Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
A new study released by the Institute for Energy Research (IER), “Counting Canada Wrong: The Hidden Surplus Behind the Headline Deficit” (September 2026), makes a case that official trade statistics should treat “discounted raw materials from allies the same as imported finished goods from adversaries.” The present accounting “[has] misdirected Washington’s attention and obscured how international commerce truly affects American manufacturing.” The introduction to this study follows.
Ed. Note: A new study released by the Institute for Energy Research (IER), “Counting Canada Wrong: The Hidden Surplus Behind the Headline Deficit” (September 2026), makes a case that official trade statistics should treat “discounted raw materials from allies the same as imported finished goods from adversaries.” The present accounting “[has] misdirected Washington’s attention and obscured how international commerce truly affects American manufacturing.” The introduction to this study follows.
“While trade deficits are often a flashpoint when foreign nations undercut domestic manufacturing, the headline deficit with Canada tells a deceiving story. A closer look reveals a trade arrangement that overwhelmingly favors American production, energy independence, and industrial power.”
Putting America First requires trade metrics that accurately reflect industrial strength, strategic independence, and the value of American workers and manufacturers. However, for decades, official trade figures that treat discounted raw materials from allies the same as imported finished goods from adversaries have misdirected Washington’s attention and obscured how international commerce truly affects American manufacturing.
While trade deficits are often a flashpoint when foreign nations undercut domestic manufacturing, the headline deficit with Canada tells a deceiving story. A closer look reveals a trade arrangement that overwhelmingly favors American production, energy independence, and industrial power. Unlike geopolitical rivals and adversaries that export finished consumer goods, a significant share of U.S. imports from Canada are in the form of raw, unprocessed commodities that are the feedstock for American production and manufacturing. Notably, oil, natural gas, potash, and increasingly, critical minerals account for most of these materials, and the U.S. has historically imported them at significant discounts relative to benchmark prices.
Once America imports these low value raw inputs, American workers provide the processing and refining that turn them into high-value, domestically manufactured consumer goods, driving U.S. job creation and industrial output.
Securing discounted Canadian crude oil, natural gas, potash, and critical minerals breaks our dependence on hostile foreign cartels like OPEC+, supports American farmers and workers, and secures discounted supply chains needed for American manufacturing dominance. Looking only at the total Canadian import bill risks overlooking where jobs and economic prosperity are ultimately created.
For energy, fertilizers, and raw or unfinished metals, the value captured from importing relatively low-cost Canadian production also improves the overall U.S. trade balance globally by allowing the U.S. to sell finished goods at a premium. In the end, these imported, low-cost Canadian inputs fuel U.S. high-value exports to the rest of the world.
Given these raw goods’ contribution to American exports, it is worth considering whether to adopt an alternate perspective on the U.S.-Canada trade balance. Historically, U.S. customs law has treated foreign inputs as “originating” in the imported country when substantial transformation occurs, such as when raw goods are refined or manufactured into high-value finished goods.
Preferential Trade Agreements, such as the United States-Canada-Mexico Agreement (USMCA), codify the substantial transformational analysis into detailed rules of origin (ROO) that require certain percentages of content to come from the trade region (i.e., Regional Value Content or RVC), shifts in tariff classifications, and, increasingly, use certain percentages of goods (e.g., steel and aluminum) and labor valued at certain rates. Rebalanced and reciprocal trade policy needs to go an additional step forward. Specifically, U.S. trade frameworks should recognize that America’s ability to produce a trade surplus is built on the oil, natural gas, potash, and critical minerals relationship between Canada and the U.S.
The U.S. should designate these Canadian inputs that undergo substantial transformation in U.S. manufacturing facilities, which are typically operated by the same or related companies that perform the raw materials’ production, as domestic goods under U.S. laws and regulations. Rather than allowing U.S. trade figures to continue to mask the positive impacts of certain Canadian imports, trade figures should treat these as domestic goods. Acknowledging this reality would virtually eliminate the trade deficit with Canada and refocus trade policy on creating more opportunity and growth for American workers.
The collapse of US-Canada trade talks last week, and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s declaration that “you’re at war when you get attacked,” has turned a tariff dispute into a political toxin that now sits inside the one relationship still holding North American energy security together.
President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the US had secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves through a partnership with private business.
The collapse of US-Canada trade talks last week, and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s declaration that “you’re at war when you get attacked,” has turned a tariff dispute into a political toxin that now sits inside the one relationship still holding North American energy security together. Fifty-percent US tariffs have taken effect on billions of dollars of Canadian goods; Ottawa has promised dollar-for-dollar retaliation from September 8th. Crude oil, natural gas and potash were, for the moment, carved out of the American levies, but that exemption cannot be thought permanent. The uncertainty, the public flirtation with using oil as a retaliatory instrument and Carney’s larger strategic posture toward Washington already threaten the physical barrels and the political trust on which the 2025 National Security Strategy depends.
The contrast with what seemed possible only a year earlier could not be more dramatic. The August 2025 Anchorage meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, however inconclusive on Ukraine, opened a window onto a potentially different energy order: one in which sanctions-driven distortions might have eased and Russian Arctic and Siberian resources might have again attracted Western capital. Combined with the January 2026 capture of Nicolás Maduro and Washington’s subsequent assertion of control over the rules of Venezuelan oil production, that vision promised hemispheric abundance rather than managed scarcity. Carney’s brinkmanship now risks putting a dagger through it – and doing so at the expense of Alberta first.
The Anchorage window and the promise of abundance
On August 15th 2025, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, the presidents of the world’s largest and third-largest oil producers met for the first time since the outbreak of the Ukraine war. No ceasefire was signed, although the maximalist demand by EU hawks for an immediate ceasefire was dropped as a non-starter. Trump said there was “no deal until there’s a deal”. Putin later conceded that “there were indeed no agreements reached in Anchorage”. Yet the meeting itself, after years of isolation, revived talk of economic cooperation in the Arctic, LNG technology, icebreakers and even possible restarts of ventures such as Sakhalin-1. Russian officials spoke of region-to-region contacts between the Russian Far East and the US West Coast; side conversations touched Novatek technology for Alaskan gas.
That window mattered because the post-2022 sanctions regime boomeranged on its progenitors. Measures intended to turn the Russian rouble into rubble instead accelerated Europe’s de-industrialisation, sent discounted Russian barrels through Indian and Chinese refiners into European markets at a premium and encouraged experiments in non-dollar settlement. A genuine US-Russia thaw would have reversed those distortions, reopened Siberian unconventional plays to American fracking expertise and reduced the incentive for BRICS energy trade to migrate away from the dollar. Developing countries, long subject to decarbonisation demands while the West consumed the fossil fuels that built its wealth, would have gained cheaper energy and a less politicised development path. The ‘spirit of Anchorage’ never became a treaty. By mid-2026 it had largely dissipated. But the mere possibility of ending the sanctions-driven split in global oil trade – and of pairing US technology with Russian Arctic and Siberian geology – was part of a larger architecture of energy abundance. The other half of that architecture was sitting in the Orinoco Belt.
Venezuela’s heavy oil and the Trump Corollary
In the pre-dawn hours of January 3rd 2026, US forces captured Nicolás Maduro and flew him to New York to face narcotics-terrorism charges. The operation was the most muscular application yet of what the administration calls the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The November 2025 National Security Strategy had pledged that the United States would “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere” and “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to… own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere”. Venezuela’s oil was precisely such an asset.
The Energy Institute’s Statistical Review still lists Venezuela as holding the world’s largest proved reserves – on the order of 300 billion barrels, the great majority of them extra-heavy Orinoco crude. At recent prices that stockpile is notionally worth many trillions of dollars. Venezuelan output has risen from well under a million barrels per day toward roughly 1.2 million, with several hundred thousand barrels now moving to US refiners. Supermajors remain cautious; service companies and smaller independents have moved first. Full restoration toward two to three million barrels per day still looks like a multi-year project even under favourable political conditions. That timeline is why Canadian barrels remain indispensable in the near term – and why treating them as a weapon is so reckless.
President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the US had secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves through a partnership with private business. This unprecedented US agreement to take control of a fifth of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves is a bet that American companies can revive the nation’s battered energy industry.
