview was able to offer the company exclusive access to an unused berth at the Columbia River terminal, one formerly used for grain shipments. Nutrien has an established relationship in the U.S. Pacific Northwest as it already ships potash out of nearby Portland.
Other factors cited by the company in making its decision were congestion and transportation bottlenecks on the Canadian side of the border. Nutrien also noted recent labour disruptions at B.C. ports. Longview, by comparison, was seen as more efficient and reliable.
Transportation rates. Access to the port. Labour relations, Those are federal responsibilities.
Eby did not say if the province had made efforts on its own to persuade Nutrien to invest in B.C. But the province has already added port expansion to its list of preferred projects.
Worth noting, too, that a rival potash firm with operations in Saskatchewan is already building an export terminal in B.C.
BHP Ltd., the Australian mining giant, is spending $1 billion on the Westshore terminal at Roberts Bank, Delta BC, just west of the BC Ferries Tsawwassen terminal . It is the intended destination for the output of a $9 billion potash mine BHP is working to bring on stream two years from now in Jansen, east of Saskatoon.
Canada's onerous regulations are likely why Nutrien chose to build the terminal in the U.S., said Stuart Smyth, a professor with the U of S Agricultural and Resource Economics department: “To put a billion-dollar investment in place is going to require rail capacity improvements, and by the sounds of what Nutrien is saying, things are easier to get done in the United States than they are in Canada.”
Joel Bruneau, department head of economics at the University of Saskatchewan, said if transportation bottlenecks in Canada are impeding the free flow of Nutrien’s product, it has every right to seek alternatives.
“Carney wants, and we all want, more investment in Canada,” Bruneau said. “But if there’s bottlenecks in that railway, and Nutrien is saying those bottlenecks are problematic, then surely we should get rid of the bottlenecks in our transportation system. Surely we need another port in the country that we can offer to a company like Nutrien, one with excess capacity.”
Bruneau said it’s unfair to characterize Nutrien’s plan for a terminal in Longview as against the Canadian national interest: “Investing in the United States is going to make some American governor and American officials happy that a Canadian firm is investing in their country. Good for Nutrien. And not so bad for Canada, too, that a company trying to do the best for itself and its shareholders does something that shows Americans that we really are friends and allies.”
If Nutrien is banking on a better shipping alternative in Washington state, that should be taken as a signal to federal and provincial governments that “they need to step up” and remedy the country’s transportation shortcomings, Bruneau said.
That's the simplification of this story at the end of the day: If Canada wants business to invest more in Canada, we need the federal government to focus on infrastructure, removing transport bottlenecks, and making things predictable for companies. And, honestly if we can't beat the Donald Trump administration on business predictability then that says a lot about Canada.
Supplementals:

The number presently stands at 14 members of the UCP caucus facing recall campaigns. The recall campaigns sprung up after the UCP used the notwithstanding clause to order teachers back to work and Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan pledged to bring the government down. Not all petitioners have ties to the NDP
The media response to the recall has varied from listing the MLAs and the reason for the petition to outright suggesting if the campaign is successful the government would lose their majority status.
The recall petition must first be granted.
After this the petitioner has a set amount of time to collect signatures. If the number of signatures is met and verified then a recall vote is held.
If that vote sees more than 50% support the MLA is recalled and a by-election is held.
Global News online and on TV described the petition process as follows: “The petition process allows those behind each campaign to collect signatures in their constituency over three months and, if they collect enough, a vote is held on whether the MLA keeps their seat. It’s a long, multi-stage process. But if all nine MLAs are defeated in constituency votes, Smith’s government would lose its majority status.”
Starting off we have the recall campaign for Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides who is the MLA for Calgary-Bow. This campaign was started by Jennifer Yeremiy.
Yeremiy lives in Calgary-North West which is a neighbouring riding to Calgary-Bow.
She also was the previous candidate for the Alberta Party in Calgary-North West and got 778 votes in the 2023 election.
Those who sign the petition must live in the riding of Calgary-Bow. It is not immediately clear if Yeremiy has moved or if she lives in the riding.
The individual attempting to recall Angela Pitt of Airdrie-East is Derek Keenan, a school principal.
Serenity Shalev is attempting to recall MylesMcDougall, MLA for Calgary-Fish Creek who is also the Advanced Education Minister. halev says in supporting use of the notwithstanding clause to end a recent teachers strike, McDougall "shows that he's not interested in upholding a democratic and legal government."
Applicant Oana Uritescu is attempting to recall long term MLA and Speaker Ric MicIver and says McIver has failed constituents in his former role as municipal affairs minister by supporting legislation that "reduces local democratic control" while doing little to help the constituency with infrastructure, education and other priorities.
Applicant Joshua Eberhart is attempting to recall Dale Nally, MLA for Morinville-St.Albert, and says Nally hasn't been listening to constituents and using the notwithstanding clause to end the teachers strike "reflects an overreach by the UCP government, of which Dale Nally is a part."
The vast majority of these people are citing issues with the use of the notwithstanding clause and have issues with policy put in place by the UCP.
This leads to the question: should recall be used to settle policy differences? Or should it be reserved for more egregious cases of ethical or criminal breach?
If recall existed while the NDP was in power there’s a very real chance that many of those ministers would have been recalled too.
Alternatively recall can be used for ethical breaches such as the Redford sky palace fiasco of the early 2010s and COVID-era Kenney government snafus where MLAs went on vacation while others were told not to.
This is a level of nuance that the media is of course missing. Each of these petitions costs money and raises the question of whether or not recall is being used in the spirit of which it was designed.
Supplementals:

Dakota Nations claim title to mineral-rich corner of Manitoba valued at $1.3B annually

Two First Nations are suing the Manitoba and federal government, claiming land and mineral rights to the southwest corner of the province, where the annual value of oil and gas produced exceeds $1.3 billion.
Canupawakpa Dakota First Nation and Dakota Tipi First Nation filed a statement of claim in Court of King's Bench on Thursday, asking for a declaration of title and subsurface rights over the entirety of the Williston Basin in Manitoba, including oil rights "and the right to economically participate in the extraction, development, and production of subsurface minerals."
The lawsuit says the area is unceded ancestral land, and the Dakota were "deliberately and strategically excluded from the numbered treaties," meaning their inherent rights, including title, have never been relinquished.
