Latest / Kvetch & Release / Keeping up with China's EV industry

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Keeping up with China's EV industry · Kvetch & Release

0:16
With news that Ford has delayed the start of eed production at its Oakville plant
0:22
by two years until twenty twenty seven, it felt apt to check in on
0:25
the state of the ED industry as a whole. In Canada. We've of
0:29
course seen billions of dollars of investment in both public and private dollars into building
0:34
out a brand new industry, the EV industry, with an integrated end to
0:38
end supply chain from minerals to vehicles and everything in between. In Windsor,
0:42
where I am located, we've seen the announcement of the next our EV battery
0:47
plants, which is going up now, and a new associated supply chain because
0:50
of that, the retooling of Stillantis's Windsor assembly plant, which will begin production
0:55
of the world's first and only electric muscle car, the New Charger, as
1:00
well as yesterday a sixty million dollar investment of a new one hundred thousand square
1:07
foot facility to manufacture components for electric vehicle batteries. It's a fast time right
1:14
now, especially in Windsor, where we have been known for you know,
1:19
we've seen a declining auto industry over the past couple decades, so everything is
1:25
changing and going very fast. Right now. Joining me to help break down
1:27
the state of the industry today, strength and weaknesses of North American ev companies
1:33
and the challenges faced by the emerging Chinese evy market is the CEO and publisher
1:40
of Energy Media, Markham Hisslop. How you doing today, Markham, I'm
1:44
just fine, John. How are you doing very well? Thank you.
1:47
I really appreciate your time and your knowledge on this one. So what brought
1:53
me into this conversation with you was a anecdote that you had shared from Flogg
2:00
Volpei, who is the head of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association. And I'll
2:05
just say the summary that you put up and I'll let you build on it.
2:07
But this is from your Twitter. I refuse to refer to it by
2:10
the new name. By the way, we don't have to. We're gonna
2:13
let Twitter stand exactly. It says the CEO of Stillantis, which is what
2:17
I just referenced here in Winzard, the Jeep and Dodge thinks that any legacy
2:23
automakers not ready now to manufacture evs will be buried by China's EV makers.
2:30
Flavio Volpe agrees Markham. That seems like as good a place as any to
2:36
start this conversation. Wow. Yeah. I was interviewing Flavio in early February
2:40
for an episode of the Energy Talks podcast. I think it's episode two hundred
2:45
and sixty one for anybody who wants to google it, and I started off
2:49
with the Carlos Tavaris quote. So let me give it to you for your
2:53
listeners. If the automotive industry doesn't move, this industry will dis appear under
3:00
the offensive of the Chinese industry. The magnitude of the Chinese offensive, the
3:06
competitiveness that they can demonstrate, and the massive arrival of all of their best
3:10
carmakers is a significant change. So I read that to Flavio and his response
3:19
was it kind of caught me off guard. He said, Okay, interviews
3:23
over, Carlos has said everything that needs to be said. He nailed it.
3:27
This is exactly what is happening. And the reason Flavio is important here
3:31
is because his association represents about seven hundred parts makers in Canada, which it's
3:38
a big industry, and you know many of them are you know, people
3:43
like Magna International. These are big players. And on top of that,
3:47
in his position, he gets to talk to all the big OEMs so like
3:51
the gm Ford, Honda and Toyota and many of whom have operations around the
3:57
Windsor area. So when he says this is what the industry is worried about,
4:02
and I agree with Carlos Tavares, that really means something and we should
4:09
in here in Canada, we need to pay attention to this. It's almost
4:14
incomprehensible to think of legacy auto makers disappearing overnight. But we've also seen at
4:20
the same time the emergence of Tesla out of you know, relatively a short
4:26
period of time, becoming such a fast growing automaker. But Tesla itself is
4:30
facing issues right now from the Chinese EV market, which I'm sure Elon Musk
4:36
was not expecting to occur when he made his decision to invest in China looking
4:43
for the subsidies that he was able to get. And I just want to
4:46
set the table here with you Marka one more time before we dive into the
4:48
Chinese side of things with their manufacturing. And it was in twenty thirteen in
4:55
Windsor when an exclusivity agreement between our city here in the City of Windsor and
5:00
electric bus manufacturer then byd expired. The City of Windsor was looking to purchase
5:06
ten electric buses at the time, add at least two of them into our
5:11
transit fleet, and the agreement would see that BID would stop looking for a
5:15
North American municipality in which to manufacture the buses. That deal blew up.