As important as the headline volume is the molecule. Long-chain, high-sulphur, high-residuum crude is ideally suited to the delayed-coking complexes that dominate the US Gulf Coast. Those refineries convert discounted heavy sour barrels into diesel and jet fuel more efficiently than light-shale slates can be upgraded. Control of Venezuelan heavy oil therefore complements, rather than merely duplicates, the Permian’s light sweet output. It gives the United States a full-spectrum position across the barrel and a second wing for a non-OPEC Americas bloc that already includes US shale, Canadian oil sands, Guyana’s new discoveries and Brazilian pre-salt, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
Four million barrels a day and the Alberta-Ottawa fault line
EIA data show US crude imports from Canada averaged 3.9 million barrels per day in 2025; weekly figures through 2026 still cluster around 3.5–4.2 million. Those volumes have routinely accounted for around 60% or more of US crude imports. The main destination is not only Houston. It is first the US Midwest, then the Gulf Coast: complex refineries configured over decades for Alberta’s heavy sour crude. Bloomberg put 2025 Midwest receipts near 2.7 million barrels per day vs about 416,000 barrels per day to the Gulf. These barrels are not interchangeable with Permian light or with distant Middle Eastern grades that must travel longer, more vulnerable sea lanes. Without them, utilisation rates fall, product yields suffer and pump prices rise. In a tight global distillate market – the spread between crude and diesel, the “crack spread”, has run over $100 a barrel – the substitution problem is acute. As David Blackmon assesses, there is no ready alternative outlet of comparable size and proximity for Canada either. Canada’s only large operating Pacific marine outlet is the Westridge terminal in Burnaby, the end of the Trans Mountain pipeline, rated at 890,000 barrels per day. That line can be optimised toward about 1.19 million barrels per day by 2028. A separate million-barrel West Coast pipeline has been proposed, with construction possibly starting in 2027. Neither is a substitute, this year or next, for the US inland system.
Canada’s own vulnerabilities are equally structural. Eastern provinces, home to most of the population, still depend on US-sourced barrels or on west-to-east pipelines whose routes pass through Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Ottawa’s long refusal to approve adequate all-Canadian eastbound pipelines left Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa exposed. Any serious disruption therefore boomerangs on Canada as surely as it would hit Chicago and Houston.
That is why using oil as a weapon would detonate inside Canada long before it wounds the US – an economy 13 times larger that absorbs just under three-quarters of Canadian exports and some 90% of its oil exports. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has said she “cannot think of a more disastrous policy decision than cutting off or taxing Alberta’s oil to the United States”. Doing so, she warned, would extinguish hundreds of thousands of livelihoods in Alberta, hobble Ontario and Quebec, send the TSX into a dive – and hand US cokers a reason to look to Venezuela instead, perhaps permanently. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was equally blunt: his province “cannot and will not support any kind of export tariff” on oil or potash. The producing Western regions of Canada have told Ottawa no.
Danielle Smith also points out that an export tax on Alberta crude invites a symmetric American levy on gasoline and diesel heading into Ontario and Quebec “right as we turn into fall and winter”. Carney himself said in July he did not “see the value” in using energy as leverage and that Canada must remain a “reliable supplier”. The ‘war’ language of last week sits uneasily with that earlier caution. If Ottawa now flirts with the oil card, it will reopen the oldest Canadian fracture: Alberta and Saskatchewan sell the oil and potash, and the Carney Government in Ottawa is tempted to treat those exports as leverage. Alberta’s separatist undercurrent does not need a better recruiting poster.
This interdependence is a strength when relations are stable. It becomes a glaring weakness when they are not. Even though energy was excluded from the latest 50% tariff list, the collapse of talks has already injected the uncertainty that markets and capital abhor. Cross-border projects feel it immediately. South Bow’s Prairie Connector – a partial reuse of cancelled Keystone XL pipe, with 20-year commitments for about 465,000 b/d and a mid-2027 investment decision – needs a permit that survives the next election. CEO Bevin Wirzba has said the company will not proceed without a “durable” US authorisation. Twenty-year contracts cannot be financed on a relationship described as war.
Waiting out Trump: Democrats, Davos and a lame-duck bet
Mark Carney is a former Bank of England governor and UN special envoy for climate finance who once argued that central banks should help impose “moral sentiments” on capital allocation in the name of Net Zero. In his January 2026 Davos speech he told middle powers that the old rules-based order was fading and that “when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness” – obviously, if obliquely, referring to Trump’s America. He has signed new “strategic partnerships” with the EU and China, diversified trade talks across four continents and presented Canada as an “energy superpower” whose customers need not be confined to the United States.
Carney elevated Maia Johnson — an American who worked on scheduling and operations for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and later on the Biden and Harris efforts and who was tied to Michael Bloomberg’s political-data firm Hawkfish — into a newly created senior operating role in the Prime Minister’s Office. The hiring choice is a signal about which American political network Ottawa finds congenial. So are Carney’s private meetings this year with leading 2028 Democratic contenders – including Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg and Elissa Slotkin – as Democrats begin to audition for the post-Trump era.
The timeline fits a waiting game. People familiar with Ottawa’s deliberations told Bloomberg that Carney’s Government sees little chance of restarting talks before the November 2026 midterms and is designing support “to ride out the balance of Trump’s term if necessary”. Carney himself said Canada would back affected firms “for as long as it takes, in other words, beyond the life of this US administration”. Danielle Smith, from the other side of the same calendar, has urged diplomacy so that Canadian oil can be kept out of the trade war. CityNews put the question directly: is Carney waiting for a lame-duck president?
But a Democratic midterm gain would not automatically unwind executive tariffs; a White House official called that expectation “a desperate pipe dream”. A 2028 Democratic restoration does little to alleviate the trade standoff. It might, however, restore the Net Zero reflex that spent a decade making Canada’s physical ability to get crude out of Alberta and to paying customers harder. Betting the continental oil system on a US partisan cycle is the opposite of energy security.
Trump’s National Security Strategy is an energy-dominance doctrine that treats pipelines, upgraders and heavy-oil reserves as instruments of hemispheric security. The Venezuelan reset was meant to reduce extra-hemispheric influence in the Americas and, over time, to give Washington a substitute source of heavy crude. That substitution is years away. In the meantime any sustained interruption – or even the credible threat of one – raises the odds of tighter product markets, higher prices for American and Canadian consumers alike and the postponement of the very infrastructure that would make the hemisphere more secure.
The Anchorage meeting and the Caracas operation together sketched a world in which the Western Hemisphere could become a low-cost, high-security energy platform spanning Alaska to Tierra del Fuego – light oil from the US Permian and other shale oil basins married to heavy Orinoco and Athabasca crude, insulated from Eurasian pipeline politics and Middle Eastern chokepoints. That architecture still requires Canadian flows in the critical intervening years. Carney’s war language, his Democratic entanglements and the temptation to ‘wait Trump out’ do not create new heavy-oil supplies or new all-Canadian pipelines. Rather, they raise the probability that the existing system fractures worsen – between Ottawa and Alberta, and between Ottawa and Washington – at the precise moment when US strategy is attempting to lock in hemispheric advantage in energy supplies.
The physics, economics and geography of global oil trade flows remain broadly unchanged. What has changed is the political choice to treat an existential energy partnership as another front in a trade war, or as a holding action until the next American election. If cooler heads do not prevail, Carney’s dagger threatens not only the oldest and most intimate trading relationship in North America but also the energy security interests of the entire American hemisphere.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substackand X.
The map shows the current distribution of wildfires in Canada and hotspots as of August 6, 2026. The Eastern part has now reduced down greatly. The action now is in the West along the US border. The infographic provides the data on Active fires, new fires and extinguished fires. There are numbers for year to date and 10 yr. averages. The graph on the left shows area burned each year from 2017 through 2026 to date. Humans caused 42% of the number of wildfires, and nature caused 92% of the area burned.
As Chris Martz pointed out in an interview, boreal forests burn every year as part of their natural life cycle. Also Canada forests are vast and remote so that management is challenging. A previous post here mentioned that some practices can and should be improved, especially since recent years have been more active and destructive, especially 2023, 25 and now 2026. Martz also provided some data contradicting the notion global warming is the cause.
The drought and heat wave indices are where climatic effects would show up. Yes there are recent spikes, but also numerous precedents in the past. In neither case do the patterns reflect rising CO2, let alone human hydrocarbon use. In fact there is a significant decrease in the worst of the drought categories despite the spike in 2023–24.
Americans often picture Canada as a vast northern forest – an endless expanse of pristine wilderness. But the truth is far more complex and increasingly relevant to U.S.–Canada policy debates. Eighty‑nine percent of Canada is Crown land, owned by federal or provincial governments. Yet only about 10–12% of that land receives detailed ecological monitoring.
Americans often picture Canada as a vast northern forest – an endless expanse of pristine wilderness. But the truth is far more complex and increasingly relevant to U.S.–Canada policy debates. Eighty‑nine percent of Canada is Crown land, owned by federal or provincial governments. Yet only about 10–12% of that land receives detailed ecological monitoring.
This matters because U.S. trade policy, Canadian conservation policy, and federal herbicide permitting are now combining to reshape North America’s forests in ways few Americans recognize.
Over the past 20 years, Canada’s sawmill and pulp‑and‑paper sectors have entered a steep decline. Statistics Canada and industry reports show that mill closures have accelerated, especially in western Canada, where over 30% of softwood lumber capacity has disappeared. Employment has dropped sharply. Entire forestry towns have hollowed out.