The Williston Basin, which extends across southwestern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan, western parts of North Dakota and South Dakota, and eastern Montana, is known for rich petroleum and potash deposits. Oil was first discovered in the basin in 1936 in Montana, followed by Manitoba in 1950. It contains the Bakken Formation, an underground layer of rock that is estimated to contain as much as 503 billion barrels of oil.
The lawsuit says that prior to Confederation and the numbered treaties, the Dakota entered into a peace, friendship and trade treaty with the British Crown in 1763, which was reaffirmed and expanded several times in the following years, up to 1814.
Until 1930, Canada managed all Crown land in Manitoba, and until 1889, all land granted by the federal government included the subsurface rights — the legal rights to everything beneath the surface of a property, including the right to extract resources, the suit states.
After 1889, Canada began reserving all subsurface rights, and subsurface rights were transferred to the province in 1930. Most of the land in the Williston Basin was granted before 1889, so the majority of rights are in the hands of private owners, the lawsuit states.
The Crown still owns about 20 per cent of subsurface rights in the basin, which the Dakota Nations want transferred to them. Alternatively, their lawsuit calls for economic participation or compensation.
Faron Trippier, the lawyer representing the nations, said “The Dakotas were the allies of Canada and were critical to the formation of Canada, deliberately and strategically. The Dakotas were excluded from the numbered treaties. This means the Dakotas have never surrendered their rights or title, and they have unceded rights to the land.”
He also said “What needs to happen is a process where the government sits down with the Dakotas and engages in proper consultation. That failure in the past won’t continue. If we have to sit down in a court room, we’ll do it. We’d rather sit down in a boardroom.”
The province of Manitoba and the government of Canada have not commented on the case.
This story is reminiscent of the story in BC where the Cowichan tribes got the court to settle a case in their favour, and have set precedence in cases of Aboriginal title in BC. While this doesn't set precedence for Canada, the Supreme court of Canada has said it would not overrule indigenous claims like this and also our Notwithstanding Clause cannot overrule it either.
The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Aboriginal title is a robust form of ownership that cannot be easily "overruled" or extinguished by governments or private interests without strong constitutional justification. This stems primarily from the landmark 2014 SCC decision in Tsilhqot'in Nation v. British Columbia, which for the first time confirmed Aboriginal title as a collective right to exclusive use and occupation of land, predating Crown sovereignty. The Court emphasized that title holders have the authority to control the land, including decisions on development, and that infringements by governments must meet a strict "duty to consult" and justification test (e.g., compelling legislative objective, minimal impairment, and fair compensation).
Recent B.C. cases like the Cowichan ruling directly apply this precedent: The court found that even registered fee simple titles (private or Crown) can be overridden if incompatible with proven Aboriginal title, as title predates colonial grants. Critics argue this creates uncertainty for property markets, but the SCC has consistently upheld title's supremacy over non-constitutional property rights.
The Notwithstanding Clause (Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) allows federal or provincial legislatures to override certain Charter rights (Sections 2 and 7–15) for up to five years, but it explicitly does not apply to Aboriginal and treaty rights under Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982. Section 35 stands apart from the Charter, it's a standalone constitutional guarantee recognizing Indigenous rights as pre-existing and unextinguished.
This is a messy case that's only going to invite more and more just like it across the country. Whether or not the Dakota's get the recompense they are looking for, we're not going to see the end of Aboriginal title cases like it for some time.
Supplementals:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/winnipeg/article/dakota-first-nations-lay-claim-for-mineral-rights-in-manitobas-oil-patch/