5:23
BID has now emerged on a global stage as much bigger than just an electric
5:29
bus manufacturer, Markham. When we look at the advantages that the Chinese market
5:34
has and why they are such a concern and a threat for legacy automakers,
5:40
can you explain why what's going on over there? I can actually, so
5:45
there's some historical context here that's really important. Over the last forty or fifty
5:51
years, the Chinese government has actively pursued what's called industrial policy, which means
5:59
that the government basically gets in and leads economic development in particular industries and to
6:04
build up national champions and we you know, Canada has pursued this. We
6:09
had Nortel as an example, BlackBerry Hyundai in South Korea as an example of
6:15
this. It's been used by many countries, including the United States, since
6:18
World War Two. What China did in late the late nineteen nineties is they
6:27
looked around their economy and they said, you know what, we have a
6:31
big automotive industry already with the internal combustion engine. We're never going to catch
6:38
the North Americans and the Europeans. We're just not going to be able to
6:43
become as sophisticated and low cost as they are. They've got too much of
6:46
a head start. So the government made the decision. They said, you
6:48
know, there is this emerging technology what they call new energy vehicles and what
6:54
we would call, you know, just electric vehicles, and we're going to
7:00
put are We're going to put tremendous resources into all aspects of new energy and
7:06
that means batteries, wind, wind turbines, solar panels, the evs themselves,
7:16
and all of the supply chains. And they've done that and allowed them
7:21
those industries to both become more technologically proficient, but also, and this is
7:28
the important thing, to scale up operations. When you scale up operations,
7:32
this technology benefits from what are called learning curves. So as you double production
7:38
costs come down by you know, maybe ten percent, fifteen, twenty percent.
7:43
And if you look at the cost curves for all of those technologies starting
7:47
in about twenty about a decade. Twelve years ago, they started falling off
7:51
a cliff. You know, they would be one thousand dollars a kilowatt hour
7:55
or megawat hour or something like that, and now they're down to one ten
7:59
or even eight, you know, five to six percent of that, which
8:01
is what is enabling the rapid expansion of all of this. And where we
8:07
are now is that companies like byd which you know, overtook Tesla in the
8:13
last quarter of last year to become the largest ev maker in the world.
8:20
They are scaling up with big subsidies from the Chinese government. Of course,
8:26
you know, as you can imagine, this is ticked off governments in the
8:30
US and Europe to no end, and there's there are big fights over over
8:35
those anti dumping by the Chinese. But essentially they've got to the point where
8:41
they have learned how to make reasonably good quality and in some cases very good
8:46
quality electric vehicles in the ten thousand to thirty thousand dollars range. And in
8:52
North America and in Europe we can't even build anything for under fifty thousand.
9:00
We have a few in the thirty thousand dollar range, like the Bolt,
9:03
the Chevy Bolt and now the Chevy Bolty EUV, but you know, those
9:09
are outliers, they're not the norm. Mostly what we're building is fifty to
9:16
one hundred thousand dollars vehicles, premium vehicles at the top of the market.
9:20
And the Chinese are now moving out into export markets like the Europe and Latin
9:26
America and Africa and so on, and they're expanding. They're building manufacturing plants,
9:33
they're setting up dealers and showrooms, they're entering into agreements with national governments
9:37
like they are in Brazil. It is crazy. It's an all out assault.
9:41
And the problem in Canada is that we're so busy looking inward and having
9:48
these silly arguments over carbon taxes and so on, and the energy world and
9:52
the automotive world around us is being dramatically changed in a very short period of
10:01
time. And I have argued you and I have discussed in previous interviews that
10:05
we Canada so desperately needs to get its head out of wherever it's posterior and
10:13
start grappling with the world as it is not the world as we remember it,
10:16
you know, twenty thirty forty years ago. It really does sound like
10:22
there's two markets. Then there's the Chinese market of evs, which are incredibly
10:31
cheap. Might not be as technologically advanced in terms of having all the bells
10:35
and whistles, but they're able to put out very cheap vehicles on the road,
10:39
and as you said, they're exporting. So there's there's that market,
10:43
and then it seems like there's the rest of the world, and they all
10:46
exist in their own side of things as well. It's incredible how China has
10:52
become such a competitor. It absolutely is, and we're only recognizing it in
10:58
you know, we only recognize in the life past few years just what a
11:01
competitive they are. And I read an interview about eighteen months ago and it
11:07
was about how Chinese consumers think of evs very differently than we do. They
11:13
because in China, their culture revolves around mobile phones. Everything they do,
11:20
they're banking, so much of their social life takes place on their phone,
11:24
and they see their automobiles their transportation as an extension of that digital culture.
11:31
And so the Chinese EV makers have designed their vehicles over time to incorporate to
11:37
be part of that digital culture, and they call them, you know,
11:43
rolling iPhones is basically what they are, and so the Chinese, while their
11:52
products are much lower cost, are actually pretty technologically sophisticated. And when it
11:58
comes to this, you know, the interface what's called now in the industry,
12:03
the software defined vehicle. They lead and we are scrambling to catch up,
12:09
and not very good. I mean, look at the problems that GM
12:11
had with its Blazer and other vehicles around software. The CEO of Volkswagen was
12:18
fired a year or so ago because the software department in the in Volkswagen was
12:22
just a disaster and they couldn't get their vehicles out the door because of that.
12:28
So we're now in the uncomfortable position of the OEMs being playing catchup.
12:35
We're not the leaders anymore. We are now in the position that the Chinese
12:41
were twenty years ago, where we're looking at basically an industry that's coming to
12:45
eat our lunch, and the industry knows it, and unfortunately the public is
12:50
for the most part unaware. So, you know, absent the country flipping
12:56
into a Donald Trumpy in speech where we're going to put up massive trade barriers
13:03
and block imports of these vehicles, which I can't see, you know,
13:07
the decoupling of a global economy like that actually occurring. Do you think that
13:13
an eed transition in North America will happen if costs aren't able to come down
13:18
from our domestic producers here. Or is it simply that the Chinese EV companies
13:26
are going to win and we're just going to be seeing Chinese vehicles on North
13:28
America streets. No. I think Flavio has the right view on this.
13:31
He said, you know what, what we need in North America and Europe
13:35
is moving in this direction for sure, and that is the kind of support
13:39
that the Chinese EV makers get from government. We need to begin to do.
13:43
And this is why remember the kerfuffle that erupted a year or so ago
13:50
because the federal government decided to subsidize a couple of battery plants. I think
13:54
Volkswagen was one with ten billion dollars, and there was there were another one
13:58
or two that were in the billion dollar range. And the economists on my
14:03
social media accounts just were outraged. You know that we would spend this kind
14:09
of public money and this was not a good use of our money. And
14:13
I disagreed. I said, look, this is the technology of the future,
14:16
the transportation technology, and there are two ways to go about this.
14:20
You can pay at the beginning like the Chinese have, and you can build
14:24
these industries and scale them up and fund the innovation that's required and then reap
14:31
the benefits. But if you don't do that, which Canada has not done
14:33
and North America has not done, then you have to pay to buy in.
14:39
That's the price of playing in this game. And the alternative, the
14:43
third option, is you don't play at all, and you just open your
14:46
markets up to the new technology and the chips fall where they may, which
14:50
is everybody agrees unacceptable. So what Flavio says is absolutely correct. We need
14:56
to start investing in our OEMs. We need to in invest in these new
15:00
technologies, scale up battery plants we need. But there's a whole range of
15:05
related technologies. They're not very sexy, but they're absolutely critical. AI is
15:11
one, Artificial intelligence software is another. The parts you know that go critical
15:18
minerals, that would be a big one. Canada, according to Bloomberg and
15:20
Ef, has emerged as the number one country in the world with the potential
15:28
to be a critical mineral supplier for these new technologies. And you know,
15:33
so that's lithium and copper and nickel and all sorts of other less well known
15:39
minerals, and we have them here. We have a big mining industry in
15:43
Canada. We need to now reform our approval processes and support our domestic industry
15:52
to extract, but not just extract. The big opportunity here is refining,
15:58
turning back battery minerals into battery metals which then become the component parts for battery
16:06
cells. And the reason why I put a lot of emphasis on refining and
16:10
processing is China controls ninety percent of that global capacity, which means that if
16:15
you extract lithium in Canada, the odds are you have to ship it to
16:19
China to be refined and processed. Then you have to ship it back and
16:23
that's just not economic. So there are all these opportunities that we need to
16:29
build political support for in Canada so that our governments feel that they have the
16:34
mandate to go out and spend public dollars to build these industries up so that
16:40
we get our employment and we get the economic benefits of them. And that's
16:45
where we're falling down in my opinion. Well, China is a economic competitor.
16:52
China is also a security competitor with us, right now, And you
16:57
could make the argument that ensuring that this industry builds up as quickly as it
17:03
can domestically so that there isn't a reliance upon China for there as you said,
17:08
refining, or even just for cheap vehicles, it puts us on a
17:11
stronger national security footing. Shifting back to our footprint here in North America,
17:18
what are some of the advantages would you say that we have outside of just
17:23
critical minerals when it comes to looking at this emerging fight with China not emerging.
17:29
I mean, we're in it right now, right I'm happy to answer
17:32
that. I want to back up just a little bit to address the point
17:34
that you raised about the national security. There's there are great speeches by American
17:41
leaders, and I'm the one I'm thinking of is Gina ray Munda, who
17:45
is the US Secretary of Commerce, and speeches that she gave in twenty twenty
17:48
two. Your listeners can google them. They're very instructive, and she tells
17:52
the story about how in the you know, the Americans spent the night from
17:57
the nineteen eighties up until the pandemic basically offshoring all of their manufacturing. You
18:03
know, Matt in the US used to be a major manufacturing power, and
18:07
then over time it shifted all of that stuff to low cost centers, particularly
18:11
in China. China became the factory to the world. And she says,
18:15
you know, in the first year of the pandemic, we discovered, to
18:19
our chagrin how vulnerable we were to Chinese supply chains basically if we wanted,
18:26
you know, certain technologies and products and so on. They came out of
18:30
China, which has now emerged as the major geopolitical competitor for the US,
18:37
and it was like a revelation for them. There was like a thunderbolt,
18:41
thunderclap, you know. And so they and that's why they started putting,
18:45
you know, hundreds of billions of dollars into the Infrastructure Act, and then
18:48
the two hundred and eighty billion in the Chips Act, and then up to
18:52
maybe a trillion dollars in the Inflation Reduction Act. All of those are in
18:57
response to the re ignit. Finally the recognition in the US that China had
19:04
them is a major competitor and they had a major national security vulnerability in these
19:12
new energy supply chains, and so they're going to build that. So where
19:18
are the opportunities for Canada. I argue that they we you know, I
19:22
was around for the free trade debates in the late nineteen eighties and the argument
19:27
against moving closer to the US was that it made us more vulnerable having one
19:33
big customer, one big market that we serve. Unfortunately, I think we're
19:37
going to have to double down on that. I think that as the Americans
19:41
scale up their battery manufacturing, they're going to switch their auto manufacturing to electric
19:47
vehicles. Electric transportation buses will be a huge opportunity. There's six hundred thousand
19:52
electric buses in China, five or ten thousand in North America. I mean,
19:56
there's a huge opportunity there, and we we need governments, both federal
20:02
and provincial, who recognize the opportunities, work with decision makers in the US,
20:07
work with industry in Canada, put in place the strategies. It's not
20:12
just the policies. You need strategy. The Americans are brilliant at strategy and
20:18
they now have one or multiple strategies depending on how you look at it,
20:22
and we are we are not leading in that respect. So in order for
20:29
Canada to take the pivot from where we're you know, traditionally hewers of wood
20:33
and drawers of water. It's our oil and gas and our forests and our
20:37
minerals. And to make that pivot so that we're providers of finished materials and
20:45
technology and technologically based products like electric vehicles, but do it at a bigger
20:51
scale than we've ever done before, but enjoy the economic benefits that come along
20:55
with that investment and job creation. That is in my mind, the biggest
21:00
imperative political imperatives in this country. And again I can't say there's enough times
21:06
John, and I will probably say it again during this interview that this is
21:10
where Canada is falling down well, and you don't want to be falling down
21:14
with this occurring, because again, things are moving as quickly as they are.
21:18
We don't have time. We have to be catching up right now,
21:19
and falling down will just be putting us further behind. You know, I
21:23
wanted to ask about the strengths of the North American market, but you tapped
21:27
into that right there as well, sort of into one response, which was
21:32
great. I want to shift to the last point of your tweet that you
21:34
had put out in regards to this statement from the CEO of Stalantis. You
21:41
say Alberta, this is your demand, this is demand for your oil,
21:45
waving goodbye, bring shut down. There is some great work done by Colin
21:52
Mccherricter bloomberg Enif, who is, by the way, a good Canadian boy.
21:56
You grew up on Quadri Island in British Columbi. But now he's based
22:00
out of Oslo, Norway, and he leads up their Active Transportation team,
22:07
and their analysis is that transportation at the global level is being electrified so quickly
22:17
that they expect peak road transportation oil demand to peak into like twenty five,
22:23
twenty twenty five or twenty twenty six. And let me explain that a little
22:26
bit. Break it down a little bit. So we use currently about one
22:30
hundred and four million barrels a day, one hundred and five million barrels a
22:33
day of oil, and just under fifty percent of that goes to road transportation.
22:38
So we're talking about not just passenger cars, but we're also talking about
22:42
freight trucks. We're talking about medium duty delivery vans, those kinds of vehicles.
22:49
And it's the light duty vehicles and the medium duty vehicles that are set
22:56
that are already electrifying in a big way and are set for that to take
23:00
off in an even bigger way in the next few years. And once we
23:04
hit peak road transportation oil demand, then the curve down begins to bend very
23:11
sharply, and we're going to and according to the Bloomberg and EFS analysis,
23:18
we're going to see demand fall and the rise in other areas like petrochemicals and
23:26
aviation will not be able to offset that fall in road transportation demand. So
23:30
what does that all mean. What it means is we're likely to hit peke
23:34
oil demand before twenty thirty. From this point of view, that means then
23:41
that you've got more supply chasing less demand in the oil market, and that
23:48
means lower prices, and that means then and we saw what happened in twenty
23:52
fourteen, the last time we had a big bust in the oil industry,
23:57
and Alberta was just a state. I mean it. You know, the
24:03
industry is since then has lost forty or fifty thousand employees. And at that
24:07
time, you know the government was running ten billion dollars a year deficits,
24:11
and it was just it was carnage all over Calgary and all over rural Alberta.
24:18
That's the prospect of what Alberta is looking at. Now, that's a
24:22
worst case scenario. But Alberta has a very bad habit and this is the
24:27
root of a lot of the conflict between Alberta and the federal government these days.
24:32
But it has a very bad habit of planning for the absolute best outcome
24:37
and not caring about the absolute worst outcome. And you know, it's like
24:41
I'm fond of saying, you know, what did mom tell us? You
24:45
know, hope for the best, plan for the worst. That's not what
24:48
Alberta does. And there's a very good chance that Alberta is going to be
24:53
caught unawares and that oil demand and prices are going to fall far sooner,
24:59
like years, maybe even decades sooner than they're planning on, and they're going
25:03
to be unprepared. And that now, say, you know, if you're
25:07
sitting in Windsor, Ontario and you thinking, well, what do I care
25:08
about Western Canada? Oil and gas exports are Canada's biggest exports. And I
25:17
mean by like a factor of two, automotives come in. Automotive exports come
25:21
in around sixty billion dollars, oil and gas around one hundred and twenty billion
25:25
dollars. They're a big, big part of the national economy. They generate
25:30
a lot of revenue for the federal government, which then gets distributed around to
25:33
other provinces. They do the industry does a lot of business and other provinces,
25:38
particularly in Ontario because of the manufacturing. What happens in Alberta matters a
25:45
lot to the rest of Canada. And it's you know, I know,
25:48
it's hard to feel sympathy because we're sniping with them all the time over these
25:52
you know, climate policies and carbon taxes and stuff. But that's that's the
25:56
truth of the matter, and it really behooves us as Canadian to figure this
26:00
out and come to some kind of common understanding so that we're not at loggerheads
26:06
all the time. This is not this is the absolute worst time for us
26:11
to not be rowing all in the same direction. Alberta sounds a lot like
26:17
Windsor to be honest, because I think back to when the Oshawa GM plant
26:23
closed down. It was the night that we had our municipal elections and our
26:29
mayor, who's our current mayor right now, still Drew Dilkins, gave his
26:33
speech at the victory night and tore up his speech and he said, I
26:37
had something written, but we can't rely on that. It's time for us
26:40
not to rely on going the way that we've always gone. We need to
26:44
start diversifying our industries. What if something like INSA were to occur here,
26:49
Well, flash forward five six years. We are all back in on the
26:55
automotive train. And I've even had some people try to convince me that you
27:00
are not actually automotive. It is a diversification, and it's like, Okay,
27:06
well I suppose, but right now they're making they're making batteries for cars.
27:10
Maybe they'll start making them for you know, the refrigerators or something else
27:12
down the road. But we're all in on this one, and I can
27:17
appreciate the concerns of something like that. One of the last times that we
27:21
spoke, though, Alberta had just paused or suspended renewable energy licensing at the
27:29
time. So where do things stand right now? Because based on what you
27:33
just said to me about, you know, they're completely off with they're forecasting.
27:37
I wouldn't be surprised if you were to say it's still still suspended or
27:41
they're moving away from it. Do they have a renewables plan. No,
27:48
And that's the short answer and the longer answer which requires some context. So
27:55
Alberta and Saskatchewan had and this is in the southern part of the province,
27:57
have the best wind and solar resources in Canada. And Alberta, because of
28:03
its open it's deregulated wholesale market, has allows basically anybody who is an approved
28:10
developer, like if you want to build a wind or solar farm in Alberta
28:14
connected to the grid, you don't have to ask anybody for permission, You
28:17
have that right to do it and you can then offer your product into the
28:21
wholesale market and compete with other generators like utilities. So that Alberta has seen
28:26
far and away the most wind and solar investment in Canada in the last number
28:32
of years. So what happened though, is that they're you know, the
28:37
local The current UCP government is very pro oil and gas, doesn't like renewables
28:42
at all. It's political bases in the rural areas where they don't aren't always
28:48
fond of oil and gas or sorry, wind and solar either. They worry
28:51
about things like, you know, a wind turbine ruining the pristine viewscape of
28:56
the rocky mountains, that sort of thing. So in August, the Alberta
29:00
government and announced a pause on wind, on new wind and solar development while
29:07
they sorted all of a sudden So February twenty ninth they announced the new rules,
29:12
and the new rules were horrendous. Even though they lifted the hard moratorium.
29:17
Many observers said, no, this is this is basically a sophom moratorium.
29:21
And I interviewed Dan Balaban, who's the one of the big developers of
29:26
wind and solar in Alberta, and he said, Okay, it's not it's
29:30
not great, and you're going to will still be development, but there'll be
29:34
a lot less of it because there's so much uncertainty. We just don't trust
29:37
the regulator and the government and and so on. So they've kind of they
29:44
haven't kiwa washed it, but they've really hobbled it. Now here's the problem
29:48
with that. We are moving to electrify our economies in response to competition from
29:56
the Chinese, in response to the client crisis and the need to reduce greenhouse
30:02
gas emissions. So everywhere that you look, even in China, which still
30:07
burns a lot of coal, but it's also true in Europe, and now
30:11
it's even true in the United States. Wind and solar are basically all of
30:17
the new generating capacity that's being added to power grids, and countries are spending
30:22
hundreds of billions of dollars in order to modernize their power grids to handle all
30:29
of this new technology. So I interviewed Atta Ramont, who is the senior
30:34
grid planner for the Alberta Electric System Operator right folks who operate the power grid,
30:41
and his message was different. He said, look, we understand here
30:45
at the ASO that there is a technology revolution going on in the power sector.
30:53
And it's not just wind and solar, which are intermittent resources pushing out
30:59
coal and natural gas. It's not just that there are a whole range of
31:03
you know, techie stuff that we don't have to talk about here that are
31:07
revolutionizing how we work in the electricity sector. He said, we're on top
31:12
of that, and we expect a lot more wind and solar in the future.
31:17
We expect that we're going to be investing in these new digital technologies and
31:21
grid technologies to modernize our POA grid in Alberta. All of that is in
31:26
the planning process. We've got you know, reports and blah blah blah,
31:30
all of that kind of stuff, and this is the inherent conflict. The
31:34
people in the know, the people who are working in these areas know what's
31:38
coming and they're doing their very best to accommodate it and prepare for it.
31:44
But the political culture and the policies that then flow from the government are it's
31:48
like it's back in the nineteen eighties. And Alberta is not alone. I
31:53
mean, Saskatchewan is doing the same kind of thing. We've seen a little
31:56
bit of this in Ontario with the Ford govern men's preference for gas for you
32:01
know, gas power plants. We're seeing it in a little bit in some
32:07
of the maritime provinces. So it's not like Alberta is alone. But again,
32:10
we're not all rowing in the same direction. And we you know,
32:16
this is going to come back to bite us. It's not obvious today,
32:20
well it's obvious to some of us today, but with every month, every
32:24
year that goes by, it's going to be increasingly obvious that we're going to
32:29
pay a price if we don't keep up. And I think that is a
32:32
point that is not it's clearly not understood in Alberta, but it's not also
32:37
well understood out of albert Outside of albert we're going to pay a price if
32:44
we don't keep up. You know, it's pretty sobering when you hear that,
32:49
but I mean it makes perfect sense, and I think that's probably a
32:53
perfect place for us to actually leave this as well, because like the ASO
32:58
said, I suppose it's sort of and see for all of us right now
33:01
in terms of how things continue to go. Markham, I really appreciate you
33:05
taking some time away with me today on a Friday afternoon. I hope you
33:10
enjoy your weekend and thanks for sharing your knowledge. Always a pleasure to chat.
33:15
John, you know my number. Markham Hyslop is the CEO and publisher
33:21
of Energy Media