And while multiple factors contribute – mountain pine beetle damage, wildfire losses, transportation bottlenecks – the most overlooked driver is the federal government’s long‑standing approval of spraying Roundup (glyphosate) herbicide across millions of hectares of Crown forests. For decades, glyphosate has been used to kill broadleaf species – birch, aspen, poplar – so that commercially valuable conifers can dominate.
But this practice has consequences. Roundup creates monoculture conifer stands, which are more resin‑rich and significantly more flammable than mixed‑species forests. Instead of diverse, moisture‑retaining ecosystems, Canada is producing vast tracts of single‑age, single‑species pine and spruce – exactly the kind of forests that burn explosively under extreme fire weather.
The result is a continental paradox: Policies meant to “manage” forests have instead created more combustible landscapes, contributing to the anomalous rise in total annual area burned.
Deterioration of Canada’s forestry is also being accelerated by domestic policy. Rising carbon taxes on diesel and gasoline – critical fuels for logging, hauling, and mill operations – have increased costs across the supply chain. New layers of regulation slow approvals and reduce harvest flexibility. And when pulp mills close, sawmills lose buyers for residual chips and sawdust, undermining their economics even further.
But the most consequential impact of this industrial contraction is ecological. Canada’s parklands – where monitoring exists – show a clear trend of rapidly aging boreal forests, with large stands now reaching 70 to 120 years old.
In Alberta’s eastern foothills, provincial parks contain dense, overmature, fuel‑loaded forests primed for high‑intensity wildfire. Decades of fire suppression, beetle kill, drought, and heavy recreational pressure have created extreme fire risk. As Parks Canada itself warns, “the reduction or exclusion of fire as a natural process … leads to increased risk of wildfires.”
The consequences are here. Alberta’s Jasper National Park recently nearly burned to the ground when extreme fire weather collided with decades of fuel accumulation, beetle‑killed forests, a highly vulnerable townsite, and infrastructure failures.
Nonetheless, long‑term fire data tell a more nuanced story.
According to Canada’s National Burned Area Composite and CIFFC wildfire statistics, forest‑fire frequency has declined since the 1980s. Canada is experiencing fewer fires overall.
What has changed is the total area burned, which had remained relatively moderate for decades but then spiked dramatically in 2023 and again in 2025, producing two of the worst years for fires in modern Canadian history.
These spikes reflect the dangerous combination of aging forests, heavy fuel loads, glyphosate‑driven monoculture, and extreme fire weather – not an increase in ignition frequency.
Meanwhile, federal biodiversity reports show that parks are not experiencing net improvement. Most ecosystems are stable, but among those changing, declines outnumber gains. And crucially, non‑park Crown lands are not monitored at all, meaning there is no empirical basis to claim that conservation designations improve biodiversity.
Yet Ottawa is moving ahead with its flagship 30×30 agenda – a plan to place 30% of Canada’s land and water under conservation status by 2030.
In practice, this means restricting forestry across vast areas when forests are aging, fuel‑loaded, and increasingly prone to extreme fire behavior. By limiting private‑sector utilization, 30×30 will increase fuel loading, exacerbate forest aging, and reduce the thinning and harvesting activities that mitigate catastrophic wildfire.
For Americans concerned about lumber prices or wildfire smoke drifting south, the lesson is simple. Canada’s forests are increasingly unmanaged, aging, and burning, not because Canadians don’t care, but because the economic and policy frameworks governing those forests are pushing the country toward less active management.
North America needs forestry – not just parks – to remain resilient.
Originally published at The DailyWire, July 31, 2026.
Joseph Fournier, Ph.D., has worked in the energy industry and environmental sciences and is a member of the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He writes from his family’s ranch east of Calgary.
Recurring wildfire smoke raises questions about Canadian forest management.
For the past several years, we have covered the smoke emanating from blazes in Canada’s mismanaged forests. Furthermore, a number of the fires were investigated for potential arson.
Just like heat domes, smoke from Canadian wildfires appears to be a regular feature of American summers.
For the past several years, we have covered the smoke emanating from blazes in Canada’s mismanaged forests. Furthermore, a number of the fires were investigated for potential arson.
Now, over 800 wildfires are being reported across Canada, with smoke affecting air quality in New York.
More than 830 wildfires were burning in Canada on Wednesday, along with more than a dozen in northern Minnesota, forcing mandatory evacuations and spreading unhealthy smoke down to the Lower 48.
Some of the largest wildfires are burning in west-central Ontario, consuming thick forests and releasing an incredible amount of smoke.
The wind is now directing that smoke into the U.S., creating dangerous air quality for millions across the upper Midwest and Northeast on Wednesday and through the end of the week.
On Wednesday afternoon, air quality had reached unhealthy levels in New York City and the Eastern Lake Ontario region, the Central New York region and parts of Western New York, according to air monitoring site AirNow.
There are currently 838 wildfires burning across Canada. More than 100 are in northwestern Ontario, sending thick smoke to the Great Lakes and Northeast U.S. pic.twitter.com/nJS5QaJvqY
Air quality in the Midwest is also being adversely impacted, and two of the fires have crossed over into U.S. territory.
Two of the largest blazes — the Bear Trap and Thumb fires — have crossed the border into Canada, officials said.
“Fire management anticipate another very high fire danger day today with increased fire activity and fire growth,” the agency said.
Already this week, state authorities around the Great Lakes have issued alerts for poor air quality. In northeastern Minnesota, the state’s pollution control agency said that the air quality would likely remain “very unhealthy for everyone” through Thursday. Just across the border in southern Ontario, Environment Canada issued an orange-level alert on Tuesday for air quality and urged people to avoid spending time outside.
Smell smoke this morning? Its coming from a wildfire outbreak in Ontario. While it should not impact air quality much today, smoke at the surface could increase Wednesday into Thursday, potentially reducing visibilities and air quality. High temperatures may also be limited. pic.twitter.com/6QdV5965nt
Meanwhile, in Canada, a wild video is making rounds showing a freight train surrounded by huge flames from the roaring Canadian wildfires near Armstrong, Ontario.
The video, which was taken inside the train, shows raging flames around it. A crew member can be seen also capturing the incident on their cellphone.
The train car was stopped in Armstrong, Ont., which is north of Thunder Bay. A CN Rail spokesperson told Global News all employees in the area were evacuated overnight Monday.
“CN has temporarily suspended rail operations near Armstrong, ON as a precaution due to wildfire activity in the area. As a safety measure, CN employees in the area and residents of the Town of Armstrong were evacuated overnight,” the spokesperson said in an email.
🔥 ON FIRE: Wild video shows a freight train surrounded by huge flames from the roaring Canadian wildfires near Armstrong, Ontario. According to local sources, three Canadian National Railway Company (CN Rail) trains were halted on their tracks because of the fires in the area. pic.twitter.com/8DluFdM1Gp
However, there may be an upside to the smoke. As meteorologist Chris Martz notes, the smoke layer may take the edge off the heat.
The Canadians need to get their wildfire situation under control.
This is now the third year in a row that we are having to deal with these smoke plumes being blown downwind, reducing air quality in the northeast.
The one good thing is that it should help keep a lid on temperatures the next two days as forecast highs range 95–100°F on model guidance. But with the smoke layer, shortwave flux will be reduced, so highs will be in the low-mid-90s.
The Canadians need to get their wildfire situation under control.
This is now the third year in a row that we are having to deal with these smoke plumes being blown downwind, reducing air quality in the northeast.
Back in 1992, a review examined how prescribed burns have been a natural and effective forest management tool in Canada and argued for their expanded, science‑based use to reduce fuel loads, support healthy forests, and maintain ecosystem function.
Published in The Forestry Chronicle, the authors show that prescribed burning can be cost‑effective and ecologically compatible with many management objectives. The authors concluded that continued and adaptive use of prescribed fire, integrated with responsible timber harvesting and clearcut‑area treatments, is essential for long‑term forest resilience and should remain a core tool in Canadian forest policy and operations.
Perhaps Canada should revisit this 1992 paper, which shows controlled burns and sound forest management practices are effective in preventing massive wildfires. https://t.co/cSqFailjPtpic.twitter.com/PTpEYeCGd2
There are many things that seemed to have worked better in 1992, especially in Canada. Perhaps it is time to return to more traditional approaches rather than bitterly clinging to eco-activism and climate cultism.
The DOE move to prop up the nuclear big iron also prompts a recollection of the words of the great American philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Alternatively, “Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.” Some 20 years ago, facing a 30-year decline in the U.S. nuclear power business (no reactor ordered after 1974 got built), the George W. Bush administration threw $8 billion in 2005 dollars each to two, two-unit AP-1000 reactor projects.
The DOE move to prop up the nuclear big iron also prompts a recollection of the words of the great American philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Alternatively, “Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.” Some 20 years ago, facing a 30-year decline in the U.S. nuclear power business (no reactor ordered after 1974 got built), the George W. Bush administration threw $8 billion in 2005 dollars each to two, two-unit AP-1000 reactor projects.
The Trump administration and its Department of Energy have made Canada–who many Americans other than Donald Trump consider our closest ally and good friend–happy. Recently (June 23, 2026), DOE’s loan office (grandiosity renamed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing) announced a $17.5 billion dollar loan program to subsidize building five as yet unidentified, two-unit 1,000-MW, nuclear power plant stations.
These “supply chain loans” are intended to get projects off the ground. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that “these conditional loans will play an important role in reviving the supply chain needed for America to once again build large-scale commercial reactors.”
Westinghouse Set-Up
Westinghouse makes the only licensed reactor that matches DOE’s desires, the AP-1000. The DOE news release said,
Westinghouse will partner with up to five eligible utilities and energy companies nationwide to procure the long-lead items at a fixed price. Each project will be jointly owned by Westinghouse and a utility or energy company partner. Both Westinghouse and the partner are required to fully commit their project equity, $500 million each ($1 billion total per project), upfront prior to accessing DOE loan funds.
DOE says it intends that the low interest federal loans be used to buy long-lead items (“complex components of a nuclear power plant that require the longest time for manufacturing and delivery”). Unstated is that Westinghouse is a Canadian company. It is jointly owned by Cameco (49%) and Brookfield Renewable Partners (51%), both traded on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges. Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse has not been a U.S. company since 1998, when it was sold to Britain’s nuclear company BNFL, then to Japan’s Toshiba in 2005, went into bankruptcy in 2017, and ended up in the Cameco-Brookfield consortium in 2023.
If and when those projects go on line, their nuclear fuel will be provided by Cameco, whose main business is uranium mining, another boon for Canada.
We are pleased to see the US government make this additional commitment to expanding nuclear power capacity using the proven AP1000 reactor technology…. The expansion of nuclear power in the United States is expected to create significant opportunities for Westinghouse and Cameco, accelerating growth in Westinghouse’s energy systems segment during the procurement and subsequent construction phase.
Brookfield also has deep and abiding Canadian roots. One of the company’s early chief executives was a Canadian economist named Mark Carney. He’s now the Liberal Party prime minister of Canada.
The DOE move to prop up the nuclear big iron also prompts a recollection of the words of the great American philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Alternatively, “Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.” Some 20 years ago, facing a 30-year decline in the U.S. nuclear power business (no reactor ordered after 1974 got built), the George W. Bush administration threw $8 billion in 2005 dollars each to two, two-unit AP-1000 reactor projects.
Remember Vogtle #3 and #4?
Georgia Power got funds for two new units at its existing two-unit Vogtle nuclear station, ultimately totalling $12 billion in taxpayer dollars. Construction began in 2009 with the estimated cost of $14 billion. The two new units came into service in 2023 and 2024 at a cost of over $36 billion.
The rate backlash of the overpriced reactors led to two Democrats ousting two entrenched Republicans in a statewide election to The Peach State’s Public Service Commission last November, leaving three surviving Republicans on the commission. Those seats were not on the ballot. In South Carolina, a partnership of investor-owned Scana Corp. (South Carolina Electric and Gas) and state-owned Santee Cooper got $8 billion (ultimately $9 billion) also for two AP-1000 units. The project collapsed in 2017 (the same year Westinghouse went into bankruptcy, partly as a result of the Summer and Vogtle projects).
But spread over 10 units, that’s a modest $1.75 billion each. Is that significant for projects that are likely to cost upward of $20 billion each? The new DOE push for big reactors raises questions about the fate of the agency’s previously aggressive program for advanced small modular reactors. The Westinghouse reactors, unlike the SMRs, actually exist. The DOE AP-1000 announcement preceded a nosedive of the stock of SMR high-flyer Oklo, with a paper reactor design and no revenue.
The Motley Fool (an online investment site) commented:
The Trump Administration remains very bullish on nuclear power and committed to helping build a nuclear renaissance in the U.S. — that’s the good news. The bad news is that, financially speaking, much of the administration’s support is being thrown behind big nuclear reactors.
Overall, as OilPrice.com reports, SMRs have significant hurdles to deployment. The energy news service commented,
While SMRs are likely to play a major role in the nuclear industry’s future, severe delays and funding gaps have slowed deployment. The United States is currently playing catch-up with China and Russia, while Europe and other regions of the world could still be several years behind in commercial SMR deployment.
Final Thought
In an ironic twist, Canada seems to be well ahead of the U.S. in the SMR world. In April, Ontario Power Generation, the utility owned by the province, began major construction at its Darlington nuclear site of the first of four GE Vernova 300-MW BWRX-300 advanced boiling water reactors. Operation is targeted for 2030. A massive crawler crane lowered a 953-tonne steel and concrete slab onto a 35-meter deep shaft, completing the 2.1 million pound reactor basemat. Oil Price commented, “Construction has begun on the Western world’s first grid-scale Small Modular Reactor (SMR), though small is not what comes to mind, considering that the machine will fit on two soccer fields.”
Kennedy Maize is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who has covered energy and environmental topics for more than 40 years. This post originally appeared at The Quad Report. His previous posts can be viewed here.
He’s the only leader in the G7 to have plunged his economy into recession. He’s been Prime Minister for four quarters now. The economy has shrunk in three of those quarters. He’s the only G7 leader who can say that. The economy is smaller today than when Mark Carney became Prime Minister a year ago. He’s the only G7 leader who can say that.
In the video speech yesterday, Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre brings the receipts damning PM Carney for Canada sliding into economic recession. Transcript below with my bolds and added images.
The Carney Liberal recession
He’s the only leader in the G7 to have plunged his economy into recession. He’s been Prime Minister for four quarters now. The economy has shrunk in three of those quarters. He’s the only G7 leader who can say that. The economy is smaller today than when Mark Carney became Prime Minister a year ago. He’s the only G7 leader who can say that.
Mark Carney will like to make excuses today, but let me ask him a question. But before I do, I’m going to actually quote back to him something he said to one of you. Mark Carney said to one of the journalists, Rosie, look inside yourself. Well, I’m going to ask Mark Carney to look inside himself, and I’ll ask him directly.
Mr. Carney, if it really is global factors and tariffs that have given Canada the only recession in the G7, why have France, Italy, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States all avoided a recession? They all have the same tariffs and the same global factors, yet none of them, not one, is in recession. Only Mark Carney has the distinction of leading his country into a recession.
Now we know that there will be a lot of excuses today, but excuses will not put food on the dinner table of the 2.2 million people relying on food banks. Excuses will not get the jobs back for the 120,000 people who’ve lost them, as Canada has the second highest unemployment in the G7. Excuses will not allow a young couple to buy a home, as Mark Carney has given Canada the worst housing costs in the G7.
Excuses will not help the mother who is tossing and turning in bed at night wondering how she will make her mortgage payment, as Mark Carney has given Canada the most indebted households anywhere in the G7. By the way, Mark Carney will claim that this is just technical. There’s nothing technical about having an empty stomach because you can’t afford paying the worst food inflation in the G7.
There’s nothing technical about coming home from work and telling your kids that you no longer have a job and that they’re going to have to sell the house because Canada has the second highest unemployment in the G7. That is not technical. It is real. This is a full-blown liberal recession. And it’s not just one or two little data points that cause this, my friends. It is one of many data points that we see today.
For example, in the last few weeks alone, we have fact after fact showing that the liberal economy is collapsing. I’m going to quote from Equifax. Insolvency volumes have increased to levels not seen since 2009, up 19% year over year. Delinquency rates climbed 32% year over year. In the first quarter of this year, insolvency volumes hit a 17-year high, partly due to escalating financial strain on mortgage holders. And one in 1.5 million Canadians missed a minimum debt payment in the first three months of this year alone.
Then there’s the investment numbers, which came out just yesterday. They show that in the first four quarters under this Liberal Prime Minister, Canada saw $1.9 billion of investment flee. That’s $20 billion more than entered our country. That’s a net $20 billion leaving our country to build pipelines, mines, homes, bridges, technology, and other countries for foreign businesses and foreign workers.
Again, we cannot blame foreign factors for that, because the other countries to which that investment fled are facing the same foreign factors. So no more excuses, please. We actually need results. Furthermore, we know that the Prime Minister is fond of doing illusions of action, but here is the core reality. After a year in office, what has really changed in our economic policy? Every anti-development law remains in place, C-69, C-48.
He’s increased the industrial carbon tax six times higher than it was when Justin Trudeau was in office. Home building has actually dropped, and in many provinces the GST still applies to that home building. He’s renamed, not eliminated, renamed the consumer carbon tax, and there are 500 economic projects waiting, some of them for years, just to get through the Liberal bureaucracy permitting system.
Now, we know what won’t fix this. Dazzling speeches at the World Economic Forum, clever-sounding corporate buzzwords, signing fake and unenforceable MOUs in grand halls with stately backdrops, none of these things will reduce costs or boost growth. Announcing projects that were approved many years earlier or making pie-in-the-sky promises like he’s going to double electricity production 25 years from now with no details on how, all of these things are illusions.
They give the impression of action, but in reality, all of the policies of Justin Trudeau remain the same, or they have gotten worse. The deficit has doubled, spending is higher, the only spending that has not gone up is capital spending, precisely the opposite of what Mr. Carney promised. The only way out of this Liberal recession is to reverse the policies that caused it in the first place.
And that is why we are calling for the Prime Minister to get back in the House of Commons next week and introduce a bill to reverse all of the economic policies his party has introduced over the last decade. We don’t need more photo ops, more signing ceremonies, more discussion papers. We need to reverse the Liberal policies that have given Canada the only recession anywhere in the G7.
Conservatives have put forward positive plans to unleash our growth, including a real plan to incentivize the Americans to sign on to tariff-free trade, eliminating capital gains tax on reinvestments in Canada, ending the industrial carbon tax, in fact, cutting taxes on work, energy, home building, and investment, making Canada the fastest place anywhere on earth to get a permit, the freest economy in which to trade, work, invest, and get a return.
Let’s restore the promises of this country where anybody who gets out of bed in the morning can find a terrific job, a job that gives them a great paycheck, that buys affordable food and homes, where our young people can afford to start a family, where our parents can afford to give their children the best start, where our seniors retire in peace and tranquility, and where our economy is truly independent, self-reliant, standing on its own two feet.
That is the mission. Now, let’s turn it into action. Thank you very much. Thank you.
We’ll now take questions from reporters. Please identify yourself and your outlet. One question each.
I can start. Yes, hello, Mr. Poilievre.Laurence Martin from Radio-Canada. It’s an article that just came out this morning. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration wants vehicles covered by the CIO, so with low or exempt tariffs, to have at least 50% of American content.Is that an acceptable request in your opinion?
No, I have already proposed a positive plan to eliminate all tariffs on cars, which will force manufacturers to produce one car in the United States for each of their customers in the United States, and one in Canada for each of their customers in Canada. That way, we will be able to increase the production of cars in our two countries, massively, to reverse the commercial deficits that both countries have now. So that’s the only way we can eliminate tariffs between Canada and the United States.
Mr. Carney has given up, and he hasn’t done anything. He’s not at the negotiating table when Mexico is there. And because Mr. Carney is absent, now we’re seeing more dangerous threats compared to our automotive sector. There is no future for our automotive sector without direct and non-tariff access to the United States. That’s why I presented a plan about three months ago to save the automotive sector and to reverse the decline that we’ve seen in Canada for 10 years.
Mr. Carney has done absolutely nothing since then, except make big contradictions. Yesterday, he said that he wants to, and I quote, make America, in his words, great again, after saying that he wanted a break with the United States. So that’s another big failure for Mark Carney, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Canada has the only recession among the G7 countries. Yes, well over three months ago, I presented a plan for tariff-free auto trade with the United States, bring back the 1965 auto pact, which would massively increase production in both Canada and the United States, and actually achieve the stated goals of both countries.
Since that time, Mark Carney has been nowhere and done nothing. While the Mexicans are at the negotiating table eating our lunch on auto negotiations, Mark Carney has not shown up for one negotiation so far. The result is that our auto sector is hemorrhaging jobs under his leadership.
In the last 10 years, we’ve lost half of our auto production, and now we’re losing even more.
But because Mark Carney has done literally nothing to fight for tariff-free trade on autos over the last decade, we’ve lost even more auto jobs, and one of the facts that Statistics Canada reported that led to us being the only country in the G7 in recession is the decline in the auto sector. Yesterday, Mark Carney gave a baffling, confusing, and contradictory speech in which he simultaneously said we need a rupture with the United States, and that we need to make America, in his words, great again. So, his elbows are up and down so fast, he’s doing a rhetorical chicken dance while we lose our auto sector.
Rahim Ahmed from the National Post. Mr. Paliyev, you said that you’ll be campaigning across Alberta for a united Canada. Can you give us an update on any visits that you have scheduled back home in the next few weeks? And are you open to debating folks like Keith Wilson and some of the other prominent Alberta separatists?
We will be back in my home province of Alberta to campaign for a united country, and our message is that all of Canada needs to wrap its arms around Alberta. Let’s ensure that every Albertan knows that Canada loves Alberta, that Canada is Alberta, Alberta is Canada, we need to have a strong united nation right across this country.
And that will mean a stronger province of Alberta, but getting out of the way and off the backs of our energy sector, getting rid of the gun grab, locking up criminals to bring safety to our streets, allowing young Albertans to start families with affordable homes, decentralizing control in the country so that Albertans have more direct decision-making power within their provincial boundaries, that is a positive, optimistic, unifying vision that I will be presenting to all Albertans in all corners of the province.
Mr. Poliev, the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs is in town today. He said this morning to Anita Anand, the Canadian minister, that if the momentum continues, trade could increase by more than 100% in five years, and that the Chinese market would remain open to Canada, and that it would soon become the largest market in the world. How do you think that will be received in the United States, and what is the risk to Canada?
First of all, Mr. Carney is directly in a conflict of interest. He went to China to receive a loan of $200 million from a bank controlled by the Chinese government a few months before he took office. He still has investments in Brookfield that he wants to expand his business in China. He has already allowed Brookfield to be at the table of discussions and talks by representing Canada. It has never happened that a prime minister sends his company to make talks.
We want a prime minister who defends Canada’s interests and not his company. Obviously, to say that we can replace the United States with China is not realistic when we sell 20 times more to the United States than we sell to China. Perhaps one of the reasons why Canada is the only country in recession among the G7 countries is our bad calculation of Mark Carney, a man who has been wrong on all economic issues for a decade.
He was wrong on the carbon tax, on the plans to keep all oil on the ground, his opposition to pipelines, his support for monetary pressure. He has been wrong on all economic issues for a decade, and we see that he is still wrong on global issues. Do you think China will do anything to make Beijing unhappy? Of course not. He won’t do anything to make Beijing unhappy.
A year after Mark Carney said that China was the single biggest risk to Canada, he claimed that we were going to have a full rupture with the United States in favour of a strategic partnership for a new world order with the dictatorship in Beijing. Of course, Mr. Carney is in a terrible conflict of interest.
He went and got a $200 million loan for his company from a state-backed Chinese bank while he was the economic advisor to Justin Trudeau. That loan is still owed, my understanding is, by Brookfield, which the Prime Minister continues to be invested in. He allowed Brookfield to be at the table for discussions.
Mr. Carney has got to be clear that he should represent Canada’s interests, not his corporation’s interests. Maybe one of the reasons why Canada is the only G7 country in recession right now is because he is miscalculating on trade, just like everything else. He has been wrong on every economic question over the last decade, and Canadians are paying the price.
He was wrong on carbon taxes, wrong on keeping half our oil in the ground, wrong to oppose a pipeline to the Pacific, wrong to support money-printing inflation, and now he is wrong in his trade priorities. We sell 20 times more to the United States than we sell to China. That is just a mathematical fact, and Mark Carney’s Brookfield interests in China will not change that.
We need a Prime Minister who is fighting for our workers in this country. We should have the best economy in the G7, not the worst. In Q3 2025, the economy grew at an annualized rate by 2.6%. We have economists saying that today’s numbers are so nominal that they could be forecasted away and revised away.
Aren’t you jumping the gun a little bit and calling this a full-blown recession? I know that there are a lot of excuses being made for Mark Carney today, and I am not surprised. By the way, which outlet are you with? The Hilltop. Is 2.6% economic growth an excuse, or is that just the numbers? There is no 2.6% economic growth. You are having to go back? How many quarters are you having to go back now? Two quarters. You are having to go back. Let’s get this straight.
There have been four quarters since Mark Carney became Prime Minister. The economy shrunk in three of those four quarters. Canada is the only G7 country for which that is the case. There has now been an entire year of Mark Carney that is recorded in economic data, and the GDP is smaller today than when he took office. That is only true of Canada among G7 countries.
Now there are two back-to-back quarters where the economy shrunk, which is the literal definition of a recession.
By the way, it is not just that our economy is shrinking quarter after quarter. It is that we have the second highest unemployment in the G7. You think that the 120,000 people that lost their jobs since the beginning of this year call this just a technical recession? No. They call this real job loss. Then you have the delinquency rate that is up 32% year over year at 17-year highs. We have the highest household debt of any country in the G7, the worst housing costs of any country in the G7, and for most of the last year, the worst food price inflation of any country in the G7.
So yes, you are making excuses and trying to hide from the reality that Mark Carney has given Canada the worst economy in the G7. It is time to stop making excuses, not for political reasons. It is time to stop making those excuses because this is people’s lives.Behind these statistics are empty stomachs, empty fridges, and empty bank accounts. Behind these numbers are 120,000 people who have come home to their kids saying, we cannot have you registered for hockey this year. We have to sell our home. I do not know what we are going to do. That is the reality of Mark Carney’s economy, and it is trying to stop covering it up with illusions.