Firing Line

Carney signs major energy agreement with Alberta, laying out conditions for new oil pipeline

The much anticipated memorandum of understanding between the Alberta government and federal government was unveiled on Thursday.
The goal is to take a series of steps that will hopefully increase co-operation on energy projects, increase energy production, and improve economic sustainability and export potential.
The hoe is that the conditions would allow for a new pipeline to BC’s west coast to happen.
The province will let the industry carbon tax rise to $130 per tonne which has been frozen in recent years. Alberta first brought in the industrial carbon tax (with support of the industry) in 2007.
Alberta will also push to develop the Pathways Alliance carbon capture and storage project.
The MOU also says that the federal government will suspend clean electricity regulations for Alberta, not implement the oil and gas emissions cap, and if required create a carve out for the federal tanker ban.
The hope is that this will lead to “one or more” pipelines.
There is also the goal of constructing thousands of megawatts of new power generation through nuclear that’s designed to power AI projects and a “dedicated sovereign cloud”.
There’s also a plan to bring more clean energy to Alberta by constructing new large transmission interties with BC and Saskatchewan.
Danielle Smith has called this a “new relationship, a new starting point, with a Prime Minister who cares about Alberta’s prosperity.”
She also said the Trudeau era was dark times because the natural wealth was trapped and wasted and now the Carney government has agreed to cease attempts to throttle our energy industry.
Danielle Smith was asked what the province would do to ensure that a Liberal Prime Minister would follow through on such a commitment, Smith said that Carney and others had to recalibrate their thinking on conventional energy.
Smith promised Albertans that the province would keep tabs on the federal government saying, “We will trust but we will verify. We will make sure that he lives up to the commitments in this agreement. We have to proceed somewhere with a measure of good faith.”
That good faith is important because we must take stock of just how much the government is admitting was a failure over the last decade and the wins that brings.
The emissions cap, tanker ban, and C-69 were obstacles to private sector investment, now there is a way forward. A win.
9 years ago to the day today (Nov 29) was when Justin Trudeau axed Northern gateway and later imposed the tanker ban and passed C-69.
Lifting of that emissions cap also allows for the optimization and expansion of Trans Mountain and the Enbridge Mainline.
Scrapping clean energy regulations is something Alberta has been asking for many years.
Given the 2021 ruling that allowed the federal carbon tax to be implemented and that Alberta was able to get a deal to on the industrial carbon tax, clean energy regulations, and emissions cap is a win.
These are all things that could not have happened under the previous government and are major admissions that the last decade of policy was kneecapping energy production.
The deal is not done, a pipeline is not guaranteed but many in the media will be all too content to not realize how big of a deal this is since they effectively acted as cheerleaders for the last decade.
The deal also sees holdovers in x being upset. We can imagine the likes of Jonathan Wilkinson are in this group as is former environment minister and current Canadian identity and culture minister Steven Guilbeault. Guilbeault resigned from cabinet over the MOU.
He plans to stay on as MP for his Montreal area riding. He has been portrayed as a popular MP for Quebec by the media.
Guilbeault is a former greenpeace advocate who spent time in jail, climbed to the roof of Alberta Premier Ralph Klein’s house and scaled the CN tower. Yet despite all this he became Trudeau’s environment minister and remained in cabinet under Carney.
Other Liberal MPs are rumoured to be upset at the decision including Nova Scotia Liberal MP Darren Fisher and BC MP Gurbux Saini and BC Liberal MP Wade Grant, the parliamentary secretary to the environment minister.
We saw in the media how the discussion went when there was the suspicion of the Conservatives losing members, will we see wall to wall coverage over the next week due to these members pushing back against the MOU?
Probably not and that highlights where the media leads its viewers astray.
Of course the fallback going forward to those in the establishment media and laurentien elite who do not want to see Alberta have a larger seat at the national table will fallback to David Eby and BC First Nations.
Eby is maintaining his no pipelines approach and says the province should have been part of the MOU. The MOU does call for Alberta to begin immediate discussions with BC which the Smith government will begin shortly.
Eby kept re-iterating his usual appearance that there’s no money for the pipeline and no private proponent.
He did rule out filing a lawsuit as the province did with Trans Mountain and suggested that he hoped the MOU would not detract from other projects like LNG Phase 2.
The general appeal is that ALL BC First Nations are against such a project but some support the idea given that there is a plan to have indigenous co-ownership.
While others have pledged to use every tool available to make sure a pipeline isn’t built and the tanker ban is not weakened.
As we get closer to a project being unveiled we will have to watch which exact nations are against the project and which ones support it.
But this discussion in BC itself regarding opposition to a pipeline project paves the way for the biggest discussion on Canadian unity ever.
Conservative Pierre Poilievre said that Carney delivered a pipe dream. He said, “a Conservative government would approve a pipeline to the Pacific without a carbon tax, without delay, without excuses… [The Prime Minister] needs to do one thing for a pipeline to happen” get out of the way.”
Poilievre also mentioned that a pipeline approval that crosses a provincial border sees the federal government have exclusive authority to approve either under Section 91(10)(a) of the Constitution.
This gets to the purpose of a country, our country. If we can’t build projects that might be slightly controversial that cross provincial borders that will lead to an increase in Canadian sovereignty and prosperity, we need to ask what is the purpose of our country?
Sir John A. MacDonald united east and west, English and French, to build the idea of Canada. A country so vast that it needed a national railway to strengthen its sovereignty in the eyes of American Manifest Destiny. If we cannot do that today, we must ask what the purpose of this country is and what road that leads us down.
This is something that has been wholly ignored this week by the media and they do this at their peril.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

“Investing in the United States is going to make some American governor and American officials happy that a Canadian firm is investing in their country. Good for Nutrien. And not so bad for Canada, too, that a company trying to do the best for itself and its shareholders does something that shows Americans that we really are friends and allies.” - Joel Bruneau, department head of economics at the University of Saskatchewan, on the decision for Nutrien to export through Washington rather than BC.

Word of the Week

Memorandum - a document recording the terms of a contract or other legal details

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Show Data

Episode Title: Canada’s Purpose
Teaser: Nutrien decides to export through Washington instead of BC, more UCP MLAs are facing recall campaigns, and the Dakota Nations sue for title over southwest Manitoba. Also, a memorandum sets the conditions for a west coast pipeline.
Production Code: WC-446-2025-11-29
Recorded Date: November 29, 2025
Release Date: November 30, 2025
Duration: 1:01:39
Edit Notes: Shane cough at end

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX