10 Thoughts on Abortion 1. It sure is mighty convenient timing for all political and electoral energy in the United States to suddenly get sucked up into a single issue which affects the powerful in no way, shape, or form. I wouldn't have thought it would be possible for everyone's attention to get diverted away from inflation and the looming likelihood of wage reductions and soaring unemployment, or the economic war with Russia that's making everything worse for everyone while pouring vast fortunes into a proxy war in Ukraine. But by golly, the empire found a way. 2. Easy access to safe abortions helps prevent women from being trapped in abusive relationships because childbirth is a great way to keep a woman tied to you and submissive to you. Financial abuse plays a role in virtually all abusive relationships, and if a woman has been made dependent upon an abusive partner to feed her children, she's far more likely to submit to his demands and far less likely to try to leave for fear of being unable to provide for them. Most women who've escaped from a long-term abusive relationship with a man can tell you about the horror of a missed period and how much more terrifying that experience would have been if they hadn't known that abortion is an option. Being forced to birth an abuser's child often means being forced into enslavement to him. The way to prevent this from happening is to ensure women easy access to safe abortions if they want them, and ideally to guarantee mothers financial support so they aren't dependent on the charitable inclinations of some man who may or may not be a good person. 3. For me the issue of abortion comes down to bodily sovereignty, not only in that the state has no business forcing unevidenced beliefs about metaphysical personhood upon people's reproductive systems, but also in that it's immoral to force anyone to let their body be used by anybody else. Leaving aside philosophical debates about whether a fetus is a person and all the faith-based mental contortions you need to pull off to make a small cluster of cells seem the same as you or me, bodily sovereignty means abortion should be a right even if we concede that the fetus is a person. No person of any age, whether six weeks in utero or 60 years out utero, has a right to use my body without my permission.  In exactly the same way, it's illegitimate for the state to force a woman to let a fetus use her body to gestate just because it can't live outside her. Even if we grant both the woman and the fetus full bodily autonomy, a woman refusing to let a fetus use her body is not a violation of the fetus's bodily autonomy because the woman isn't at fault for the fetus's inability to survive outside the womb any more than you'd be at fault for my inability to survive without the use of your kidneys. Some may argue well, the woman had sex therefore it's her moral responsibility to carry the life to term. This is wrong and it says so much about how entitled people feel to the use of women's bodies.  That's how bodily autonomy works. If she gets pregnant and the fetus gets to live 10 weeks as a result of that before she evicts it from her person, then that's 10 more weeks of life than it otherwise would have gotten. You're welcome, fetus. No time's up. Out you go. 4. While we're on the subject of bodily sovereignty, I've seen a lot of people arguing that the whole my body my choice position was invalidated by the way people were forced to take vaccines in order to participate in society. This is an entirely logical argument in my opinion. It's not logically consistent to say that bodily autonomy needs to take a back seat in one area and then claim it's of utmost importance in another. Proponents of vaccine mandates are responsible for the fact that this argument is being used and that it is being used effectively. 5. It's very disconcerting that the law has come down on the side of subverting bodily autonomy in both these major debates recently. As humanity gets more and more complicated, we may see the dominance of the notion that our bodies are not our own yield greater and greater consequences going forward. 5. I was talking on Twitter yesterday about how I'd have to give up my career if I got pregnant and couldn't have an abortion, and some guy told me something like yes, but raising a child is so much more noble and lasting than what you are doing here. It is true that motherhood is certainly noble, and I myself am much more impressed with my achievements in that field than I am in this one. But have you ever heard anyone say such a thing to a man? Have you ever even once heard anyone tell a man that he'll need to give up his successful writing career or any other successful creative career if he becomes a father because the labor of fatherhood is so demanding and intensive it will require all his focus? Of course you haven't, because the burdens of parenthood overwhelmingly fall to the mother. It's almost impossible to do a good job raising a child while maintaining a steady and high quality creative output, and those who do often wind up like Sylvia Plath. Men are never forced to sacrifice successful careers to raise children. Women shouldn't be either. Silently picking up the slack of a society that expects people to work unpaid, doing the most important job in the world is what women have always done, and it's unjust. Our society was built over thousands of years, during which both men and women were trained to believe that women's lives don't belong to them. That indoctrination still reverberates through our society today. Abortion rights affect not just mothers, but grandmothers as well. If women are forced to give birth when they are young and not ready to be mothers, who do you think that responsibility is going to fall to most of the time? Forced birth isn't just an imposition on pregnant women. It's an imposition on the grandmothers who will get stuck raising an unwanted child, probably just as they were getting excited about beginning the empty nest phase of their lives. If my daughter was forced to have a baby right now, so much of the work would fall to me that I would have to put my career on hold again. Supporting her education would be my priority. This would be an intrusive and immoral imposition on both of us. 7.  8. There is a very robust argument to be made that all unwanted pregnancies and therefore all abortions are the fault of men.  Everyone is responsible for what they do with their own bodily fluids. We're supposed to learn this as small children, but if you suggest that men are at fault if they choose to ejaculate inside a woman's vagina instead of literally anywhere else, it gets an outraged response from a certain type of man. It's just taken as a given that a woman who consents to vaginal penetration has consented to vaginal insemination and therefore both parties are equally responsible for any ensuing pregnancy.    It's something you do for yourself, not for her. If this is news to you, please revise your understanding of what sex is and start paying way more attention to the clitoris. 9. The overwhelming majority of the idiotic vitriol I get whenever I talk about abortion always comes from men. The ones I've interacted with are powered by a kind of invincible ignorance where they simply talk at women about what pregnancy and motherhood are like, with this know-it-all attitude that refuses to ever consider the possibility that there may be some aspects of those experiences they don't fully understand. I've had men not just argue with me about my own experience of my own body, but actually lecture me.  They will remain in their impervious know-it-all bubbles for the rest of their lives, partly because they don't let any new information in and partly because they repulse anyone from trying to give them any. Make sure that that's not you. 10. There is this fuzz-brained notion in Trumpian circles that holding antediluvian positions in social justice issues like abortion is somehow fighting establishment power structures, because politicians and the media tend to give lip service to those causes. This is based on sloppy thinking. As humanity becomes more conscious, people increasingly value egalitarianism and personal sovereignty. Powerful spin-meisters simply understand that you need to be aligned with the collective consensus and ideally even a bit ahead of the curve if you want to manipulate everyone. Manipulation depends on sympathy. Propaganda and advertising don't work if you don't have the sympathy of your audience. If you're saying something that makes people unsympathetic, they'll simply reject whatever you're saying, so manipulators say whatever they need to say in order to get as much public sympathy as possible. If the public is waking up to the need for social justice, then in order to continue manipulating, you'll want to not just look like an advocate for social justice, but the best advocate in the room. That way you can direct where public energy and attention goes. They're not saying, yes, this way toward Satanism, like right-wingers claim, they're saying, this way toward continued support for the status quo. Our support for social justice means continuing to vote for status quo politics, consume status quo news, and shop at Amazon. Pro-choice activism in America will with 100% certainty see its energy herded toward support for the status quo politics of the Democratic Party. This doesn't mean abortion is bad or that the establishment loves abortion. It means establishment manipulators will work to divert any movement into support for the status quo in order to control it.


Internal Revenue Service, IRS Tax News, reminder to many retirees, last date to start taking money out of IRS and 401Ks is April 1st. IRS has reminder to retire. Yes, it's the same reminder they have for all of us. We're watching you. Just remember, the IRS is watching you. What's your hurry? What's going on? I got a special delivery here, Mark Durge. I'm watching you, Foster. Just remember every minute. God is watching you.   It's quite scary. I mean, it's going to be difficult to tell this kid to stop feeding his face after he's been pampered for so long, but I feel we have the moral obligation to do so.   And the government looks down, shuffles his pudgy feet, which he hasn't been able to see for nigh on four score and seven years ago. As he says, nothing, I didn't spend, I swear I didn't spend the money on anything. And so it's like, wait a second, what are you saying government, that the money just disappeared like the trillions of dollars just disappeared? And then as they look around attempting to find support from their pampering old grandpa, they're like, we totally spent the money to like eradicate all viral diseases everywhere worldwide. It's like, okay, so you're telling me government, you spent the money to keep us safe from diseases. Is that what you're telling me? Do you think that Dr. Fauci intentionally lied under oath to Senator Paul when he vehemently denied NIH's funding of gain of function research? I think there's no doubt that NIH was funding gain of function research. Is it likely that American tax dollars funded the gain of function research that created this virus? I think it did not only from NIH, but from the State Department, USAID and from DoD.  I mean, possibly even some deception is going on here. I'm starting to feel like there might be a little bit of deception. We've got to tell the truth. When you don't tell the truth, you've got a problem. And I think if you go back, there were many times when public health officials packaged the message to what they wanted to say, but it wasn't necessarily truthful. Honestly, I'm starting to think this bohemian blubbering beast of a government may actually benefit from going on a diet even. I mean, how can that be? Could the fat positivity movement actually be wrong? But then when you finally force the government child to admit their line, instead of taking initiative to correct a course, they attempt to take the insanity defense claiming they have like climate related mental health issues or something. Climate mental health. I said, tell me what's going on with your peers. Climate mental health. Which means, of course, that they need more money, which is obviously a claim laden with all kinds of deception.  So, you know, we start the process. We start the process over again, I guess. I are 2023-43, March 9, 2023, Washington, the internal revenue service today reminded retirees who turned 72 during 2022 that in most cases, Saturday, April 1, 2023 is the last day to begin receiving payments from individual retirement arrangements. Those are the IRAs 401Ks and similar workplace retirement plans. So remember the general idea of the retirement plans is usually you get a tax benefit when you put the money into the retirement plan, but it's really a deferral. And when you take the money out, then you're going to have to be paying taxes at the point in time that you take it out, and the IRS is going to require people to take the money out at some point in time in the future because they want to get paid at some point. So that's the general idea. So payments called required minimum distributions, RMDs are normally made by the end of the year. But anyone who reached age 72 during 2022 is covered by a special rule that allows IRA account owners and participants in workplace retirement plans to wait until as late as April 1, 2023 to take their first RMD. So if you're waiting on that, if you're in that particular situation and you're waiting as long as you can on it, then you want to make sure that you're in compliance so that you're not having any penalties related to not taking out your required minimum distributions. The IRS wants you to take the money out, of course, because then it will be taxable income and they want to get paid at that point. So in other words, in general, the special April 1 rule applies to IRA owners and other participants in these plans who were born after December 31, 1949, two payments in the same year. The April 1 RMD deadline only applies through the required distribution for the first year. For all later years, the RMD must be made by December 31. This means that taxpayers who receive their first required distribution for 2022 and 2023 on or before April 1 must receive their second RMD for 2023 by December 31, 2023. So if you have that special rule going into effect that kind of pushes that first date out, then you're going to have the squishing together of the next date to be back on the normal date horizon after that point. So even though the first distribution is actually the required 2022 distribution, it's taxable in 2023 and reported on the 2023 tax return along with the regular 2023 distribution. So hopefully, you can get that straightened out with your tax plan and your CPA as well as your financial institution so that you get the documentation, the 1099R and whatnot, properly applied to the proper period so that we have the proper categorization of the distribution to the right year in the proper category. So types of retirement plans required MNDs. These required distribution rules apply to owners of traditional SEP steps and simple IRAS. While the original owner is alive, they also apply to participants in various workplace retirement plans, including the good old 401K, 403B and 457B plans. RMDs don't apply to Roth IRAs. Remember, the Roth IRAs are kind of like the reverse of the normal IRA. So you would think the government doesn't have the same kind of incentive to force you to take the money out of the Roth IRA because you pay the benefit when you put the money into the Roth IRA. So it's a little bit different of a scenario there. So the IRA trustee must either report the amount of the RMD to the IRA owner or offer to calculate it. Often the trustee shows the RMD amount on Form 5498 in Box 12B for a 2022 RMD required by April 1st, 2023. The RMD amount is shown on the 2021 Form 5498 normally issued to the owner during the first part of 2022. Some can delay RMDs, though the April 1st deadline is mandatory for all owners of traditional IRAs and most participants in workplace retirement plans. Some people with workplace retire workplace plans can wait longer to receive their RMD. That sounds interesting. Tell me more. Most participants who are still working for that employer can wait until April 1st of the year after they retire to start receiving these distributions if their workplace retirement plan allows. This RMD exception does not apply to 5% owners of the business sponsoring the retirement plan. There's a link to that here to participate in SEP and simple IRA plans. See tax on excess accumulation in publication 575. There's a link to that here for details. Employees of public schools and certain tax exempt organizations with 403B, that's typically the kind of 401K related plan for government employees such as if you teach in a public school, for example, accrues before 1987 should check with their employer plan administrator or provider to see how to treat these accruals. IRS online tool and publications can help. Many answers to questions about RMDs can be found at RMDFAQs. There's a link to that here on irs.gov. A lot of three letter stuff right there. So RMDFAQs on irs.gov. Any case. Most taxpayers use table 3 uniform lifetime to figure their RMD. Marry taxpayers whose spouse is more than 10 years younger. And is there only beneficiary use table two for 2022 RMD do April 1st 2023 use the life expectancy tables and appendix B of the publication 590 B. There's a link to that here distributions for individual retirement arrangements or iras IRAs as shown in table three, the RMD for a person age 72 in 2022 will normally be based on distribution period of 27.4 years divide the December 31st 2021 balance by 27.4 to get the RMD for 2022.   Don't you know no. Anyways publication 590 B has worksheets examples and other information that can help anyone figure their RMD new age 73 rule starts in 2023 for those planning ahead starting in 2023 retirees can wait until age 73 there's a lot of rhyming going on here to begin receiving RMDs I gotta read that sentence for for those planning ahead starting in 2023 retirees can wait until age 73 to begin receiving their RMDs that just rolls off the tongue right there visit irs.gov for more information on this and other changes affecting retirees and retirement plan participants so there's a link to this here in the description so you can check it out if you want more detail on it.


Alright in this video I'm going to walk through my November online photo sales. Now November was a really really good month for me. It was actually my best month of 2020. Not only was it my best month but it actually doubles my second best month. I made more in my online sales in November than I did in August, September and October combined. So it was really good month for me. I'm pretty excited, pretty happy but I've got a lot of great things to talk about so we'll just get into it now. Now one of the reasons why I had such a great month was I got a lot of sales from my own website. So I have my own domain SouvenirPixels.com and I've got a website that's hosted on Smugmug and I sell my photos on there and people can download them for stock or they can also download them for prints. Now there's one company that found my website and they were making a calendar for their customers so they want to send out this calendar for their customers for 2021 and they ended up buying seven of my photos. Now I sell my photos for about $29 and Smugmug takes a small cut so it ends up being a fairly large amount and it ends up being my biggest site of the month. Now I don't get sales on Smugmug every month but I get more than a lot of other sites. However, the good thing about Smugmug is that they take a very small percentage. So the downside is you need to market your own stuff so this person probably found me through my social media so I have to do my own marketing for it. But when you get downloads you get to keep the majority of it and you get to set your own price. So this worked out very well for me $180 in just November. Really happy with that and it was my best site of the month. Now not only did I have a great month on Smugmug I also had a great month on Fine Art America. This was my highest Fine Art America sales for any month of the year and I made $170 on just three sales. Now one of the things with Fine Art America I find is I do get more sales this time of year. Being November people are buying Christmas gifts so I find that November is typically a good month for Fine Art America but making $170 in one month off of my old photos is still pretty good. That actually only came from three different sales. All of them were photos that I uploaded there over three years ago from vacations I'd had in the past and this photo in particular I'll put it up here. It sold twice so two of those three sales were this one photo. This photo is interesting I actually really like this photo when I took it and edited it I really liked it but it makes very few sales on the stock sites and this is the first time it's ever sold on Fine Art America as well but it sold twice in the same month the first and second time. Now I actually see this a lot and I think what happens with Fine Art America is that when you get a sale one sale they'll bump you up in the search results for a certain period of time. So often what you see is you get a first sale of a photo and then shortly after you'll get the second sale of that photo and I think that's what happened again in November. So the first person was probably looking for something very specific you know that photo and bunch of bunch of y'all you know maybe they had a good time traveling there and they wanted to find a photo of it and then so that's got the first sale then the second sale probably came from you know bumping up the search results because of the first sale. Anyway it's really happy about it $170 from three sales on Fine Art America. Alright now next on the list is Shutterstock. Now not only was did I have my best month for Smugbunk sales my best month for Fine Art America sales I also had my best month for Shutterstock sales. So recently I've been averaging like $30 or $40 maybe on Shutterstock a month and in November I got like what $85 looking up there so I got $85 and the majority of that though actually came from three sales so on Shutterstock what you get is you get a certain percentage of the sales so if people purchase extended licenses those cost a lot more and then you get a much bigger percentage and because of that I'm just gonna look at the exact numbers here because I wrote them out I got three larger sales so I got one sale for $29 one sale for $26 and one sale for $11 so out of the $85 that I got from Shutterstock 65 of those dollars came from like three different sales right so that's why I made so much I got some big sales I don't get big sales like that every month and it just so happened that three of them came through in November right now I know this is gonna come in the comments people are gonna say well I thought Shutterstock only gave ten cents Shutterstock does not give ten cents per download Shutterstock gives a minimum of ten cents per downloads okay so I had a large number of ten cent downloads that added up to you know ten twenty cent downloads that up to like $20 but then I also had those other three big sales that was $65 just how I get my $85 on Shutterstock right so again still not as good as what I was getting Shutterstock three four years ago but it is has been my best Shutterstock month of the year and it coincides a lot of other best sites of the year so I'm really gonna add it up for November alright so those are three great sites then I have all my other sites here now deposit photos you know was slightly better than I think average but I typically make around $20 there's 25 isn't that big of a deal next are the two free sites the Pixabay and Pexels so those are donations from those sites so when I have like RPD up here that's revenue per download or revenue per purchase for fine art America but in these sites this is revenue per donation so I received a number of donations and it added up to two sites I got $50 in donations which is also quite good all right now next was Adobe stock Adobe stock was pretty much average that's about what I've been making recently I'm after that is pick fair now pick fair is a site I don't up there very regularly anymore because I don't make a lot of sales that's only my second sale of the year so you know it's nice that it came in but it was only $8 so I don't upload there regularly but it is nice to get that second sale and then the rest of the sites are pretty much average just the low sites now but that ended up being $550 for the month of November and as I mentioned at the start that was my best sales month of the year it was by far my best sales month of the year probably you know after that I think my biggest month was like $250 so if you've been watching this channel for a while you know that you know a lot of the photography I do I do it on vacation and so it's vacation photography so when COVID hit and traveling stopped it hasn't been great for my stock sales and my year this year although I haven't tallied everything up I'll probably have a lower year in 2020 than I did in 2019 so it's really nice that I did get this kind of larger month at the end of the year another reason it's nice is I wanted buy some gear my last trip out doing some photography I noticed that my one tripod was pretty it was starting to shake and I figured out that I couldn't really fix it very easily I have another tripod that I use sometimes and one of the legs got stuck and I also couldn't fix that easily so I've got like these two five-year-old tripods that both have kind of gone south over the past year so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use this $550 to get myself a Christmas present and I actually already got it in the mail it's right here I picked up the peak design tripod probably one of the more expensive options that you can get for a travel tripod but you know I somewhat rationalize it by the fact that you know I just made $550 on my sales and hopefully this tripod is gonna you know get me out taking more photos in 2021 and you know which will turn into additional sales so it's kind of like an investment but it's more just you know for me in my photography because I wanted to get a new tripod and this one seemed pretty good from all the reviews online anyways that's my photo report for this month next month what I'll probably do in January is I'll do a year in review so I'll go over all of my sales from 2020 look at all the different sites see how they compared to the year before so we can kind of see which sites are getting better and which sites are maybe going down hopefully it'll help you give you some ideas but where you should be focusing your you know upload efforts in 2021 anyways hopefully found this useful and best of luck selling your photos online


I had a couple of questions about my moving XOR script that I wrote for the 010 editor and the reason that I wrote this is because I encountered the malware sample that used that type of encoding. So let me show you how this works in a video. So we do the moving XOR encoding. We can do it from left to right or from right to left. So here default is from left to right and then the offset. So here default is minus 1 and this is here the encoding. So how does this work? Well let's undo this and let me show you with another version of the script which does this step by step. This is the version that does it step by step. So again we go from left to right. So that means that we will XOR this byte and this byte and this byte here from left to right. And also the byte that we XOR together is defined by the offset and the offset here by default is minus 1. So here we are going to XOR this byte and this byte and store the result here. And then we will XOR this byte and this byte and store the result here and so on. So first of all here let's do this step by step. We have 41 and 42. This will be XOR together and stored here at this position. So let's do this. The result is 3. So now next step 3 and 43 are XOR together and the result is stored here. So that's 40. Next step 40 and 44 are XOR together and this is stored here. Like this. This is 4. Next step 4 and 45 are XOR together and the result is stored here. This becomes 41, 41. Last step 41 and 46 are XOR together and then stored here. This is 07. So this is how this encoding works. We can also decode this by running the same script but then instead of going from left to right we go from right to left. We can type R. It's not case sensitive and also the offset is minus 1 and this is the decoding. So here we have again ABCDEF. So this is how the script works. It can also work on a selection like here. We have XML. This is a message and you can run the script moving XOR selection. And now let's just go from right to left just to have a different encoding. Say that the offset is 1 and then here you have the decoded, the encoded message which you can decode by running this again now from left to right. Offset 1 and we have the original again.


Good afternoon. On behalf of Professor Barry Rabe, the Ford School of Public Policy, and in particular the International Policy Center, it's my pleasure to welcome you to our fourth webinar event for the North American Colloquium on Climate Policy. The North American Colloquium is an ongoing collaboration between the Ford School, the University of Toronto's Monk School, and the Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Meany Family Foundation for making this year's programming possible. Today's event focuses on the politics of oil and gas pipelines with evidence from Canada and the United States. First, Andre LaCourse will present findings from his research with Daniel Belan, comparing the politics of pipeline expansion in case studies from Canada and the US. Then Amy Janswood will present from her research with, excuse me, with Sarah Martin and Kate Neville, which focuses on two proposed pipeline expansion projects in Canada. As audience members, you may ask a question in writing using the Q&A feature on your Zoom control panel. During the Q&A, we'll get to as many questions as possible, but apologies in advance. We will not be able to get to all of them. We may go about 10 minutes past the scheduled end time of 5 p.m. local time in order to accommodate as many of your questions as possible. It's now my pleasure to introduce Andre LaCourse. Andre LaCourse is professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. He is the author or editor of numerous publications on the topics of nationalism and federalism. His recent books include Nationalism and Social Policy, the Politics of Territorial Solidarity, published by Oxford University Press, and Fiscal Federalism, and Equalization Policy in Canada, published by the University of Toronto Press. Andre? All right, thank you very much, Josh. So the paper that I'll present today was written with my colleague Daniel Belan from McGill University and it starts with a puzzle. And the puzzle is this one. Pipeline development in Canada has triggered fairly serious intergovernmental conflict. Such development is wanted by the government of Alberta, the main oil and gas producing province in the Federation, but has been, you know, opposed or lukewarmly endorsed, depending on where you stand by the federal government, and strongly opposed by several other provinces. So there has been fairly severe intergovernmental conflict in Canada around the issue of pipeline development. In the United States, although there's been similar pipeline development to take Texas oil out of the Permian Basin, there's been very little intergovernmental conflict, both in relation to the relationship between Texas and the federal government and with neighboring states. So that's kind of the puzzle that we start with. That's why intergovernmental conflict has been so much more prevalent and severe in Canada around pipeline development to carry Alberta oil out of the province. Then it has been in the United States to carry out, to carry Texas oil out of the state. There's some kind of basic explanations that we would be drawn to that don't work very well. For example, we could think that oil is more important for Alberta than it is for Texas or in Canada than it is in the US. But, you know, really that's not the case when you look at some basic statistics, oil and gas extraction percentage of GDP, for example, in the two federations quite comparable, 8% in the US, 7% in Canada. That's probably the importance of the oil and gas sector in Texas and Alberta. It's also about the same in terms of percentage of GDP, 9% for Texas, 10% for Alberta. So there's no easy explanation that come out of this. One important, I guess, difference when it comes to just raw numbers and that's striking and then fairly important I'll come back to it is that Alberta represents a much greater overall oil and gas industry in Canada compared to what Texas represents in the US and I think that's important. So we develop our explanation around four factors that we think all taken together, you know, help us understand this puzzle, crack this puzzle if you will. The second factor is the constitutional regulatory framework. So basically, you know, what I'll explain here is that in Canada, the federal government is much more exposed to, you know, decision making around pipeline development it has to arbitrate between different positions in the way that the United States federal government does not. The second factor we'll look at is the ideological and political connection to oil that exists both at the federal level and at the constituent unit level and both federations. So basically we'll look at indigenous opposition to a pipeline development. Strong indigenous opposition can provide some momentum for opposition on the part of either the federal government of or constituent unit governments and what we'll find here is that it's stronger and more, more, more central in national politics in Canada than the US. And our last factor is the fact that in Canada there is a an equalization program that seriously aggravates the oil producing province of Alberta, which then kind of, you know, enmeshes the discourse about pipeline development with a broader than the physical federalism in the country. So those are basically the four factors that I want to discuss fairly briefly with you here. So let's start with the issue of kind of regulatory framework. So first starters I mean the idea behind developing pipeline. As the government of Alberta wishes is to take Alberta oil to new markets, Alberta oil right now, Alberta's landlocked, and it can only export to the United States very dependent on the US market, and it doesn't want to be right. But in order to go to go east and west or to export oil to either Europe or Asia or both. You need pipeline to cross many different provinces. And, and so pipeline development in Canada becomes automatically an issue of Canadian federalism. And the regulatory framework in Canada basically as confirmed by a Supreme Court of Canada decision in 2020 is that the government of Canada the federal government as sole authority over the regulation of both oil and gas pipelines right so the government of Canada needs to basically approve pipeline development for it to occur. So the provinces, neighboring provinces or provinces whose territory would be, you know, affected by new developments and pipeline really have constitutionally nothing to say, and, and, and materially nothing to gain, either because in Canada, the natural resource natural resources are property of of provinces. The long and short of it here is that in Canada the federal government is as a result of the constitutional and regulatory framework place in a position where it has to arbitrate a conflict between oil producing provinces, mainly Alberta but also Saskatchewan to a lesser degree. And essentially non oil producing provinces who have very little to nothing to gain from pipeline development at least in the very concrete terms. Now, of course the Texas experience with all those a little bit different because it already has a more considerable pipeline network geared towards export it also of course has access to see. So perhaps we could make the argument that more pipeline development could be seen by Texas as less crucial to its economic overall the economic development than it is for Alberta but at the same time. We know that there's been a tremendous pipeline expansion as a result of the Texas production boom. And, and, and this has not created the same type of intergovernmental conflict as we have we seen in Canada. And again, to start with we need to look at the I think at the constitutional regulatory framework which is quite different than what we find in Canada. The US federal government does not have an authority comparable to its Canadian counterpart on the construction of of crude oil pipeline. In fact it's it's very much a state by state basis. Which you know sometimes doesn't involve very stringent kind of authorization or requirements. What I'm saying here is that the US federal government has very little exposure in relation to the building of oil pipelines unless of course it crosses international borders or federal lands which reduces the potential for federal state conflict and on gas pipeline. And the regulatory framework there focuses on, you know, a self described independent commission the federal energy regulatory commission. So which also, you know, provides some insulation to the US federal government in terms of these types of decisions so that's that that's factor one basic kind of constitutional and regulatory framework differences between the two federations point to more focused on ideology and politics here. I think in Canada what's important is that the current liberal government led by Prime Minister Trudeau really came to power by stressing two things, fighting climate change, and operating a reconciliation with First Nations. And of course we know that you know that liberals climate change commitment puts the federal government in an awkward position when it comes to to potentially supporting pipeline development because then it's accused of being hypocritical right and and the federal party system in Canada, features other parties on the left of the liberals, the new Democratic Party, the black and the green party, all small parties mind you but that that that really press the federal liberal government on the issue of climate change right so from and if you from a pure electoral perspective, you know, the liberals really have never have any success in the province of Alberta they don't actually have a seat there and not much of a prospect for one at the forthcoming elections whenever they come so there's very little political incentive for the federal liberal party to to say aggressively support pipeline development. There's also an awkward position when it comes to the so called reconciliation with First Nations agenda of the liberal party of Canada because of course, many different First Nations in the country have opposed pipeline development out of Alberta not all of them mind you, but but probably probably half of them. There's political and ideological opposition coming from two important provinces one is British Columbia, where a pipeline would need to cross in order to take Albert oil to to see and then eventually to an Asian market. The BC BC has been governed by the new Democratic Party and at some point in the coalition with the Green Party so very, I guess, unfriendly political forces for pipeline development. There's a big issue in Quebec where there's this course is a, there's a more conservative party there but you know national identity in Quebec is very much matched with the notion of being green, the province really works with hydroelectricity, and the premier as clearly stated to his Albert accounts counterpart that he didn't want. Alberta is quote unquote dirty energy anywhere near near his province comments for which he later apologized. So that's in the United States of course I think the scenario with a political and ideological scenarios quite different. Oil has historically been much more central to the United States and its economy than it's a than it's been to Canada. There's also I think a political connection linked to kind of the United States global superpower status, you know slogans like energy independence really which were present in the United States under George W Bush. And even from before I've really been absent in Canada. So we don't have this dimension. So to put it simply the party in Canada that's friendlier to the oil and gas sector and pipeline development, the conservative party of Canada was a bit on that, on that note would be the equivalent of the Republican Party in the United States. Just doesn't govern Canada as often as the Republican Party governs the United States. So of course we know that the previous administration was very sympathetic and supportive of pipeline development. What's also interesting is that neighboring states to Texas have generally been very supportive as well of pipeline development, in part because some of that oil is used by them. And also because a lot of these states are oil and gas producing states and I think there's there's there's a connection that's formed there which which we don't really find in Canada except for the Alberta Saskatchewan tendon right and for example in the US there's an interstate oil and gas compact commission a lobbying, you know, commission where oil and gas producing states get together and again that that kind of common front really doesn't exist in Canada. Third factor is, is indigenous politics. And the idea here is that, you know, if indigenous opposition to pipeline development is strong. Then it gives some momentum some ammunition some would say to governments who want to formally and really politically and perhaps legally and constitutionally oppose it. And we found in writing this article that, you know, it's a much more notable feature in pipeline politics in Canada is the voice of indigenous peoples. There are two reasons. The first is that in Canada there are stronger legal anchors for such opposition on the part of indigenous peoples. In BC, for example, the issue of land has not been settled. The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized that governments have a duty to consult with in with indigenous peoples with First Nations, whether the land was ceded to treaty or not. There's a difference with the United States, whereas, you know, domestic dependent nations tribes really. It's really about maximizing sovereignty over, over reservation so in this context for pipeline is not going to go through an actual reservation. The legal and constitutional opportunity to fight it is much, much weaker than in the United States and it is in Canada. That's one thing about indigenous politics and pipeline development and the second thing is just the fact that fairly simple fact that indigenous politics overall is much, much more central in Canadian politics, especially federal politics and it is in the United States, right You know, it was an important aspect of electoral campaigns, both in the last one and back in 2015. All the leaders of the main parties were made to speak about indigenous issues and so on and so forth and of course in the United States, not the case. I don't think there was one word uttered about that in the last, in the last presidential election so that that's a big difference and in addition, in Canada there is this is this sort of on the part of the liberal party of Canada and some of their federal parties for perhaps all of them except the liberal party, there is this wide acknowledgement that you know the relationship between indigenous peoples and the Canadian state is still of a colonial nature. There's been a lot of commissions and documents produced, which, which, which means that, you know, I think provinces opposing pipeline developments there have kind of, of course, natural, natural allies in, in, in, in many first nations. So, whereas in the US, again, very striking for Canadian anyway that, and I'm not a specialist of indigenous peoples at all but it's still striking to me just as an interested observer, how absent, I guess indigenous issues are from, from at least federal politics which is really what I can see from, from Canada. Finally, you know, Canada has, you know, a program transfer program as part of this fiscal federalism that's called equalization, and it's a program essentially that seeks to bring provinces that fall under the national capacity average up to that average, so that they can provide quality public services of public services of comparable quality to wealthier provinces at the comparable level of taxation. The United States doesn't have such a program it's actually, you know, the only liberal democratic advanced industrialized Federation not to have one. But in Canada what this means is that Alberta is never a recipient of equalization. So for that reason, the Alberta government really doesn't like the program. And, and, and that has given that has fed the discourse of the Alberta government on pipeline development because the Alberta government has basically said look, the rest of Canada is not allowing us to take our economy as it should be developed. But it's very happy to quote unquote take Alberta money in the form of territorial distribution transfers through equalization. And the Alberta government has really denounced this position as hypocritical as announced it would hold a referendum in the province for the purpose of, you know, speaking about the program so the combination of the Alberta government's effort at creating greater pipeline development and its status as a non recipient of equalization program and its resentment towards the whole program in general, as, as, I think as amplified intergovernmental conflict around equalization because around, sorry, around pipeline development because it's also become intergovernmental conflict around equalization. Sometimes the Alberta government talks about equalization, but they're, they're really talking about what they see as the failure of other governments in the Federation to support pipeline development in the country. So that's the paper in the nutshell and the conclusion really what we do is we try to, you know, to rank these factors and what we say is we think that, you know, fundamentally it starts with the different constitutional and regulatory framework. And then it proceeds with, you know, the different types of political and ideological connections to oil that we find in the two federations with, you know, the indigenous issues I think just feeding into that. And the presence in Canada of an equalization program being kind of the cherry on top of the Sunday there in terms of creating tension in the Canadian Federation. So thank you very much for listening and I'll stop here. Thank you very much, Andre, that was a very informative and interesting analysis. And at this time it is my pleasure to introduce Amy Janswood for the next presentation. Amy Janswood is a postdoctoral fellow at the University in sorry in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, and a visiting fellow at the University of Victoria's Center for Global Studies. Amy earned her PhD from the University of Toronto, one of the partners for the NAC in political science and environmental studies. Her research focuses on Canadian and comparative energy and climate policy and politics. Amy. And she's going to share her screen. Yeah, I'll just get that started. Thanks for that really warm introduction. I believe you can all see my screen. I'm joining today from the traditional. Not quite yet actually. Oh, okay. One second. That's okay these things do tend to happen. It's inevitable. Yeah, now we're seeing it perfect. Great. There we go. Okay, so I'm joining today from the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people in Victoria. And I want to acknowledge that this is unseated land and indigenous title has not been surrendered to the Canadian government. The presentation today is based on a paper that I've had the great pleasure of working on with Sarah Martin at Memorial University, and Kate Neville at the University of Toronto, and Kate will also be joining us in the discussion. This work really builds on my doctoral research on contemporary Canadian oil pipelines and social movements, and Kate and Sarah's work on the historical and financial dynamics of infrastructure. Our paper is still very much in development. So we're really looking forward to your feedback in the Q&A. This is an image that might be familiar to you. It's a stockpile of pipeline from the proposed Keystone XL. This is a project that was initially framed as a bullet pipeline by the oil industry to provide a more efficient route to transport heavy oil or bitumen from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. Most of the pipe was actually purchased back in 2009 and 2010, when the project was initially proposed, and TC Energy or as it was then called TransCanada was extremely confident about the project. It has been sitting outside degrading ever since. Given the climate crisis, growing domestic oil production in the US, changing global oil demand, and a bunch of project delays, it's really quite surprising that the project was able to persist as long as it did. As you're familiar with, Biden put the final nail in the project's coffin a few weeks ago and construction on the US portion never actually got underway. So this was really what this kind of dynamic motivated our research, how was it that Keystone could remain in this sort of liminal or zombie state, neither built but not yet canceled. So we really began to investigate the commercial and financial underpinnings of this kind of mega linear energy infrastructure. So today I thought I would take you through how we think about mega oil stands infrastructure projects and mega infrastructure projects more generally. And I'll give some highlights from two of the empirical cases. In the paper we do a deep dive into the financing and the commercial viability or lack thereof underpinning to mega oil stands pipeline projects in Canada, Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain. Like the Keystone XL they also got stuck in this sort of liminal state although not for as long. Using these cases we show how the complex financial arrangements that underpinned these projects created layers of risk that obstructed pipeline construction, but also paradoxically enabled these projects to persist. And we argue these arrangements allow these projects to persist despite significant and growing risks. And then I'll just wrap up by speaking a bit about what this means for other fossil fuel infrastructure projects and other major energy companies in North America. We position our work in political economy but we draw on infrastructure scholarship more broadly from a range of disciplines including geography and sociology, which really understand built infrastructure as both embedded in and underpinned by social legal and financial relationships. And we use the term mega project as economic geographer bent flibberg does to understand the subset of built infrastructure projects that typically cost around a billion dollars or more, and includes new transmission pipelines. We also use his concept of sublime to really explore the underlying visions and logistics that drive these projects. And we suggest it's the promise of economic growth and investment that embed pipelines into particular visions of the future. We use assemblage thinking to understand the financial complexes that under that really support or underpin infrastructure proposals. Assemblage thinking has really been developed in science and technology studies and it helps us understand complex dynamics and encourages us to pay attention to relationships processes and interactions. And assemblage can include actors ideas institutions or even the environment itself. And in our case the assemblage is along with the oil industry calls the hydrocarbon value chain. And here pipelines play a crucial role because oil is only valuable of course if it can be moved from where it's extracted or produced to where it's refined or where there's demand. And it's this transmission process that generates economic value. And assemblage to make a pipeline project is very expansive and it includes everything from the characteristics of the bitumen or the heavy oil that would flow through the pipeline to the pipeline company itself, the oil producers and refiners that want to ship the oil, the states and regulators that must approve a project, the indigenous nations and landowners whose land is crossed, the banks that finance the project and the list goes on. And using the concept of assemblage really opens up new ways of thinking about pipeline politics and allows us to understand pipeline proposals, not just through the actions of pipeline owners, or companies or government decisions or executive orders, or even oil prices, but to a much more complex set of dynamics among multiple actors. So understanding this idea of assemblage requires us to really explore the process of turning the idea of a pipeline into an investable asset. This process is called assetization, which is as jargony as it sounds, it's the making of assets to extract financial value, be they physical infrastructure farmland various long products or the new world of carbon finance, although the process of industrialization itself isn't new. We draw on sociologist John Specker and his idea of fictional expectations which he's developed this idea of narratives that underpin investment decisions. And Becker suggests these expectations are fictional or invented, because the value of the asset isn't tied to some inherent quality. Rather, it's what investors think the value will be and that's what really drives investment. So pipeline stocks have often been thought of as blue chip or widow and orphan stocks. And so they're believed to have relatively low volatility and they pay relatively high dividends. Pipeline companies are generally seen as stable. And although they might not be setting growth records, they are generally financially sound. So it's these narratives that drive investment in new pipeline projects, despite their risk. So we explore these dynamics in two cases in Canada, Northern Gateway and the Transmountain expansion project. Both of these projects were incredibly ambitious and were proposed by some of the largest pipeline companies in the world, Enbridge and Kinder Morgan. Enbridge is based in Calgary and Kinder Morgan is based in Texas. These projects were designed to move heavy oil from the oil sands through British Columbia to coastal waters. And both projects would require over 1000 kilometers of new pipeline and would cross dozens of communities and indigenous territories and some urban centers as well. In terms of context, these proposals were part of an incredibly ambitious wave of oil sands pipelines that the industry was really beginning to think about in the early and mid 2000s. This is a map from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers in 2008. And it shows over 30 new and proposed oil pipeline projects. At one point the industry was even planning an expansion from Trans Mountain North to Northern Gateway's terminal, which hadn't been constructed yet. This was a fairly absurd idea and it never made it to the regulatory stage. Another bit of a wild idea Trans Canada was planning a pipeline to California, although that also didn't make it to the regular story stage either. It's important to point out that these plans were really directly linked to making the oil industry's growth viable and to increase production in the oil sands. The oil sands were growing fairly modestly at this point, as you can see right here, but oil companies were planning to really accelerate their growth and new pipelines meant that the oil sands could expand even faster. So this is what these two figures show. These are forecasts that CAP developed the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. And these forecasts weren't based on factors of production or demand, but purely on what oil companies wanted or hoped for. And they were used by the industry to justify a number of new pipelines, including Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain. This was a quick snapshot of some of the key regulatory and legal dates and decisions for each project. And I include this here just to highlight the liminal state that we're interested in explaining the period of time after the projects were approved but before construction started. And for Northern Gateway this was found the summer of 2014, when the project was approved by the regular the regulatory agency the National Energy Board to the end of 2016 when it was ultimately canceled. And two years after it was approved and bridge didn't start construction. And for Trans Mountain, it was approved by the federal government in 2016 but construction didn't start until mid 2018, and construction still hasn't really gotten underway yet. So to briefly take you through the Northern Gateway case. Early on and bridge had a hard time securing contracts from the oil companies that were wanting to ship oil on the pipeline. And so because of this the project got put on hold. But in 2008 and bridge was able to revive the project, the company created a plan, which was quite unusual and involved asking oil companies or the potential shippers to pay for some of the pre development work for the pipeline. And this really allowed the project to get revived. This required significant support from dozens of indigenous communities across the root of the pipeline, but many indigenous communities, including many first nations in British Columbia along the route were staunchly opposed. In 2012 there was a massive protest outside and bridges annual general meeting in Toronto just pictured here. And it was led by an alliance of indigenous nations that travel by train across the country to present at the AGM about the risks of the project. And it was not until 2013 that and bridge took seriously really the participation of indigenous groups and offered them an equity stake in the project, although many argue it was too little too late. This did help the project get approved the next year, but less than half of the eligible indigenous groups for partners, and progress really stagnated trying to get more buy in. This was one of the only pictures of representatives of the Aboriginal equity partnership. This was with the project president in 2016. And this was ironically when they're asking the regulator to have an extension on the project sunset clause. And bridge had already pushed the project timeline back a few times, and the project was stalled largely due to overwhelming opposition, especially from coastal first nations and BC, and over a dozen legal challenges that were pending. And these challenges revoked consolidation actually have several legal challenges revoked the project certificate and eventually the project was canceled by the federal government in 2016. Although it's important to point out that at the time that it was canceled the project didn't have any firm contracts with shippers on the on the pipeline, and didn't have any financing and construction hadn't started yet. So now turning to Trans Mountain, kinder Morgan also had shippers help finance the pipeline, and they quite creative, creatively used funds from the existing pipeline to finance the expansion. And this was also very unusual. Unlike Northern Gateway where there was no pipeline kinder Morgan was planning on twinning or doubling an existing pipeline. And also restructured itself in 2014 in order to better secure debt. This meant that it couldn't finance the project itself. So after the project was approved in 2016 kinder Morgan started to try to find a joint partner to finance the project, and it couldn't. So it had to go public and launch what's called an IPO and initial public offering in order to raise capital. So it actually raises capital to pay off kinder Morgan step. And in the process of launching the IPO this was the first time that kinder Morgan really had to be honest about the risks the project was facing. These included delays, cost overruns public opposition changes in public opinion and reputation damage. So the people whose territory is in a significant part of the interior BC called the pipeline standing rock of the north and argued that kinder Morgan was still misleading investors and pointed to many risks that potentially undermined kinder Morgan's market valuation. But even still the IPO allowed kinder Morgan to proceed with the project and start trying to finance it. At the same time the risk landscape was really dramatically changing there over a dozen legal challenges, and there was a new provincial government in BC that was really adamantly opposed to the project. Incredibly kinder Morgan was still able to secure over five and a half billion dollars and loans from major Canadian banks. And it was at this point with the loans that kinder Morgan was able to start preparing for construction. Opposition was continuing there is significant protests like the one pictured here continued opposition from British Columbia delays and more cost overruns. And so in March of 2018 kinder Morgan essentially threatened the federal government that it would walk away from the project unless the federal government stepped in to help. And so the government ended up buying the existing pipeline and plans for the expansion. As you can imagine this was a very good deal for kinder Morgan and their investors voted unanimously on the sale. And the day after the sale the federal government or sorry the federal courts revoked the project certificate which was now held by the federal government, and this created another major delay for the project. So I just want to highlight a couple of dynamics in both cases. First, there were quite novel arrangements that allowed the projects to keep moving forward, whether it was having oil producers actually fund the development of the project using equity deals to mitigate risk or launching an IPO. Second, in both cases the pipeline company was fairly successful in mitigating or rearranging corporate risk by strategically using contracts with shippers or restructuring their corporate entities. So the pipeline companies were able to walk away from both projects with relatively little loss. And the last thing I'll note here is that the discourse in Canada and us around the loss of Northern Gateway or trends mountain, or the, the government's purchase of it, and even the loss of Keystone was mostly about fictional economic losses. The loss of potential future benefits or potential future investment or jobs. There was a real economic loss that because the companies were quite successful in in maintaining fairly balanced portfolios and fairly positive ratings. So if we return to this classic political economy question of who wins and who loses. In the face of trends mountain, the public is on the hook for something that doesn't exist yet. The idea of a pipeline that was made into an asset through these financial arrangements that actually created real financial loss for the public. And the taxpayers are now on the hook for a project that was initially proposed to cost around $5 billion and is now 12 and a half billion and continuing to increase. And the energy companies that are proposed these projects are moving away from new mega oil sands infrastructure or offloading them on governments and are now focusing on other markets including Mexico and the US and other fossil fuels like shale gas. Conventional wisdom would suggest that these companies would be suffering, but that's not the case and this is where financial expectations play an interesting role because these companies are still highly valued and investors have a lot of faith in them. And today, even though money is flowing away from pipelines and into renewable power and utility stocks pipeline companies still have very attractive valuations and investors are still considering them to have. And I quote resilient and low risk business models that are well positioned to grow into the longer term. In the words of one analyst. Of course pipeline come pipelines and pipeline companies are still a site of contention. A coalition of over 100 organizations are working to leverage the financial vulnerability of mega pipeline projects. And they're targeting some of the largest banks asset owners and investors and insurers that are supporting other fossil fuel expansion projects, including, and currently emerges line three. This coalition is building on the investment movement and other pipeline campaigns and it remains to be seen whether they will be successful in defending these projects. And just a few thoughts. As we conclude and open up the discussion. As we've shown mega infrastructure projects are not only technical and political but also financial feats and energy infrastructure including pipelines are part of an asset class supported by very powerful financial actors. However, the process of assetization is much more contingent and contested than what many investors assume when just looking at numbers on a page. And third these projects are surprisingly flexible and involve incredibly creative ways to keep them alive, although there are limits, as we saw with trans mountain that make projects eventually unviable for private company. Using assemblages helps us go beyond seeing these projects as just beholden to party politics, which is often how these pipelines are portrayed by the industry or the media. And we also open up what we mean by political in these projects. So political means not just the politicians who are making decisions about permits or whether or not to support a project, but political in the sense that assetization really centers on power relations and itself is a political process. And I'll leave it there for now. Thanks so much. Thank you so much Amy that was really really interesting and in a moment I'm going to. We're going to have two of Amy and Andre's co authors joining the panel, and we're going to kick off the Q&A with Professor Barry Ray, but at this point I wanted to remind our audience that you can submit questions for any of the panelists in writing using the Q&A feature in your zoom control If you would like to direct your question to a particular panelist, please just note that when you type your question into the Q&A panel. So joining Andre and Amy are Daniel Belonde and Kate Neville, who I will each, who I will briefly introduce now. Belonde is director of the McGill Institute for the study of Canada and the James McGill professor of political science at McGill University, an expert in comparative fiscal and social policy. He's published over 20 books and more than 150 articles in peer reviewed journals, such as comparative political studies, governance, Journal of Social Policy, policy sciences and policy studies journal. Neville is assistant professor at the University of Toronto again one of our NAC partners where she is jointly appointed in the Department of Political Science and the School of the Environment. Her research is positioned at the intersection of contentious politics and global political economy with a focus on contested energy and extractive projects much like the ones Amy was just discussing. The first book fueling resistance the contentious political economy of biofuels and fracking is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. So welcome Daniel and Kate to the conversation. And to kick off our conversation. It's my pleasure to introduce Ford School Professor Barry Rabe, who is responsible for all of this year's NAC programming on climate. Today, Ira and Nikki Harris family professor of public policy and the Arthur Thurnau professor of environmental policy here at the Ford School. Barry is going to ask our first question and welcome our panelists, Barry. Thanks so much, Josh and thank you for all of your hard work and leading and engaging this process you just did a wonderful job since joining us earlier in the year so Josh right to have you involved. I sincere warm welcome to all of our colleagues for for joining us and sharing in this important conversation and sharing your very interesting work so thank you. Listening to the talks, clearly learn a lot about differences between major Petro States like Alberta and Texas, and some of the big issues moving across Canada. I'm mindful of that map you showed that demonstrated so many of these big pipelines, either existing or proposed that go back and forth across the national border dividing Canada and United States. I'm mindful as we think of the last 25 or so years of Canada US energy relations. We've often had federal governments and presidents and prime ministers moving in very different directions at a given moment, not just just in Trudeau and Donald Trump. We would think that there is an alignment here, and yet one of the first acts that newly inaugurated President Biden took was to shut off one of the very pipelines that we've been talking about today. Just a few weeks before he would hold a remarkable zoom meeting bringing together the respective cabinets of the two government and pledging a new Canadian American climate and energy partnership. So I'm curious to any of our authors, how we might think about this Canada US relationship, when the federal governments seemingly are more likely to align. And do we begin to think about a coordinated set of pipeline and related transmission policies are the differences in the interest that take place within each government, just to fragment and splinter took to expect something along those lines. Thanks Barry so any of the panelists jump in yes. I can start if you don't mind. Thank you very much for the invitation and I thank Andre because I'm, you know, he's a great presenter I'm not so it's great that he presented our paper and he's the lead author anyway. You know I've been thinking about these issues for a while, and you're right Barry what happened recently. There was a meeting earlier this week I know few Americans notice but there was a meeting virtual meeting between Justin Trudeau and and Joe Biden and yes one of the first things that Biden did is to cancel the federal permit for Keystone Excel. What's interesting to me it's all these things play out politically internally. So when, when it was announced that Joe Biden will do this in fact he had said this long before. You know, he entered the White House and early during the presidential campaign that you will pull the plug on that federal permit right so it was not something unexpected. And when this came out that he basically issued an executive order to pull the plug on that federal permit. Justin Trudeau was blamed by Jason Kenny the premier of Alberta for not basically going after Biden and starting. Some people said the trade war at least talking about sanctions against the US for doing this. And of course that's something that the Trudeau government doesn't want to do. We had our problems under Trump with the reopening of NAFTA and so forth the last thing we and, and you know, commercial sanctions on aluminum and so for trade sanctions so certainly that was not something that we do want to do but it was criticized in Canada for not being bold enough in defending the interest of Alberta, which are closely tied to Keystone Excel so yes Keystone Excel is about Canada US relations in that sense, but in Canada it's also about the internal politics of grievances between not I want the provinces especially Alberta. But that's what I wanted to say to kickstart the discussion about this this really, I think, very timely question. Thanks does anyone want to add anything to that. Andre. Oh, sorry, let's go to Amy first and then Andre. Yeah I'll just keep my answer brief just to echo Danielle that it really was about the role of the provincial politics and the Alberta government who was really holding the purse strings. I spent a billion and a half dollars, the Trudeau government, but a different pipeline, but it really was the Alberta government and the taxpayers that were on the hook and so it was really about trying to develop, you know, political cover and try to blame the federal government although a lot of people had suggested that this project wasn't really going anywhere and construction hadn't gotten underway in the US. I guess Barry my answer would be that it'd be very difficult for the, the two federal governments to quote unquote work together on these things because on the part of the Canadian federal government it's impossible to kind of aggregate the different voices and then to then express them right so. So what do you do. You're in Canada you're always going to have the federal government's voice. And then you're going to have although I understand they have very little standing and speaking to the US directly but you will have voices of provinces right so if you have a federal government who, you know, wants to slow down pipeline then you will hear the Alberta government if you have a federal government that maybe wants to push ahead with pipeline development, then you will hear some other provinces like BC like Quebec and so on and so forth so you will hear the, maybe the more profoundly federal and nature of Canada and the idea ideational and policy discrepancies really kind of probably hinders the kind of really strict bilateral dealings that we could have on these issues. Great. So the next question. We're going to kind of be conscious of the fact that many of our audience members are from the Michigan area, where a different pipeline actually owned by Enbridge one of the same companies that Amy and Kate's and Sarah's work talked about has already been built underneath the Great Lakes. And I think the folks are wondering, are there any lessons even though you know that your cases were at an earlier stage, dealing with the financing and all of that. Are there any lessons from your research that can be applied to, you know what activists can do now about the Enbridge line five. That's a super question. It's a lot more challenging to the politics change quite significant once a pipeline is already in the ground, although we've seen some quite incredible precedents now in the US with the DAPL pipeline being shut off by a court decision. So now in the politics around the Michigan pipeline, it's, I think pipeline companies are extremely nervous about the sort of expanding possibilities for infrastructure. And this is a project that's quite old and so pipeline companies have really not been forced to think about what to do, how to retire pipelines and so these are questions that are really only starting to become answered in the regulatory process, at least in Canada. And so these are things that are really coming conversations that are coming to the fore now, and these projects are quite vulnerable and especially because pipeline development has been extremely stalled in Canada the political stakes are quite high and Enbridge is extremely nervous, because this is one of the main lines that are part of its main line system. Okay, Kate did you have anything you want to add or Well, I just, I do want to pipe in that some of Amy's other work does some comparison between projects that are brownfield so projects that are already built and being expanded or replaced versus ones that are greenfield new transmission pipelines and the kinds of political arrangements that are then possible so so you know that that point about the possibilities for opposition for things that are already built versus things that are brand new for new land transformation do look a little bit different and and you know we see that in other infrastructure as well, things like hydropower dams, where we're thinking about aging infrastructure in a different way than we're talking about new infrastructure development so that's not necessarily a clear set of points to how to advocate against a particular project, as much as things to consider about the differences, even between things that look similar different pipeline. So here's a question shifting gears to a bigger question since a lot of us have political science backgrounds and I'm not sure how practical this question is but it's certainly an interesting one. Would it be better to nationalize pipelines, so that all Canadians could benefit from the profits. What are people's thoughts on, would it be desirable normatively and then secondly, you know, how feasible my you know what would be the current hurdles to doing so. I can start by saying that, in a way I mean the federal government bow to the trans mountain pipeline. So, obviously, I don't think it's part of a big master project to lead in the direction of that is basically alluded by this question, but I think that the federal government already spend a lot of money to buy a major pipeline project, so that it doesn't sink that to to so that it stays alive and it did that in part because of the the political climate in Western Canada especially in Alberta. And the fact that the, the federal government is being criticized for not doing enough to support the, the oil industry, and the liberal government which is very unpopular in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the two largest oil producers in Canada in Alberta, of course, they they about this pipeline and there was a great political cost to pay for this because a lot of people on the left thought that it was a betrayal of the environment, environmental commitment of the liberal party. So I think that this is very risky politically, especially for a liberal government and the liberals are still in power. They invested a lot of economic money in that pipeline but there's a lot of political capital as well. And I think they prayed they pay the price in some provinces like in Quebec at the last federal election for doing this because people the block in Quebec and Quebec and the Green Party and the NDP, they criticized the liberals they said hey, you're buying a pipeline and you want to fight climate change we signed the Paris Agreement. So don't forget the liberal party today is a left leaning left leaning party. And it's it has a strong environmental platform. So there is a discrep there is a tension here, ideologically and politically for the liberals and the opposition on their left is using that. And that's creating some discomfort and even in some provinces like Quebec. I think it's it's becoming a political problem for them.  Okay. Well, I think again, in the Canadian perspective, I think, you know, probably the last thing that the governments of Albert and Saskatchewan want to do is put the pipeline in the hands of the federal government, right, for all kinds of historical and reasons. So let's just say there's much less trust in the federal government than there is in the private sector. So I think that that would be a major hurdle. Okay. Yeah, and I think another question to think through. I'm thinking about kind of ownership structures of oil and gas projects, whether at extraction or at transmission is the question of what is already under production and how do we share the benefits in more, say, just or equitable ways, which is goes back to that question that Andre and Danielle were telling us about equalization payments and the questions around that. And the second is what do we want to invest in as a country moving forward so as collective as a polity in the US and or in Canada, what is the direction for the future so what do we do with existing infrastructure who should own it who should benefit from it and how. And the second is, do we want to focus on this question of nationalizing pipelines versus keeping them private or do we want to think about different energy future. And that's where at least Sarah and Amy and my work comes back to you is what are we building these for you know what what kinds of conversations do we really want to have about ownership of energy. Great. Yeah, thanks. Thanks Kate so the next question is from someone who will be a future presenter at one of these NAC events, Heather Malar from the University of New Brunswick. I was just asking about shale gas, and how it's different. How the dynamics you guys talked about with oil sands extraction might be similar different with shale gas. Does anyone have any thoughts on that. I can start us off and I'll. I think it's a super great question also toss it to Kate because her book is actually launching tomorrow at the University of Toronto so I hope she can mention that a little bit but yeah the politics are similar in some ways and very different and others are similar in the sense that gas pipelines in Canada and particularly in BC are particularly the recent ones have been just as contested as oil pipelines although that's a fairly recent development. The contestation pipelines really started with oil sands pipelines, although now we're seeing this kind of politics really expand into gas production as well. And even though the economics of gas production are a bit different the oil and gas industries are very closely tied. And so a lot of these major companies, trans Canada was a major owner of the coastal gas link natural gas project which was blockaded in and trans Canada has now tried to offload its ownership stake again to the entities of the Alberta government and so you see this pattern also playing out in in gas politics as well. I mean, I have, I have lots to say about the politics of shale but I'll just say one, one kind of quick thing about the role of narrative in this which is one of the differences between oil sands pipeline and all the debates over shale gas is a question that was introduced shale gas was introduced as a lower carbon solution. So the debates over whether that's true have been fierce. You know that that's sort of a question on its own but it's certainly been a powerful narrative for governance. So I actually I'd be curious to hear Andre and Danielle's visions of what this means for kind of state politics for for governmental level politics but we have a very different with the BC government opposing oil sands pipelines and BC politics doing that, but much more mixed views about whether liquefied natural gas should be produced so I do you think that carbon narrative that climate change uncertainty and the way it was introduced is a big factor in those. Just just quickly I think and then maybe you can speak to this too but I do think that the framing is different. I do think that rightly or wrongly that when it comes to oil pipelines, this is when Canadian parties at least probably maybe Canadian citizens as well perceive a greater tension with, you know, fighting climate change objectives. And I think because also at the level of the narrative and the frames. So, it's the image of, you know, adverse environmental consequences has really largely been linked to, you know, the so called Alberta tar sands if you want to use that that expression and I think that's gained so much more than the alternative which like you said was initially promoted as being a lower carbon alternative so I think, you know, focusing and stressing the way things are presented here gives us part of part of the answer. Yeah, and I would say I mean shale gas often is it becomes more kind of internal provincial issue. We saw that actually in New Brunswick we have a question from someone in New Brunswick or in Quebec and when we talk about tar sands or oil sands and people then really when you use the term oil sand that you're maybe more favorable tar sand in Canada when you use that word tar sand it means you're really against it normally. It's interesting how people choose the words obviously as Kate is smiling and of course she knows all about that. You know, yeah, I think it says it doesn't have the same. I would say it doesn't capture the imagination as much at the federal national level we talk way much way more about what will happen with with you know oil sands and pipelines then shale gas per se overall at least in recent and over the last few years. Again, Kate is much in a much better position and I am to talk about this but in terms of federalism I don't think it's as prominent, certainly not in the last few years. All right, well, if unless anyone has any last thoughts, I guess we'll have to end it there it sounds like people should check out Kate's new book. Thank you to all of our panelists. And by the way, these themes that have come up today, like you know Andre was alluding to federalism which tied into our first presentation with Douglas McDonald. There's a number of themes that are sort of going to keep running throughout this entire series and so we would very much encourage people to to join us for our next session which is on March 9 at noon. We will have a former California Public Utility Commissioner, Diane Brueneich talk about electricity policy and specifically how to regulate imported electricity from Mexico. And then we'll also have Monica Gattinger of the University of Ottawa talk about North American Reliability Corporation and a number of other issues related to electricity policy. Thank you all thank you to our panelists for being part of today's event, and we hope you have a good evening and stay with us. Take care. Bye bye.