Hello Roy here. I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to the Roy Green Show ad-free on Amazon Music included with Prime. The West doesn't need to go back to get its oil flowing east. There is another way.
That's a column by Terence Corcoran in the National Post earlier this week. And Corcoran joins us on the Roy Green Show on the Coronus Radio Network. Terry, thank you very much for taking the time. And you write the Grim Times for Alberta and Alberta's oil and gas resources.
In fact, are even more grim. Would you explain that to us, please? Well, we've got, you know, we're having trouble getting oil to the West Coast, obviously, with the DMX pipeline. Still in the Hanging Limbo.
Getting oil to the United States has been the problem with the Keystone Hang-Ups. And Quebec says no matter what happens, they're not going to let any oil pipeline run through Quebec beyond what already exists. So it looks like Alberta is sitting there with its oil sands product in isolation there and nowhere to go. But there is an alternative.
Well, I'm very interested in that. I actually got into a debate with a couple of friends over lunch a few weeks ago. And I was telling them, look, pipeline could go north and then use the ocean. And they were telling me that I was off my rocker.
But you write about a planet. It's not what I suggested. But you write a planet put forward by Michael H. Bell, Canadian energy transport expert, which would, quote, liberate Alberta and Saskatchewan from the constitutional clutches off Quebec and British Columbia.
So watch them all here. Well, it involves running a pipeline from Alberta going through Saskatchewan and parts of Manitoba up to Churchill Falls. From Churchill Falls, it would board a tinker, which would circulate out of Hudson Bay around between Labrador and Quebec, or the top of Labrador, I guess, and then make its way, it could make its way down to the east coast of Canada, to New Brunswick, where they would load the oil and the oil could therefore be in the east coast and make it there, or even more promising, it could make its way to the United Kingdom or to any number of places that it can't get to now. And this is not with the issues and problems as one of the men promoting one of the executives from the executives promoting this as an employee.
I want to ask you about that, but it's interesting, isn't it, that Bill C48 precludes that kind of tanker traffic on the west coast, but on the east coast. It's perfectly fine. So if, well, justically, you could make that happen. If you could construct the pipeline, if you could get the oil to a tanker on Hudson Bay and get it all around as you suggested, if all of that can come together, then you would be able to move oil by tanker.
It starts to boggle the mind that we are tied ourselves in such knots over one of the most sensible things that we can do, and that is to use our energy, sell it to the ultimate benefit of the economy in every Canadian. So let me ask you this about such a pipeline. It would have to traverse Saskatchewan and northern Manitoba in environmentally sensitive areas. There would come the issue of tankers in the Arctic.
Now, that would create no doubt to stop the pipeline movement like DMX is facing, and although Churchill and Manitoba has a deep water port, could it handle large tankers? I know today's technology may just make this option doable, financially stable, and safe from the vagaries of political wins if it were to take place. I obviously have a ton of emails about the pros and cons of this particular project, and everybody raises these issues about Churchill, and even Michael Bell will say that maybe Churchill falls as not fully ready there at the present time to take on these major tankers. But none of this is insurmountable, including traversing what will certainly be cited as being, and probably is, environmentally sensitive territory all through the northern parts of those provinces, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
But the point that Bell is making, and he has a number of associates of former oil people who know their way around this a little bit, say that the least we can do is start a study to try and figure out what is possible, what are the shipping options, what are the ice that forms, and some people say, well, you'll never be able to get this through the ice because it all freezes up solid. It's different ice, isn't it? It's different ice, according to Michael Bell, it is, I don't ask me, I'm never in the Churchill fold, but I'm just looking at what they're talking about, and they're saying that the ice that forms there is an annual ice that is routinely broken up by the existing tanker technology and ice breakers and what have you. And Michael also points out that tanker transports despite some high profile incidents, including the Exxon Valdez off the west coast, despite these high profile incidents.
The first part of oil is safer than pipelines, which is there's 99.99% safety record associated with the transport of oil by tanker, and it moves by tanker into Canada all the time from wherever it comes from into the east coast, and it moves from tanker around and all kinds of places all over the world, with almost 100% safety in terms of spills, et cetera. So it all seems perfectly feasible, at least as something to be reviewed and thought about. Particularly when you, but you know when you consider that we're importing at least 700,000 barrels of oil a day from other parts of other countries, why don't we use our own to our own advantage and to our own economic advantage and to support and prop up our social programs because they're under duress with a federal debt over close to 700 billion dollars and provincial debts running out of the line as well. And if we're talking about costs, if I understand my Canadian geography reasonably well, a pipeline from Alberta to Manitoba would be essentially downhill, wouldn't it?
Which would be a lot cheaper than trying to climb one over mountains. I think it's essentially downhill. Well, maybe you're right. Well, it certainly wouldn't be uphill because you're heading toward a coast, but I'm sure there are obstacles in the way.
The objective should not be necessarily just the ship Canadian oil to Canadians. It doesn't matter who's getting the oil. The point is that there's a product there that Alberta has and Saskatchewan has, it can be and should be sold to the market if it can be extracted in an economic way and if it can be transported economically and sold to the market. That's where the jobs are.
And as you say, that's where the revenue flows come from to provide governments with the money to provide the services we expect from them. That's the objective here. Whether Canadians get it or not, if it's a chip to the UK or some other country in Europe or Africa or down into the US even, so what? The market's designed.
That's the market's designed, exactly. That's one of the reasons I've never been ultra enthusiastic about the energy East pipeline because it always gets wrapped up in this sort of nationalist thing that we need to be buying Canadian oil when we hit our homes in an Eastern Canada, whatever we do with the oil. As long as we don't freeze in the dark. That's right.
The next thing we know will be insisting that we pay higher prices in Canada for Canadian oil, which is not where we want to go at all, especially the motivation simply to make it mean that we're buying Canadian oil when we use oil. The bizarre thing about all this fixation, I'm going to call it this in the next day or so, this fixation on Canada exporting these little driblets of oil compared with the global market for oil, is that there are news stories constantly. The African countries have just announced that they're not going in with any climate change cutbacks in oil production or fossil fuel use. They need it.
They want it and they're going to continue to expand. India is expanding its coal production and will be for the next decade or more. And they're going for a while. Sure.
Everybody's going. We're like this little crazy planet Canada, and alternative universe trying to sort out some problems. There's nothing to do with the rest of the world. Just become a national loopy fixation for all of the complicated reasons.
I have to run, but I really appreciate your time. I love your work. I read the column and I said, I have to get Terry on the drone. Thanks for doing this.
That's really, really great. Terry's quarter. If you want to hear more, subscribe to the Roy Green Show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find your favorites. And if you like what you hear, leave us a review and tell a friend.
I'm Roy Green. Have a great weekend. First pitches, kickoffs. When the game is on, you call the shots.
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