Good afternoon, Pierre. So, Pierre, on national defence, Pierre. I will get your question, but I just have to get this. On national defence, yesterday, CanSec, the conference, concluded, and both of your former colleagues in Aeronautical and Peter McKay sang praise of the government’s shift of national defence policy under Mark Carney’s leadership. What do you make of the shift of that national defence strategy and procurement specifically? And also, do you believe you are losing ground to Mark Carney in an issue like national defence to the progressive conservative flank of your party?
No. What we have seen is a lot of illusions from Mark Carney, a lot of spending on bureaucracy, on procurement, and on consultants. A lot of big corporations will get very rich. The problem is that the money is not reaching the equipment in the hands of the soldiers. We 100% support more military spending, but we want to turn that spending into better equipment and better results for our soldiers, not more expensive bureaucracy, more confusing procurement, and more profits for multinational defence contractors.
So, Pierre, your final validation is that there is influence of Mark Carney’s leadership into the media.
Who can even ask questions? I think it is very troubling. The question for those who could not hear is that Mr. Carney has decided to protect the minister from Beijing by not allowing media to enter the room and only to release state photography of the meeting. That is how things are done in Beijing, and now Mark Carney is importing those methods here. Even one liberal commentator on CBC, Althea Raj, said that Mark Carney has an authoritarian streak.
I would remind him that he is supposed to work for Canadians, not for Beijing, not for Brookfield and its Chinese investments. He should open up and actually take questions from the media, like I am doing here today. By the way, he should actually show up in the House of Commons and answer questions there. We see that Mark Carney cannot take difficult questions because his illusion shatters under any scrutiny, but that is not how Canada works.
We are a free and open democracy, not an authoritarian state. Yes, I find it very disturbing that Mr. Carney forbids the media to take pictures and ask questions. He is trying to import protocols from the regime in Beijing, here in Canada. It is not democratic. There are certain CBC commentators who have noticed that he has an authoritarian streak, and now he is using it to promote Beijing’s dictatorship. I remind Mr. Carney that we are a democracy in Canada.
We work for the Canadian people and not for Beijing’s leaders. We should be willing to talk and trade with China. It is a brilliant civilization with hard-working, decent people, but we have to do so with our eyes open. This is a dictatorship that Mr. Carney himself acknowledged was the biggest threat to Canada only a year ago. Our interests in Canada are in being sovereign, self-reliant, and standing on our own two feet, ensuring that we have full control over our technology, our economy, and our minerals. Never will we be vulnerable to the aggressive instincts of a foreign dictatorship.
We have not proposed that. We think that the government should focus on reducing the cost of government spending. It should unleash free enterprise so that our small businesses, our workers, and our investors can make Canada the richest and most affordable country anywhere on Earth.
First of all, we should allow the savings that come as a result of AI to be passed on to consumers. They should not be inflated away through more money printing. Second of all, we cannot allow the government to use high-tech companies as a surveillance arm of the state. That is why we are fighting against the changes proposed in C-22.
We are very worried about excessive government power for surveillance and for control of the population. We need to have a free and open society where Canadians can use the tools that AI offers to make their lives affordable, empowered, make their paycheques bigger, and their lives less complicated. At the same time, we need to make sure that the government does not abuse that technology for its own control. Thank you very much.
In 2025, China opened a breathtaking rail terminal facility called Chongqing East. The city is in mountainous terrain, and so building a large rail terminal is a compounded challenge. Nevertheless, at an estimated cost of $8 billion, a 1.2 million square meter facility over 8 levels was constructed after carving a flat space out of the side of a mountain.
In 2025, China opened a breathtaking rail terminal facility called Chongqing East. The city is in mountainous terrain, and so building a large rail terminal is a compounded challenge. Nevertheless, at an estimated cost of $8 billion, a 1.2 million square meter facility over 8 levels was constructed after carving a flat space out of the side of a mountain. An estimated 2 million cubic meters of concrete went into it, along with 366,000 tonnes of steel. The terminal includes, as in, one facet, includes seven high speed rail lines that can host 400 meter long trains. Passengers can check baggage for air travel right from the facility, never touching it again until their final destination. It is no Communist-concrete bunker; it looks great inside, with a tree motif to the pillars, and an overall sense of a well-designed and functional mega-facility. You really should check out the link above; Chongqing East is an engineering tour de force.
The entire construction process, from blueprint to blasting to grand opening, took 38 months.
Once upon a time, Canada constructed an 1,100 kilometre pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast, across some of the most challenging mountain terrain anywhere on earth, not to mention major waterways and wetlands. It was built in the early 1950s with 1950s-level technology (as in, virtually none). No computers, no laser-guided this or that, no GPS.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
That pipeline, the original Trans Mountain line, was constructed in 30 months.
China is building things with the same fervour that we had 70 years ago.
Some sixty years after the completion of the original Trans Mountain line, it took 6 years, more than twice the time of the original, to construct a parallel pipeline in the same right of way, from 2018 to 2024. And that is for construction: the pipeline was initially proposed in 2012. It took 6 years of frustration for Kinder Morgan to throw in the towel, before the feds stepped in, and the entire process, from kick off proposal to completion, took 12 years and over $30 billion, far, far more than the Chongqing mega-facility. And the feds had it relatively easy, construction-wise;, opponents put up a fraction of the fight that they would have for Kinder Morgan.
Given the current state of the world, it is hard to find a person that doesn’t understand the imperative of getting things built, of securing supplies of critical components like energy, metals and minerals, of moving decisively to snap out of the regulatory slumber we’ve fallen into. That is why even our federal government has created a Major Projects office, or whatever it’s called; to facilitate construction of critical infrastructure.
I’ll let you decide how that is going. Here is Prime Minister Carney ‘articulating’ an answer about whether there is a proponent for a new pipeline. He fumbles around a bit then launches into an explicit set of warnings; do not be looking for anything to happen soon: “Thank you that first point in terms of the dynamic here, Alberta is the one proposing the pipeline bringing forward a private proponent for the pipeline so that’s that’s a process that’s underway with them. I will leave it more to them to be more explicit in terms of the answer but certainly their expectation and it shows in terms of the effort that’s been put into the agreement the specificity around the agreement, the timelines for the agreement, the expectation is that that will be the case and and then what follows from that is there’s a sequencing a regulatory well there’s a consultation sequencing with indigenous people they’re saying work with the problems of British Columbia moving through those and moving to that October date and I just wanna be very clear to everyone you have a – moving towards a designation if if various things are met – designation by the Major Project Office as a nation building project but then there’s a process of consultation to determine the conditions around that project as well and to answer your question through all of that a private proponent can be building out the um, the open season if you will, the backstop of the barrels associated with that..” {emphasis added]
Feeling comforted now?
Negativity sucks, and it is indeed cool to see the enthusiasm in everyone’s eyes at the very thought of infrastructure development progress. The energy sector has been dying to hear something like that for years. But there is no wisdom in evading what is in front of us, just past the wondrous enthusiasm.
First off, we have to ask: At what price progress? As baffling as it sounds, Alberta (and the rest of Canada) is about to “be fine” with a carbon tax of $130/tonne, which is being sold as good news because it is not $170/tonne. Has critical thinking gone on summer holiday already? Again, it sucks to just be critical, but come on, we have to face reality. From the desk of the Prime Minister of Canada, announcing a new National Energy Strategy: “That’s why we intend to adjust clean electricity regulations to provide the flexibility needed to keep energy costs for all Canadian families reliable and affordable, while reducing emissions and building the clean energy system of the future.” Note the messaging here: affordability for Canadian families is deemed critical; no mention of business costs. Which will, in case anyone has forgotten, add $6.55 to every gigajoule of natural gas consumed, and the long term forward price for Alberta natural gas is about $$2.60/GJ, meaning consumers can expect to pay over $9/GJ, when the comparable forward price in the US is currently about CAD $4.82GJ. Businesses don’t vote, and factories that are never built don’t get counted.
So much sounds good, like a National Energy Strategy. We really do need strategic thinking. But the “strategy” part is as much to do with staying in power as it is to do with building a maximally functioning national grid system. The PMO’s National Energy Strategy will begin with, you guessed it, consultations, with “provinces, territories, Indigenous Peoples, utilities, and unions”, the eventual results of which said consultations will fed into a redesign of Canada’s entire electrical generation, transmission, distribution, storage and grid system. Consulting with…unions?!?! About what? What infrastructure builder ever consults with workers, unionized or otherwise, to see whether something should be built? Every single person reading this will be dead before there is agreement from that collection on something as grand a scale as that, particularly when the table is slanted towards that zombie-goal of Net Zero 2050…the National Energy Strategy even pencils in the ultimate flag of ignorance, the irreducible fact that they have no clue: “…we are also expanding support for energy-saving retrofits for up to one million households through financing, grants, and complementary measures. This includes making it easier for Canadians to transition from expensive propane, oil, and electric baseboard heating to more affordable electric heat pumps.” [Quick interlude to bash head on wall] Mass heat pump conversion amplifies every problem with the electrical system, by creating new demand peaks at exactly the worst time. This is Canada. It gets cold. Really freaking cold. When it does, heating systems have to work harder than ever, and more reliably than ever, which means that a million new heat pumps will, at the very worst/coldest hours of the calendar, artificially create a new load on the system and push us into a national danger zone on the coldest nights of the year.
Bah. Might as well be making whale sounds. Nothing stops that train.
But anyway, while we consult ourselves into oblivion in a contented state of Big Government food coma, consider this article from an astute group called Californians For Energy and Science, entitled: “India Can’t Cook. California Can’t Drive.” The author chronicles how “In India, families are queuing for hours to buy cooking gas. In California, drivers are paying $6.15 a gallon for gasoline. These are not separate crises. They are the same crisis – connected by a chemical called alkylate, a supply chain that runs through the Strait of Hormuz, and a war that has bene raging for three months.” It is a great article, outlining how a shortage of a single oddball product like alkylate has ramifications from Bollywood to Hollywood.
The point to take away from that article is that the world is in a precarious position, and it needs reliable sources of materials, metals, and particularly energy/energy products. Queued up Indian families and furious California motorists would rather not wait for Canada to make even more green it’s power system that is already 80 percent clean energy, as even the PMO points out in their news release.
Less consultation, more building. Less regulation, more path-clearing. Less stick, more carrots. Less self-strangulation.
Hmm. Y’all seem too comfortable at the moment, so let’s smash that in a red-hot second with a surefire remedy; let’s talk about Donald J. Trump. Not just Trump, let’s also talk about Javier Milei, an equally disruptive force in Argentinian politics. At the start of each of their political campaigns, everyone, save a few die-hard founding fans, laughed. Much scoffing. How ridiculous to think either could take their abrasive, obnoxious, ferociously independent views to the top of power.
And yet there they both are, leading two countries, blowing up institutions and mindsets and you name it.
Why is that? Why did people vote for these two controversial figures? Why did enough vote for them to comfortably be elected?
Their elections were successful because those two are not causes, they are effects. Each respective country’s systems had gone so far off the rails that the average voter was willing to take a chance not just on an outsider, but on a pugnacious, inflammatory outsider. They wanted change; they wanted it bad, and they wanted it big.
Canada feels like it is hosting similar rumblings down underground, tremors before an earthquake. But what we are getting is not change. It was a lunge at a comfort blanket, a smooth central banker – Stability! Calm! A Statesman! – and we got all that, but what we didn’t get was real change. A grand agreement that, after more than a year, permits the construction of an oil pipeline is not revolutionary, it is something that needs to happen in a few months. And they aren’t even close to actually approving it yet! The application has not even been filed with the lumbering beast, and despite the chance of a new pipeline being central to this whole whoop-de-do, it won’t even hit the Major Projects Office for another half a year. If all went perfectly well, construction would start in the fall of 2027, about two years after Alberta and the federal goverment took to the stage to announce their MOU that included public disclosure that a new oil pipeline was part of the agreement. The original Trans Mountain pipeline would have been nearly completed before this one can even start, in the best case scenario.
The world is wobbling crazily as current events threaten to dismantle decades worth of supply chain stability. There is a palpable sense among regular people that action is required. Because those regular people are voicing such thoughts, it is political instinct to reflect them back just like a parrot.
But we need more than that. The alternative is to wait until things are so bad that we welcome a Canuck Trump or Milei with open arms.
At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative of imminent fossil fuel demise, facing into the storm. And now everyone is coming around to this realization as well. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here. (His personal energy site, Public Energy Number One, is on hiatus until there are more hours in the day.)
Energy realism is gaining ground because physics, economics, and security demand it—especially with rising global demand and unreliable alternatives for baseload. But governance quality, rule of law, and avoiding self-inflicted wounds (poor alliances, over-regulation, ignoring allies) determine whether momentum turns into durable prosperity or another cycle of frustration.
There are a thousand inspirational wall hangings and memes and coffee mugs that all exhort similar messages, to think positively, to avoid negative energy and negativity in general, that humans are just better overall by doing so. They are in general all correct. The words are simple, high-quality life advice that we probably know deep down but that are hard to live by. Which is why so many of those things are sold. We need the reminders. A lot of people have made careers doing exactly that, saying the same old things in slightly new ways and earning millions. Which is kind of annoying in that it seems disingenuous, to be peddling vital life lessons in not a monk-like way but in a traveling elixir salesman kind of way. Big pearly white grins and a dash of stage charisma and look at that, the entire crowd is emptying their wallets in sheer happiness from hearing what they’ve heard a thousand times before. It’s enough to make one want to punch the slick marketeers in the head.
See? That’s how close negative energy is. It’s just that easy. There’s a reason we aren’t in some perpetual state of mental bliss; the complexities of life are highly effective at overriding the dopamine hits.
All these thoughts came crashing in last week, speaking of dopamine hits, while attending a luncheon with a lot of people in attendance. The event was the CAOEC (Canadian Association of Energy Contractors) spring luncheon. Someone dropped out of a lunch time presentation and thus the empty seat that was offered to me, and so I went, mostly expecting the highlight to be the grub. And the people in the audience. Boots on the ground energy people are awesome to be around, full of energy and can-do attitude. I sat in a room, a big room, that also included a federal Liberal cabinet minister as keynote speaker – Tim Hodgson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources. As he rose to the podium to speak, a respectable round of applause greeted him. I did not participate. Not even a twitch. He was going to have to earn it. The past ten years will not be erased from memory for a very long time, and while this guy might not have been in the front lines of federal “governance” the whole time, his party and its architecture most definitely were.
But lo and behold, he did it. Hodgson made me clap. He went out of his way to make a point, multiple times (as recorded by Global News who captured these things; I was too paralyzed for note-taking): “This government and Canadians now understand that energy is the engine of Canada’s economy.” He made the same point loudly, and often, to the point where my spidey senses were on high alert. We get it, you love us now. Let go of my leg, sheesh.
But it was a great thing to say, and I don’t mean to make light of that; it is significant that he wanted to drive that point home and it is worth parsing. “This government” now understands – trying to underline the point that things are different now, and they know a difference is relevant. “…and Canadians” now understand – pointing out what is reflected in national polls, that sentiment has shifted, that the general population now understands the value of the oil and gas industry, and that it did not seem to five years ago (see: oblique accusations to ‘old government’ of Trudeau). “Energy is the engine of Canada’s economy” – another piece of relevant messaging. Trudeau/Guilbeault/Butts/Mckenna/Wilkinson…all key members of the previous government that worked hard to distance themselves from the industry, to downplay its significance.
Even in that one repeated point were a lot of messages that were very good to hear, and welcome news to the audience.
The question is, now what. For 10 years we were governed by squirrels. Actually scratch that. Squirrels have pure motives. We were governed by people who knew nothing about governance. They were like children. Idealistic, wanting to give every homeless person a hamburger and a new house. Wanting to save the environment in ways so wildly impractical that only childish enthusiasm could have propelled them.
But again, now what. What is the North Star for this government? They are taking energy seriously because they have to. What about everything else? Foreign interference in elections. Central bank digital currencies. A drug problem that drives are largest trading partner crazy brought about by sloppy immigration policies which have not been fixed. A globalist mentality that seeks to tie us to anyone than to our natural trading partner with whom we will never ever be separated, and for whom will always be our largest trading partner. Much is made of how recalcitrant the US has become over trade issues; very little is made about how Canada has been dragging its feet for years on things that it knows bug the US very much. Are we taking the drug trade seriously, when the poor police can hardly be bothered to pursue criminals with the knowledge that laws are toothless? We complain about tariffs, then stand resolutely in defiance over outrageous dairy tariffs that we ourselves impose and refuse to talk about. Is that being a good trading partner? Are we taking national defence seriously, or a reacting to a gun to our head? As a matter of fact that brings up the bigger question, what are we doing only because there is a gun to our head, versus what would we really want to do, we being the government?
All this speculation isn’t an attempt to take on the role of opposition, one of the grimiest jobs in the world, whereby the imperative is to run counter to absolutely everything the governing party does. No quarter, no exception, no thinking allowed. Just bark the opposite. That isn’t helpful.
And it is cool to see the media even starting to ask challenging questions of the government, including the likes of Andrew Coyne on a CBC news show that usually appears to be acutely aware that Liberals feed them and Conservatives will not. Mr. Coyne has been asking tough questions, such as this clip where he challenges the federal government’s sovereign wealth fund concept in an articulate way. He still has a wild political slant to his feed, which makes Coyne’s criticism of the Carney government even more stark. Other clips from the same panel if usually Lib-friendly voices show growing concern at the lack of genuine progress on anything.
But then just when it seems like progress is actually imminent, via the above developments, nope, it all has to come crashing down in a blinding reminder of where Canada is actually headed (whether it voted for it or not). Carney takes the stage at European conference and clearly proclaims he is siding with Europe: “It is my strong personal view that as the international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe, and so I am very appreciative of the symbolism of this invitation.”
Europe is a basket case. It won’t rebuild anything; it can hardly build anything. It is willing to die on a net-zero illusion, and so is Carney (who also reaffirmed in this speech his shared commitment with Europe to fighting climate change, meaning he doesn’t understand what got Europe into the hole it is in). Euro-love might sell in some parts of Canada, so this could be just a sad vote-pandering speech, and maybe Hodgson’s Calgary address was also.
Aligning with Europe because Trump is unpopular in Canada is some pretty bizarre long range strategic thinking. It panders to the worst of Canadian identity, whereby Canadians define themselves and explain their actions by saying “We’re not Americans.” That is vacuous and pompous, if for no other reason than that I know and like a lot of Americans and stereotyping isn’t helpful or the high ground. And it is just dumb. Kanye West, Warren Buffett, Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep and the Pope are all Americans…how are those sweeping generalizations coming?
And now here we are again. Headed for the world stage instead of worrying about the heartland. Heading straight out into a blizzard with no mittens. Or shoes. Shrugging our national collective shoulders again, year after year, until we hit the next breaking point.
Carney came to power by convincing boomers that he was the best man to cut a deal with Trump. In the past month or two he has declared the old relationship with the US to be “over” and is now in Europe telling them that our future is with them.
This all sucks. Talking about politics. The past decade was enough to test anyone’s sanity, and, incredible as it sounds, by late 2024 pretty much all of Canada agreed. So we all wanted change. It was as close to national unity as I’ve ever seen.
As noted initially, some things have changed. The high level talk with respect to energy is indeed welcome. But Carney’s Euro speech is making it look like the new pro-energy talk was forced on them by necessity, by the fact that the world is scrambling for hydrocarbons, and that the true desire all along was more Euro-bonding. Carney is EU climate policy incarnate, and he sits at the epicentre of why Canadian hydrocarbons are not now getting to global markets as the whole world wants. He lit the fire as much as anyone. And his comments from the European conference were noted far and wide, across North America and Europe. It has been duly noted that, officially, Canada is turning its back on its largest and most natural trading partner, and seeking to forge an alliance (of moral superiority – “the international order will be rebuilt…out of Europe”) with an economic basket case. A self-inflicted one.
Maybe this speculation is entirely wrong, and we come out of this all with diversified global trade and a renewed alignment with the US as well, which we desperately need. We can hope.
But the winds now blow as though we are integrating Canada into the EU, rather than mending the US relationship, and I can’t think of a stronger boost to Alberta separatist sentiment than that. Maybe Quebec has a lot in common with France, and good for them, but here in Alberta there is a lot more in common with Montana or Texas than Quebec. Seeking alignment with Europe will without question cause even more national bifurcation and disharmony.
Hey, anyone that’s been in the hydrocarbon industry for more than a decade is bound to wear at least some shield of cynicism. Even Ontario’s premier Doug Ford has chastised the federal government to show some respect to Alberta and Saskatchewan, singling them out, an act that has happened exactly never times before.
That’s what makes this all so exhausting. The positive messaging from Hodgson is the equivalent of the inspirational poster, exhorting us all to focus on positive energy. How great would that be…to have everyone on the same page and striving for similar goals. As Hodgson says, “this government and Canadians” are getting closer, by reaching alignment on the value of our natural resources.
That part is really great, to see some national alignment on something like that. But the rest simply can’t be ignored. When media pundits like Coyne and CBC panels, long accused of being Liberal toadies, are speaking out about the train wreck of much of the rest of the federal program…all the cheery sub-category messaging gets kind of overwhelmed. It is all so very ironic that things are finally looking up for the energy sector on the national scene, at the same time that unease is growing everywhere else.
At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative of imminent fossil fuel demise, facing into the storm. And now everyone is coming around to this realization as well. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
During the cold Arctic winter, drill holes through existing sea ice floes and use pumps (powered by gasoline in the small tests, with plans for renewables like wind or hydrogen in larger concepts) to bring up seawater from below and spread it across the surface.
During the cold Arctic winter, drill holes through existing sea ice floes and use pumps (powered by gasoline in the small tests, with plans for renewables like wind or hydrogen in larger concepts) to bring up seawater from below and spread it across the surface.
The frigid air freezes the water quickly, adding a layer of ice on top. This also compacts overlying snow, which can reduce insulation and promote additional ice growth from below as heat conducts upward more efficiently.
Proponents, including startups like Real Ice and Arctic Reflections, and researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Climate Repair, frame it as “restoration” rather than full geoengineering—enhancing a natural process to make ice thicker and potentially more likely to survive summer melt.
The goal is to increase albedo (reflectivity) and slow the ice-albedo feedback loop: Less ice means more dark ocean absorbs sunlight, warming the region further and accelerating melt.
Two small tests delivered proof-of-concept results:
Svalbard lagoon (Norway): Researchers used a gasoline-powered pump delivering ~3,500 liters of seawater per minute. They flooded a limited area and saw rapid surface freezing plus extra bottom-up growth as the added layer compacted snow and improved heat conduction.
Cambridge Bay, Nunavut (Canada): Real Ice’s team (with partners) used battery-powered pumps to flood up to 250,000 m² (about 62 acres) of sea ice. They added roughly 30 cm (12 inches) of new ice thickness compared with nearby control sites—equivalent to decades of natural thinning caused by warming. Drone and satellite data even showed the engineered patches were initially ~40% brighter.
By June, the thickened ice had melted at the same rate as untouched areas. Ocean heat from below, surface slush, and ponding erased the gains. The engineered patches broke up when the surrounding bay ice fractured—exactly like the controls.
Independent glaciologists called even these tiny-scale efforts “enormous.” Scaling to cover meaningful portions of the Arctic (millions of square kilometers) would require fleets of floating, renewable-powered pumps operating through the polar night—logistically and energetically daunting. One researcher described it as “using a teaspoon to hold the ocean back.”
Arctic sea ice has been shrinking dramatically for decades (summer minimum extent down ~13% per decade). These experiments show the technique works locally in winter, but they also highlight the gap between small tests and climate impact. Broader reviews of polar geoengineering (including this approach, reflective glass beads, and underwater curtains) conclude none are currently viable at the speed or scale needed—and some carry environmental risks.
The results were published last week in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans and a preprint in Earth’s Future.
Here are the two specific studies referenced in the Science article (published around April 17, 2026):
1. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans (published April 2026)
Title: Field Observations of Sea Ice Thickening by Artificial Flooding
Authors: Lead author includes Hammer et al. (Svalbard team, involving Arctic Reflections and collaborators like The University Centre in Svalbard and Delft University)
Conducted in Vallunden Lagoon (Van Mijenfjord), Svalbard, from March to June 2024.
They artificially flooded a small area (~1,500 m²) with seawater pumped from below during April 11–15, 2024.
Results: Added ~26 cm of ice thickness on top of the original ~90 cm first-year ice. The flooding heated and increased salinity in the upper ice layers. Surface albedo changed due to slush, snow drift, and melt events.
Positive short-term effects: Thicker ice and a 6-day delay in “rotten ice” formation.
Limitation: The extra thickness did not delay the final disappearance of the ice in summer compared to the non-flooded reference site. Ocean heat and surface processes erased the gains.
This is the smaller-scale Svalbard lagoon test mentioned in the coverage.
2. Preprint in Earth’s Future (now accepted for publication)
Title: Artificial flooding leads to thicker and brighter Arctic sea ice (or similar; full title describes the Cambridge Bay fieldwork campaign)
Conducted in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut (Canada), over the 2024/2025 sea ice season (Real Ice collaboration with University of Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair and others).
Larger test: Flooded up to ~250,000 m² using battery-powered pumps in multiple sessions.
Results: Flooded areas were up to 30 cm thicker than control (unflooded) sites by early May, with slightly thinner snow cover. Sites flooded twice thickened more than those flooded once. Drone/satellite data showed the thickened ice was initially ~40% brighter (higher albedo).
During melt: Brighter appearance and initially slower melt rates, but the ice ultimately broke up when the surrounding bay ice fractured in summer—similar fate to controls.
Both studies demonstrate that artificial flooding can thicken sea ice and temporarily increase reflectivity in winter/early spring, but the added thickness did not persist through summer melt under the tested conditions.
Access notes
The JGR: Oceans paper is open access (full PDF available directly via the Wiley link above).
The preprint is freely downloadable from ESS Open Archive.
If you have institutional access or are willing to pay for the final Earth’s Future version once fully published, that will be the polished peer-reviewed form.
These are the exact publications behind the recent Science news piece. The findings align with what was summarized: promising local winter thickening (~20–30 cm, equivalent to reversing decades of thinning), but no lasting summer survival advantage in these small trials, highlighting the massive scaling challenges for any meaningful Arctic-wide impact.
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