The News Rundown

Smith sees no threat to Alberta from U.S.-Venezuela oil deal, renews pipeline push

In what was one of the most daring and shockingly successful raids earlier this year the United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and extradited him to the United States.
What followed was a change in Venezuelan leadership to a group more favourable to the US and a new interim government. That government is keen to restart oil production and the US just recently secured a deal to have majority control over 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves.
The deal gives the Pentagon an equity stake in North America Blue Energy Partners (NABEP).
NABEP has received concessions to 65 billion barrels of proved reserves, which would make it the second-largest oil company in the world.
Those 65 billion barrels represent about 20% of the 303 billion barrels that the country is thought to possess.
In addition to the equity stake that the US government has, the State Department has the right to purchase 20% of NABEP’s oil output at the cost of production rather than the market price.
The goal of this deal is to make Venezuela investable as most US oil producers are reluctant to invest there.
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told Trump that Venezuela is “uninvestable” during a televised meeting at the White House in January. ConocoPhillips doesn’t plan to return to Venezuela until it recovers the money it is owed by Caracas, CEO Ryan Lance indicated in February.
Coming back to Canada and specifically Alberta on this, why is this a big deal and why was no one talking about it in the media?
The answer is that Venezuelan oil is similar to Albertan oil (not the same, but similar) and there is a general feeling amongst Canadian oil producers that the deal will not amount to much.
Premier Danielle Smith said she sees no immediate threat. In the comparison of numbers she said that the International Energy Agency says Venezuela is producing about 1.1 million barrels a day while Alberta produces about 5 million a day.
Analysis on our side of the border also suggests that a lot of work needs to be done in Venezuela before they get to 1.5 million barrels a day. The country has fallen into decay after a decade plus of socialistic rule and the industry is lacking.
Smith does see this though as an imperative as to why the federal government must invest in energy infrastructure, she said, “It really just reinforces why the West Coast oil pipeline is the right answer, why we want to get an additional million barrels to the B.C. coast so that we can expand markets to Asia. If I had a wish or an ask, it would be let’s accelerate the plan for the West Coast oil pipeline, get it to market faster.”
Asia is where the industry and policy experts want Canada to go. Heather Exner-Pirot, the energy director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute think-tank, told CBC News she believes Canada’s main competition is not Venezuela, but rather oil reserves in Guyana, Brazil and the Gulf of Mexico. She said Canada can adapt by pivoting towards Asian markets.
Independently of the Venezuela discussions, Exner-Pirot also detailed online the missed opportunity of not building Northern Gateway.
She said in unpublished reports she has read an estimated $179.5b in revenue was missed out on which resulted in $28.9b in royalties that the governments in Canada did not get and $3.2b in provincial taxes and $6.1b in federal taxes.
Rory Johnston, a global commodities markets researcher at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, sees Venezuela as incremental competition and not an existential threat. Part of the reason is that Canadian oil markets grew before Venezuela was sanctioned and Canada represents security of demand.
Others including Janeta McKenzie of the Pembina Institute believe that there’s no guarantee the private sector will rush to Venezuela.
While it’s not immediately clear if the US investment in Venezuela will lead to more oil coming out of the country destined for the US, one thing the media seems to wash away is the timing of this announcement.
The timing is such that with trade talks breaking down, Donald Trump probably wants every bit of leverage he can get to use on Canada.
A lot of people don’t see the Venezuelan strategy panning out but given how the trade talks went, it is not surprising that the US administration is looking to break away from one of its Canadian dependencies.
Many US refineries in the south are set up to process Canadian oil. If they instead switch to Venezuela, the Canadian market will be lost or no longer needed.
Oil and potash are two of the main things the United States actually needs from Canada. If the administration can break dependency on one of those, Donald Trump would see that as a win just to put Canada in its place.
The media doesn’t assume he’d go that low or be that vindictive, but he would.
Supplementals:

Amid the media continuing to feast on the circus of the BC Conservative shambles, the BC NDP government quietly admitted their own mismanagement of the economy, to little fanfare. The double standard in the coverage between the two parties in BC this past week has shown the NDP just how much they can get away with, especially when the economic numbers look so different from what they originally project.
Officials confirmed on Tuesday that errors including botched currency conversions led the British Columbia government to overstate its forecasted natural gas revenues by about $1.46 billion over five fiscal years.
Energy Minister Adrian Dix said the most significant error, a 44-cent overstatement in the forecasted per-gigajoule price of natural gas this fiscal year, was a “serious mistake.”
But he was quick to downplay the flub, and said the errors affect the province’s forecasting, not its actual revenues, which can vary in a given year. Price fluctuations, including the spike and subsequent decline linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have led the province to both underestimate and overestimate its revenues over the years, Dix said.
“That part is a normal part. What isn’t a part of it is human error that we’re acknowledging today and correcting in the budget,” he told reporters in Vancouver.
Senior staff with the ministries of energy and finance told a technical briefing earlier Tuesday that the errors had been independently verified and corrections would be included in the province’s quarterly fiscal report expected later this month. The briefing heard the impact on B.C.’s deficit — last pegged at $7.7 billion for fiscal year 2025-2026 — would be made clear with the release of that report.
The most substantial of the errors made by Energy Ministry staff related to U.S.-Canadian dollar conversions, when a formula was incorrectly applied across a spreadsheet. The province’s forecasting is based on private-sector estimates of natural gas prices, which are provided in Canadian or U.S. dollars.
Dix said the error involved an incorrect assumption that figures were shown in U.S. dollars, when in fact they were Canadian dollars. The numbers were “again translated into Canadian dollars, leading to an overstatement of revenue,” he said.
A second error involving the conversion of energy units amounted to a five-cent decrease in the forecasted price. Two other errors stemming from the use of data from 2025 instead of this year’s figures resulted in a decrease in the plant inlet price of 1 cent per gigajoule, while adding 3 cents to the outlet price.
Combined, correcting the errors amounted to an average annual decrease in expected revenues of $292 million from this fiscal year to the one starting in 2030. The impact for the current fiscal year is $306 million, reducing forecasted revenue by about 24 per cent, from $1.297 billion to $991 million.
The mainstream media treats this as a future "forecasting problem" rather than money currently missing from provincial accounts. The missing angle is that BC is currently tracking a record-breaking $13.3 billion deficit for the fiscal year. A drop in expected revenue means that deficit is virtually guaranteed to climb even higher.
The government spent months passing massive spending programs during budget estimates based on a revenue cushion that never existed. Credit rating agencies look directly at revenue stability; this structural error puts BC at severe risk for further credit downgrades, which exponentially jacks up the cost of borrowing for future infrastructure like schools and hospitals.
The press focuses on the ministry's internal timeline, presenting the discovery as a sudden internal realization in July or August. However, Treaty 8 First Nations experts—who are direct partners in the gas-rich northeast and receive a percentage of these royalties— alerted transportation officials of the discrepancies back in June. After a month of nothing, they literally hand-delivered a letter to Premier David Eby on July 14 explicitly laying out these calculation errors. At first, when the government checked the numbers, they actually came back and said that there were no errors!
James Tate, a legal advisor for Treaty 8, stated they requested an urgent, transparent technical review for weeks and were met with "absolute silence". For a government that constantly champions the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), ignoring the direct, expert financial warnings of Indigenous nations to protect a political narrative is a staggering display of bad faith.
The government states that these administrative errors have "no impact" on the incoming natural gas royalty framework set to launch on January 1, 2027, an account that the mainstream media has parroted. However, independent economists are calling foul. Nancy Olewiler, an economics professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University, publicly stated that the government’s explanations are confusing and that the true hit to provincial coffers could easily be hundreds of millions of dollars higher than the $1.5 billion admitted.
The BC Greens have officially written to the Auditor General demanding an independent investigation, arguing that the public cannot trust the math behind the entire new royalty framework. If the Ministry of Energy cannot handle basic Canadian-to-US currency formulas on its current sheets, its ability to accurately track and audit complex corporate multinational profits under the 2027 system is completely compromised.
The issue was first raised by Business in Vancouver’s Stefan Labbé directly to Premier David Eby on Aug. 25. He asked why natural gas royalties could be off by billions of dollars from budget estimates. “I’m not familiar with any error in our budget related to oil and gas revenues,” Eby responded.
Labbé reminded the premier that Treaty 8 Nations chiefs had delivered Eby a letter July 14 raising concerns about the new gas royalty regime, and technical errors in how the province estimated revenue. The normally well-briefed premier was caught off guard. His office quickly leapt into damage control. In a statement to Labbé, it described the issue as a mere “administrative error.”
But Labbé, to his credit, was undeterred. He suffered through a series of vague and contradictory statements by the Ministry of Energy, which seemed more intent on quibbling about the complex technical nature of the issues raised by the Treaty 8 Nations than acknowledging the giant hole in the budget.
So Labbé put the question back to Eby again on Tuesday. This time, with a paper trail of evidence provided by First Nations, and rising concern from the Opposition and economic experts about the budgeting process, the premier fessed up.
Eby changed his tune: “I'm not pleased by this situation. The Ministry of Energy has advised me that there was a human error in the spreadsheet calculations around natural gas royalties.”
The premier said he’d “instructed” the ministry to offer a technical briefing to the media, as well as refer the matter to the independent auditor general for review.
“We need to ensure that the information that goes into the budget is accurate, complete, and that people can have confidence in it. That was not the case for these royalty numbers. And we'll ask the auditor general for assistance to ensure that we have the processes in place to make sure this never happens again.”
The premier’s contrition was not exactly echoed by senior government officials, who were forced to walk reporters through the issue hours later at a hastily scheduled briefing.
The timeline proves the Ministry of Energy knew about the $1.5 billion black hole in July. If Eby was telling the truth on August 25, it means his cabinet ministers hid a $1.5 billion fiscal disaster from their own Premier for over a month. If he was lying, it means the Premier intentionally withheld a massive budgetary failure from British Columbians until independent journalists forced his hand.
Yes, the entire budget is itself basically a giant forecast of what government predicts it will earn and spend in a given year. That’s why it’s updated quarterly with real results. But the starting forecasts are supposed to be carefully calculated by experts. If they’re not, the whole budget, and its interconnected estimates of money in and money out, starts to fall apart at the seams.
“The projections aren’t supposed to be based on a wing and a prayer, they are supposed to be based on sound conditions,” said independent MLA Peter Milobar, a longtime finance critic. “You like to have some sort of confidence in that. And frankly how much confidence should we have in any of these other projections? Was this a one-off or not?”
The Opposition BC Conservatives did not respond to a request for comment, and leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s team did not want to make finance critic Gavin Dew available to speak to the issue. However, Dew defied the edict and did the interview anyway.
“It’s a wildly egregious error that strikes at the very competence of this government, their very fiscal literacy, their very ability to do something so basic every single small business person does every day, and that is calculate things using Microsoft Excel and not f**k up the formulas,” he said.
Dew said he’s concerned the government wasn’t honest with the media about what it knew and when. He demanded government make all relevant information public before advance voting begins Sept. 18 in the Abbotsford-Mission byelection being contested by Findlay.
“What kind of dog and pony show, half-baked, Podunk, just-fell-off-a-turnip-truck-government is David Eby running where errors this basic are able to make it into the fundamental budgetary documents of this government?” Dew asked.
And that's the truth of the matter - what kind of government is Eby running that a billion and a half in expected revenue can vanish due to a spreadsheet error?
Supplementals:

https://www.biv.com/news/commentary/rob-shaw-bcs-15b-excel-spreadsheet-screw-up-leaves-bigger-questions-for-voters-12733979

Ottawa spending $4.7B on new made-in-Canada Via Rail passenger cars

The federal government is spending $4.7b for Via Rail to acquire and maintain 313 new passenger rail cars from Alstom Canada.
This project was announced as a part of a Buy Canadian policy to create jobs and spur investment into the economy in light of tariffs.
The headline from the Prime Minister and what the media mostly talked about was how these cars will be built entirely in Canada.
Mark Carney said, “They'll be Canadian electricians that install the wiring, Canadian machinists that will make the precision parts, Canadian welders will build the steel frames from Canadian carbon steel.”
Carney also quipped that the cars we presently have were built when the Leafs would win the Stanley Cup. The cars being replaced are 77 years old.
We know the federal government will invest $4.7b. But that does not spell out where that money will go.
We know about $4b is manufacturing. That leaves about $700m in 15 years of parts and support. Which translates to $2.2m per car over 15 years while each car themselves will sell for about $12.7m.
The stories also do not mention who Alstom Canada is. Alstom is a French multinational company that absorbed Bombardier Transportation. So while the cars will be assembled in Canada this is not a return of an industry that will build rail cars in Canada in perpetuity.
It has been said that about 700 jobs will be created with this project creating upwards of $1.6b in economic benefit. Transport Canada says that the actual number is about 615 manufacturing jobs for a few years plus about 55 a year to support the train cars. It is not 700 new permanent jobs.
Passenger rail in Canada is not a primary means of transportation when most Canadians think about it.
There has been a plan in the works to build high speed rail between Toronto and Quebec city with the option of expanding south-west towards Windsor. But that doesn’t really answer the question of what Via Rail is best used for.
Columnist Matt Gurney wrote in the Toronto Star that despite aging cars with new ones on the way, the service one gets with Via rail isn’t good, reliable, or speedy.
In fact, Railway Supply, an online publication, earlier this year said that Via Rail’s on time performance fell as low as 30% in the first quarter of 2025.
A report delivered for the Auditor General’s office of Canada said that declining punctuality rates raises the risk of passengers switching to other modes of transportation, threatens revenue targets, and undermines VIA’s ability to meet strategic objectives.
Given the conditions that Via operates in, Via has not been able to improve their service under these conditions in any meaningful way.
In terms of delays one of the reasons is that in Canada a passenger line like Via has to give right-of-way to freight. Via owns less than 3% of the track they operate on.
Via had been working since 2023 to have the Canada Transport Agency impose a new service agreement but that agreement that would help mitigate these issues still has not been implemented.
Combine this with service frequencies that don’t inspire people to take the train and that in some cities (such as Edmonton) the Via station is in the middle of nowhere, Via is not the first option a lot of people think of when it comes to transportation.
New cars worth billions won’t solve that issue and instead it’s a government announcement set to the tune of tariff relief for Northern Ontario.
Instead we should be asking how long it took for the announcement to be put together and if it was on the table before talks broke down.
Supplementals:

Firing Line

Toronto city councillor says Muslim-only subsidized housing is acceptable

A Toronto city councillor sees nothing wrong with a policy that allows the exclusion of non-Muslims from a subsidized building in the cityThe policy — approved by city council — has elicited outrage.
Councillor Joe Cressy, of Ward 20 Trinity-Spadina says the policy, which that allows only Ahmadiyya Muslims access to a city-subsidized apartment building is not unfair. Toronto City Council’s multi-year contract On Jan. 1 with the Ahmadiyya Abode of Peace apartment building, a 14-storey apartment building on Finch Avenue West, legally restricts tenancy to members of the Muslim Jama'at.
This policy triggered public backlash when Austin Lewis, a 21-year-old physically disabled man in a wheelchair, was stripped from the building’s rent-geared-to-income waiting list because he is not Muslim. City officials defended the agreement under Section 18 of the Ontario Human Rights Code, which allows specific social housing providers to restrict their waitlists to targeted ethnic or religious groups.
“We don’t like you, you can’t share our religion, you can’t live here — it doesn’t make sense,” said Lewis, who is physically-disabled and requires the use of a wheelchair.
The Ahmadiyya property is among those that is accessible for his needs.
Lewis’s mother is outraged that her son, among others, has been taken off the list.
“It’s wrong on every single level. This goes ahead everything Canada represents to me,” said Laura Whiteway, 50, of Brampton.
While many online attacked the idea that a subsidized residence could be restricted to Muslims only, it’s not the only location in Toronto that selects tenants based on religion or age. For example, the McClintock Manor on Pape Avenue is geared to “Christian seniors. Under the mandate adopted by Toronto city council in 2002, a total of eight residences are geared to targeted groups, including buildings that house those of Macedonian, Chinese, Lithuanian and Greek backgrounds.
In a statement defending its practice, the city says the provisions do not violate human rights laws. “The City’s mandate policy allows social housing providers to restrict their housing to individuals belonging to an identifiable ethnic or religious group if specific conditions are met,” the statement reads.
About 90,000 families in Toronto are on waiting lists for subsidized housing. About 11,000 people looking for subsidized housing were removed from the waiting list at the Ahmadiyya Abode of Peace for not being Muslim.
While municipal councils directly approve local waitlist restrictions, these buildings rely heavily on larger funding frameworks tied to the federal government. The federal government routinely pours massive funding into municipal social housing pipelines. For example, the federal government and the City of Toronto announced a $2.7-billion housing supply partnership on August 5, 2026. This means federal tax dollars directly expand a municipal housing ecosystem that legally sanctions identity-exclusionary waitlists.
The federal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney aggressively uses the Housing Accelerator Fund to financially penalize cities that fail to meet strict zoning and density metrics. However, the federal government remains entirely hands-off regarding human rights equity. They withhold money if a city builds too slowly, but ask zero questions when those same cities use public dollars to kick disabled applicants off apartment lists based on their religion.
Publicly funded infrastructure is supposed to prioritize the most vulnerable, such as citizens with physical disabilities who face severe shortages of wheelchair-accessible units. The media refuses to call out the moral contradiction of a system where a person's religious identity is prioritized over a physical disability during a severe housing shortage.
The media also regularly lecture Canadians about systemic discrimination and invisible barriers to public services. Yet, they remain silent when a government entity puts up an explicit, written barrier that bars a Canadian citizen from shelter based purely on faith.
The media frame these debates as isolated, localized incidents. In reality, these restrictions worsen an already broken, multi-year waiting list. While the federal Liberal administration focuses on high-level corporate growth plans and macroeconomic summits, vulnerable working-class Canadians are left to fight for a shrinking pool of public resources that are being divided up along identity lines, causing people to clash culturally, rather than against the government for setting them up.

Quote of the Week

“What kind of dog and pony show, half-baked, Podunk, just-fell-off-a-turnip-truck-government is David Eby running where errors this basic are able to make it into the fundamental budgetary documents of this government?” - BC Conservative finance critic Gavin Dew, on the BC government’s $1.5B revenue spreadsheet error.

Word of the Week

Podunk - a small, insignificant, out-of-the-way, unimportant town.

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Show Data

Episode Title: The Dog and Pony Show
Teaser: The media dismisses the US-Venezuela oil deal as inconsequential, spreadsheet errors lead to a $1.5B decline in BC revenue, and the Carney government is spending $4.7B on new passenger rail cars. Also, Toronto defends its Muslim-only housing policy.
Production Code: WC-484-2026-09-05
Recorded Date: September 5, 2026
Release Date: September 6, 2026
Duration: 1:03:47
Edit Notes: None

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX