We sit down and have a great talk with Greg McLean, Member of Parlement in the Calgary Centre. It is a great talk about ESG, international energy, and the success and failures of past and current administrations. It is not if we need to go to renewables, it is how with the least impact on the environment. Also, we talk about solutions to the energy crisis.
Thank you, Greg and Terry Etam, for sitting down with me in our regular international podcast. I had an absolute blast, and let us know your feedback and insights. We would also like to thank Patrick Cousineau, Director of Operations and Parliamentary Affairs for your help and assistance. You have your hands full with keeping Greg organized.
Greg, please stop by the ENB Podcast anytime you have updates, or just want some entertainment.
Contact Greg through his website and contact information below.
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Greg McLean is your Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre.
Parliament Hill Office
Greg McLean, M.P.
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
Telephone: +1 613-995-1561
Fax: +1 613-995-1862
First elected in 2019, Greg was re-elected in the election of September 20, 2021, to serve in the 44th Parliament.
Before being elected as MP for Calgary Centre in 2019, Greg worked as a financial professional for 20 years. His work put him in close contact with Alberta’s vital oil and gas sector and with technology start-ups, giving him a first-hand understanding of what it takes for hard-working Calgarians to invest, risk, build, and succeed. It’s the entrepreneurial spirit that drives our province and helps make our city great. Greg works hard to use his financial background to bring on-the-ground expertise in finance, business, and resource development to Parliament. As a new MP, Greg has spent time working with his colleagues refining policy on resource development, including the significant strides the industry has taken toward sustainable development, and the many reasons that Canadians should prefer Canadian oil over environmentally and ethically inferior imports.
Greg has a Bachelor of Commerce Degree from the University of Alberta, and an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario.
Together, Greg and his wife Ruth Pogue have a combined family of four sons. Greg is a big music fan and enjoys skiing, hiking, biking, and everything else Calgary and the Rocky Mountains have to offer.
*Automated transcription below, and we disavow any or all errors unless they make us smarter or funnier.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:00:05] Hey, welcome everybody. Today is one of my favorite days. This is our Canadian roundtable and anybody that’s been listening to us has been absolutely enthralled with Heidi McCaleb. She is a movie mogul, lists and did America, a stranded nation, and is the CEO of Ascend Productions. And we have Terry ETIM and he is the author of Fossil Fuel Insanity. And we did the joke a little while ago that I had to sign my own copy so that we have to bring this up for our next guest. He says Stewart, you’re the best podcast host in the industry. Grumpy, Terry. And with that, we have a very, very special guest today. We have Greg McLean. He is the conservative member of Parliament for the Calgary Center and welcomes very much. Greg, we sure appreciate you.
Terry Etam, Author, Canadian Energy Expert [00:01:03] Stu, thank you for having me here today, and much appreciate it.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:01:06] And you know, before we get started in this, I heard of I saw some things going around between you and Terry. And would you mind telling us your side of the story? And then we want to hear what grumpy?
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:01:18] Going on there? You got to tell me which there was because we’ve been back and forth a few times, Terry.
Terry Etam, Author, Canadian Energy Expert [00:01:23] Yeah, we’ve had coffee and stuff. I wrote a post that I was whining about. I whine about a lot of things, which is why Stu calls me grumpy and I was on politicians case for something, and I can’t remember exactly what it was, said Greg reached out and said, I made some comments about those was pretty funny or something. I remember what it was. I said, Oh yeah, I guess politicians actually do pay attention to this sort of stuff. So. But then after that, we had coffee and had a great conversation and it was, yeah, a good eye-opener for me. It’s a good lesson. Never to shoot from the hip without a no,
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:01:51] no, not at all. You know, I’m a new politician. I just got elected two years ago in Calgary center and I displace the liberal that preceded me. The government in Canada is still a liberal government because they have a majority of the seats are not quite a full majority, what we call them minority government. So not quite enough to govern by fiat, which is what they’re used to doing, but enough to carry the balance here. And I’m a conservative member. I stepped out of my career as a portfolio manager in managing institutional funds and advising on that in order to get in and try and fix the message on oil and gas and how it contributes to our way of life here in Canada. The importance of what we’re doing here is fundamental, not as if we’re doing a lot of the digging a business that isn’t created by a great amount of demand and necessity in the world at this point in time.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:02:37] So, you know, Terry and Heidi and I have talked about the importance of oil for your problem. I mean, the whole thing in Canada, the whole country is importing oil. In fact, I saw a tweet this morning that there is an Iranian tanker with two million barrels of oil that is coming into Canada. What are your thoughts on how do we fix this of making Canada an energy-strong player? You guys are so great with ESG and taking care of the environment with the regulations best in the world. What are your thoughts on how we go forward? Well, thanks for
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:03:14] recognizes that because Canadian public companies are the ones that have been leading the world at this point in time on the whole ESG format before ESG was popular. Canadian companies were ESG. I had a good meeting with Enbridge, which is one of the largest pipeline companies in North America. Earlier this week and they’ve been doing ESG statements published for 20 years now, they’ve been leading this effort to make sure that they have goals as far as you know, the environmental goals. One thing I always like to say is the thing about environmental and environmental. Most of it should be set by the government, not by some other organizations that say, OK, we want you to move in this direction. Governments should be in charge of making sure that the environmental goals we’re trying to attain in society are reaching and making sure we can accomplish something at the end of the day, as opposed to some nebulous bean counter somewhere else. We’re accountable to the public and this is a public good if you think about the environment, so you be responsible and accountable to the public for the cost and the betterment of that public good. The people we elect. That’s what democracy is about as a fantastic statement.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:04:18] But this brings up our TERI and I had been talking about how do we get to renewables? It’s not whether or not we need to go to renewables. We do need to go to renewables. That’s how we get there. And Terry, your comment the other day about politicians being kind of frustrating when you went off on everything on politicians. How would you address the left side of Canadian politics? It’s everybody’s voting in the non-conservative Terry. What would you say about voting in the non-conservative and then making them being able to set the precedence? How would that impact all impact oil?
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:04:55] At the end of the day, it will impact it. I think we have to get there the hard way, though. There’s a fundamental lack of knowledge about how energy. Works at the highest levels in Ottawa, and there you can see it when they’re trying to dismantle a system before it’s ready and they’re trying to replace it with something rapidly and they feel that we have to do to save humanity, but you just can’t do that. You can’t take something apart that quickly replace it. Not that’s monolithic the way the energy industry is. I’m encouraged to see some signs with, like Greg mentioned, Enbridge and Trans-Canada, and you’re seeing these they’re thought out plans on how we’re going to integrate hydrogen or whatever. And Greg said Enbridge built their first wind farm. There have been producing ESG reports forever, and they built their first wind farm in 2002, so they’ve been at this for a long time. They understand what a true energy transition is going to look like, and they’re acting on it as fast as they can. And we should be paying attention to those people, rather than the people that don’t understand energy at all, saying we’re going to eliminate whatever by this date. But you don’t even have you have no game plan and then that there support pillars of their game plan. They’ll point to something like the International Energy Agency reports, who put out a roadmap to net-zero by 2050. And it made all the headlines. They said, Oh, the IEA has a roadmap to net zero to 2050, but if you actually read the report, they’re quite open and they’re like half of the technology required doesn’t exist yet. Well, how do you plan for anything when you’re going to use something that doesn’t exist yet? And the months prior to that IEA report, they had put out a much quieter report saying, here are the mineral requirements to actually get to net-zero if we proceed the way governments are wanting us to European governments and Canadian governments and Biden, if we proceed along that path, we’re going to need four times the number of mines that we have right now to produce all the minerals for this. If anyone pays any attention at all to the mining sector or building any infrastructure, you know how challenging it is to build mine. The stuff that they used in that report was that it takes, on average, six years from conception to production for mine, then that’s historical. Looking forward, that has to be much longer for regulatory reasons. Everything takes much longer. So you’re talking about probably, and this is probably a conservative guess, but 20 plus years to get new mines in place because they get opposed everywhere now around the world, there’s more opposition building so that when you dig into the even if you accept that impost that they think we’re going to get to net-zero by twenty-five. If you start digging into it, what do you mean by how that’s going to happen? It just crumbles. The strategy strategies just don’t make sense. But then you turn around and see companies like Enbridge and Trans-Canada and you go, That’s how it’s going to happen. They’re building it on real infrastructure with real plans.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:07:25] And you know, it’ll get to that. Stuart Armstrong. Absolutely. And I got another question for you, Greg. Yeah.
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:07:31] So Terry, you commented about the mining footprint that we’re going to have to develop in order to get to this transition. What he’s talking about is, of course, by and large, the alternative energy platform, what some of those in, you know, alternative energy platforms are electric vehicles. And you know, I’ve been in this investing business for a long time. Thirty years ago, the great of copper that we mined in the world was one point seven percent. The grade of copper we mined today is zero point eight-five percent, so almost exactly half of what we were mining 30 years ago. You take that and you extrapolate going forward here about where the reserves of copper are in the world and you’re going to have to mine a whole bunch more. Or if we continue to degrade our grades of copper or in what we’re mining, that means a whole bunch more energy that’s expended in mining that copper. This is something that isn’t even on most people’s horizon about how we do that myself. And I’ll tell you as well, people don’t seem to have your eye on the ball here that electric vehicles, batteries, and electric vehicles are not a power source, they’re a power storage source. So when you’re talking to disaggregating a whole bunch of internal combustion engines and the power that comes from that, it’s about a third of the power that’s actually expended in our society. You have to replace that with something and it isn’t batteries. Batteries have to be fueled from somewhere else. So show me where the power comes from. That’s going to replace one-third of the power consumed in Canada right now. So you’re going to have to produce, you’re going to have to construct a whole bunch more hydroelectric dams. And there aren’t that many sites. We’re going to have to construct a whole bunch more nuclear and that’s going to take at least a decade, a decade, and a half to get those moving forward. A whole bunch of hurdles here. People have not thought about the end game from start to finish. They’re just dancing around the edges, you know?
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:09:14] Wow. When you get a wow out of Terry and myself, that’s important. That’s impressive. That’s some fantastic. That is outstanding. Well done. And I just compliment you. Sorry about that.
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:09:26] It sounded like it’s going to be a long interview.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:09:30] This is fun. This is greatness. And when you talk about, I have to apologize for the U.S. kind of really not having good relationships with the Canadian side, with Enbridge, with canceling the pipeline and that kind of things. So my apologies on behalf of not everybody does. Canadian fans were in the same boat.
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:09:52] Yeah, it’s true. Let me. Enbridge is actually doing very well. Enbridge has a very good government relations department and I am pleased to see that the government of Canada. He took up our recommendation in invoking demanding that we invoke the transit pipeline treaty to ensure that Line five continued operating. And the Biden administration finally acknowledged that OK, if we break this treaty, we’re going to have to break a whole bunch more. Treaty is going to be seen as an unreliable treaty maker all around the world. So that has actually gained some significance over the last month and a half or so. I think it was October 4th when our foreign affairs minister pressured the U.S. to do exactly what we’ve been saying for several months now.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:10:31] So where were they? Where were they, Greg Greg, when we were trying to get the Keystone bill? I mean, that same group?
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:10:38] Well, I think sorry to jump in here, but I think the industry has to bear some of the burdens for the hole that we’re into the energy industry for forever. They’ve not done a great job of voicing their own position and stating clearly and articulately the benefits of hydrocarbons. And I saw that with the four executives testifying before Congress in the US. Was that a week or two ago? Yeah, they got hauled on the carpet by some very, very angry panel, and they played defense the whole time. And at the end, one of the congressmen, I think, was a congressman. Sorry if I got the terminology right. But he lectured the panel and he said, This is a disgusting attack and you deserve an apology. You heat our homes. You, you fuel our vehicles, you get the kids to soccer practice. And it was. That’s exactly what these executives I would have hoped to hear the executives say. There are. There are environmental impacts to our way of life. Absolutely. And we have to start through them and we have to make them better. But you can’t discount the benefits of what you’re getting. But I didn’t hear it. So, you
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:11:35] know, very last month, we got a lot of traction on our podcast because Terry and Heidi and I created the snowpack. North American producers of oil and gas trading so that we would have all the trade, all the heavy oil out of the Canada oilsands and Mexico. You know, we’re producing so much gas for Mexico. If we just traded nicely with us under NAFTA, which is already in place, just make it a no pack under it. I think you’d be a fantastic leader of that organization. So all those in favor of voting for you and negotiate
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:12:14] a new president, a
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:12:15] new president. There you go. And then I think your chief of staff, Patrick would also be great. Now governing that
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:12:22] sounds good to me. We really have to get a North American energy strategy together, and this needs to this requires that we actually get past all the political noise that’s happening because the last thing our citizens and your citizens need is to enter into energy poverty. And that’s the path we’re going right? Recognizing there are emissions with oil and gas, there are emissions. There are environmental effects with every energy solution out there, including nuclear, including hydro. There are footprints that we are going to have to reduce as much as we can. And the thing I like about oil and gas is in the last 20 years, we have reduced our footprint significantly. If the rest of our Canadian economy had reduced its environmental footprint the same way the industry has in oil and gas. We wouldn’t be worrying about meeting our Paris targets if you will. We’d be far exceeding them. The whole issue is to make sure we’re actually moving forward on what the actual environmental effects are. So many of the solutions I’ve seen for getting rid of oil and gas require replacements that have an environmental footprint that is often much worse than the one we’re already moving towards. So let’s continue to make sure we bet on the industry that’s actually proven results so far and get that imprint that environmental footprint down as low as possible.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:13:35] Oh, you know, Terry and I have and Heidi have talked about we have studies even as much as a year ago, two years ago that from our team that shows the more we go to fossil fuel, I mean, the more we go to renewables, the more fossil fuels we’re going to use and take a look at California. It’s got the highest expensive kilowatt per hour to their citizens, and they’re using more coal now than they were before. Hypocrisy is a real problem, and I’m going to ask both of you, I’m going to start with you, Greg. One question on hypocrisy, not yours, but because I like I mean, I like the way you think on all these things. So I don’t want the clips coming out of this, you know, on that one. But on here, but we’ve always said, what about giving up some of your power needs in order to give to other countries that are not as electrified? What are your thoughts on some kind of program to encourage? Hey, how about a tax rebate if you give up this much power so that we can give it away to somebody else? I mean, just some kind of humanitarian, but I’m calling that out of the woods there, and then I’ll give that over to Terry after this. So your thoughts on anything that would help move this forward?
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:14:49] Yeah. Well, let’s look at the world right now. Seven point seven billion people. OK, how many of those people are actually consuming in the Typekit to produce the type of lifestyle that we have in North America, right? Because we do. Have a footprint and environmental footprint in so many areas, including a carbon footprint that has led to a lifestyle that people 50 years ago would not have dreamt of. How much of that do we have to let go in order for the world to actually move up to a really good standard? That is the question, and that’s going to cost money. So if we want to say, look, we can, we can’t go to the Banana Republic and buy a new outfit every five weeks because that’s got a carbon footprint on the production and actually moving forward. But even that decision has some worldwide impact because if we stop consuming, we’re going to have to stop producing. Any of those goods are produced in places like Bangladesh, other places in Asia that are increasing their carbon footprint measurably but also increasing their standard of living. So even though a sweatshop and I hate to say this because the sweatshop stories we’ve seen are awful for the people working in those places were previously dying on the streets. So we are talking about continuing to elevate human outcomes around the world, and that’s causing a carbon footprint. I always tell people, walk into Home Depot, take a walk down the packaged aisles, and see if 90 to 95 percent of everything isn’t produced in Asia. Well, it might be produced in Asia because it’s got cheap labor in Asia and cheap power produced from coal, and we’re consuming it here. So you want to talk about border carbon adjustments? We’re doing that all here. We’re pushing our jobs over to cheap jurisdictions, which isn’t just cheap labor that we stand against here in North America, but it’s also a cheap power produced with coal that we are shunning here in North America for some good reason. So there we are. You know, how do we adjust our lifestyle to recognize that all our consumption is based on a business model that says make things cheaper somewhere else? Don’t worry, we’ll make ourselves look very pure here. But our actual outcomes are significantly worse because producing something somewhere else requires a huge shipping footprint to get us or goods at the end of the day. So there’s a conundrum as far as how we get where we’re going around the world, whatever button you push is going to require Lever being pulled somewhere else. There is no magic solution, no easy button, as you say when you walk in the store.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:17:09] Terry, your thoughts?
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:17:10] Yep, that’s true. And I would just add to that that there are four billion people that are up and coming that want our lifestyle too. So that’s just going to compound the problem. You’ve heard that loud and clear from the African delegation and India and in particular at COP26 saying You guys cut your emissions if you want, like, we’re just getting going. And Africa in particular saying we have a chance to develop our hydrocarbon industry and why, why wouldn’t we? We want to. We want to alleviate energy poverty to. That’s tapped into one other thing that I just want to mention about raging at the government again. But the lack of a strategic vision like Greg makes an eloquent point there of how challenging it’s going to be to get there. The thing you have to do is to make the best choice you can along the way to find the most logical path to get there. Right now, we have a situation where if you put up your hand and say I’m going to build a solar farm, the money shows up on your doorstep. There are subsidies. People want to buy it all of the water’s part to make it easy for you to do that or a wind farm. I have a friend working for a little lithium company. They’re trying to extract lithium brine water underground in Saskatchewan. And if you’re buying into the need to get to net-zero by 2050, lithium is one of the key components. Canada doesn’t even have a lithium strategy. We don’t have a mineral inventory that I’ve been able to find. Maybe Greg knows I searched on the web for like, what is? I found old geological studies about estimates of how much lithium might be in underground water in the western Canadian sedimentary basin. But we don’t even know to understand this. We have these little companies out there struggling to raise money, paying for their own wells, doing the R&D work, and the government is setting up a net-zero advisory body in Ottawa. Until this union activists, climate activists, and they’re the ones that are driving the bus even by their own program. If you want to follow that, we just don’t have any vision and it ties in to even a North American energy strategy. We should be using our oil and gas resources. They should be connected to the refineries in the US that that want that type of oil. We should be benefiting in Canada. You should be benefiting in the US. We should be having a program where you have that healthy industry, which is fueling R&D, which is tax incentivized for these new types of things. And you should have governments saying we need a total map of the landscape. Where can we access minerals? Where are they? How hard is it going to be? What First Nations, indigenous peoples we have to engage to make this happen. Percentage of ownership, should they have to make it happen, which I think is a great development, dude. So they’re just we’re running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, it seems like. And getting nowhere, as you see in Cop 26, every big advancement they’ve put forward gets shot down, including the EU, which voted down nuclear powers as a green source of energy. So and the lynchpins of this whole transition thing, so everything, every solution that kind of pops up, which seems to make sense, gets shot down by someone or the other. So at the very start, we need, we need some wisdom in this strategy. So.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:20:01] You know, Greg, you alluded to this a little bit earlier, and I love energy, tech is not there yet. You know, energy, tech, and how it is Canada going to be able or what are your thoughts on the Canadian government being able to help? Like Terry said, the smaller players to get energy tech so that we can get to the renewable side because your finance background is wonderful. Any thoughts on improving energy tech?
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:20:27] Yeah, I’ve got some thoughts on that. Energy tech, of course, is the one is that’s going to get us through this at the end of the day and technology that continues to reduce our footprint, our environmental footprint through and through, but also gets us more energy returned over energy invested. What I used to invest in energy, alternative and regular. The whole formula was how much energy you get out of this, as opposed to the energy you invest in that one time this goes back a decade. We wouldn’t invest in biofuels because there’s more energy going into producing biofuels than comes out the other end. That is a formula you cannot continue to spin the wheel. You’ve got to identify where we’re actually creating more problems than we’re solving. So that’s one of the issues we look at at the end of the day is how much energy you’re getting out of this equation versus what you’re putting into it. And that energy includes, of course, production, energy, human energy, everything else. That’s an expenditure in the process. Terry talked about the EU and the EU, as I often think, you know, much like Canada, the U.S., and we have to make sure we manage our relationship with our most important trading partner in the world. And that is an international relationship, if you will, that showed some strangely, the both in the last administration, but also in the new administration. I often say, you know, the Liberals, the liberal government always was really demonizing your previous president, and nothing’s changed much in the way the trade happens between our countries and our USMCA, which is, you know, and they’re effective, no, they were trying to play the song, you know, ding dong the which is dead, but they should be playing, you know, meet the new boss. Same as the old boss, because nothing’s gotten any better as far as our trade relationships and aluminum and steel and everything else, prices continue to get worse. And this has to change. We’ve got to have a good binational relationship with the United States, particularly on energy, particularly our resources. We talked about lithium, we talked about rare earth metals. Now we did a study at the committee in Parliament that I was the vice-chair of on actual rare Earth Metals Strategy for Canada. The part about I liked is we had an opposition report you’re allowed to, you know, the government puts out the report and I’ll have to agree on it. We put out an opposition report and the media here in Ottawa and eastern Canada picked up on our report because it was much more fulsome about what we needed to do. I mean, all kinds of pundits in Ottawa, all kinds of rent-seekers we call them, get there and say, You need to fund this, you need to fund us, you need to fund this and you need to look at what’s happened to the funding in that interview so far. How many rare earth metals in Canada miners have done that flip over going bankrupt, you know, recapitalizing debt companies starting again with more government money. So how much money government money gets turned into it? Because the commodity market, like every other commodity market, goes up and down and when it’s down, financing is unviable when it’s up. Sure, you’ve got all kinds of government money coming at it and invest your money, right? You’ve got to have a way to stabilize. Not so. We recommended an actual bank of these rare earth metals be actually set up by our governments to make sure that we don’t get whipsawed on the world stage because most of the rare earth metals in the world right now are produced in one country, and that’s where all the industry is going. And that would be China. So we’re going to have a North American strategy on actually building a value-added rare earth metals industry, including batteries, cars, everything else. We’re going to have to start with the commodity that’s going to be part of that process. Lithium, the other very dysprosium everything else we’re mining for here in Canada.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:23:49] Well, you know, Greg, I just really appreciate you, and I just really appreciate your time and your candor and your knowledge. This has been very informative. I mean, when you get a wow at a Greg and I, this is kind of cool and I’d love to have you back again when you have something to really. We’d love to get it out there, the Terry. His last thoughts. And then we’d like to roll over to you for your last thoughts. And you know, we want to know Greg in a minute, what you got coming up and your last thoughts on anything. So, Terry, what are your last thoughts here?
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:24:21] So we’ve been writing for a long time just trying to. I started writing because the messaging was poor coming out of our industry. When I was in the pipeline industry, people weren’t understanding energy and we’re trying to transition too quickly. And I have a very bad feeling that there’s a lot of bad things that are going to happen in the world. Do you see these potential energy shortages? China is short of coal, India, short of coal, Europe, short of natural gas. They’re all short of natural gas and hopefully, we skate through with a mild winter for all of them. And there are no problems, but the chickens are going to come home to roost. I just don’t see good days ahead unless there’s some sanity that lands in energy markets.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:24:55] And so, Greg, the floor is yours. For your last words, we want to know what’s coming around the corner. And what you think, Canada, and we just really appreciate you as a great neighbor.
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:25:06] Well, thank you very much. Well, I’m going to say a few things here. One of which is that I just came through an election, so we had a very divisive election again here in Canada. And I’ll tell you here in Calgary center, I had four opponents, one of which is a Christian heritage. So they always run a religious person, and he’s the same candidate as always. But the other three were a liberal, a new Democratic Party representative, and a Green Party, and every one of those people running against me had barely held a job. OK? No, I only won by 51 percent and change kind of thing. So, you know, a slight majority of people voted for me in my riding and my wife is going, you look at the experience of the people they’re voting for and why would you expect me to have 85 percent of the vote if people just looked at the resumes of the people that were putting themselves forward? But this is a democracy, and perhaps this is a problem with democracy that we need to address right now is that no matter what you do, you put your name on a ballot. You have no experience to bring this equation. You are just reiterating talking lines of something that always has gotten you so far. Here’s your package where you’re in our party. Go say this We don’t encourage politicians that actually know anything anymore to get involved in the parliament. And I can see why after having been there two years now, because it’s always, you know, the narrative is going uphill. We don’t get rewarded, i.e. more voters coming to us by actually, you know, putting tangible solutions on the table. You get rewarded by the media, by the voters, by hyperbolic statements like, we’re going to do this. And it’s an absolutely ridiculous statement sometimes. But this is democracy. We need to have a better understanding of democracy and how democracy. The accountability of politicians for the outcomes at the end of the day is where society has to wear it because otherwise, we’re just handing over that accountability and the money and the lot, the wealth transfer, if you will, to other parties. And that’s something people need to get their eyes wrapped around here. Who’s making money in this process right now and who is going to be responsible for that? I guarantee you, I know who’s responsible, it’s the taxpayer. Take a look at where money shifting in our society right now, which isn’t into the pockets of regular people.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:27:11] Well, I’ll tell you what, I just can’t believe how much fun I had and how much I learned with both of you. And, you know, we got some action items out of here. We got to get the North America Trade Association of Producing Energy for Canada, Mexico, and you know, you’re going to be the head schmo on that Mad Dog and as we say in Texas, and we also need to figure out how to get all of our energy tech to run down the road together. But man, I can’t even begin to you how much I appreciate this and this will be rolling out next week and we’ll tag everybody. All of your contact information will be there and where to donate. But again, thanks.
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:27:51] I’m not allowed to accept funds from the United States but thank you.
Stu Turley, CEO, Sandstone Group [00:27:56] Sounds great. Thank you guys much. Appreciate it.
Greg McLean, Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre [00:27:58] Thanks for having me. And.
