Sheila Gunn-Reed and Michelle Sterling of Friends of Science expose Bill C-12’s threat to Alberta’s economy, citing a 2009 forecast of $2.1T in oil sands growth and 905K jobs by 2035. They call solar subsidies like Carmen’s $920/ton CO₂ reduction a "green boondoggle," mocking Medicine Hat’s bankrupt projects while Europe still imports Russian fossil fuels. Robert Lyman’s report warns of $1M lost per Canadian family under net-zero policies, despite the Paris Agreement’s non-binding nature. Gunn-Reed accuses foreign-funded ENGOs and media bias—like Climate Now’s 400-outlet campaign—of pushing unbalanced narratives, while Mark Carney’s warnings clash with his carbon-trading ties. The episode frames climate legislation as a job-killing Ponzi scheme, urging grassroots support to counter elite-driven activism. [Automatically generated summary]
You're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
I'm recording the show, or at least the intro and the podcast intro, on the road today because I'm off on some fight the finds cases here in East Central and East Southern Alberta tonight.
My guest is Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science, and we're talking about so much, including Keystone XL, but we're also talking about the Liberals' new net zero by 2050 legislation, Bill C12.
This thing will basically outlaw the majority of the Alberta economy.
I guess the majority of the economy that remains these days.
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Please use the distraction of the coronavirus pandemic to introduce a new law that would basically outlaw Alberta's economy.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and yes, you are watching The Gunn Show.
Hi, everybody.
This is not the normal studio, obviously.
This is the inside of my Jeep because I've spent the last few weeks working on our largest civil liberties project to date, something called FightTheFines.com.
Working on FightTheFines.com00:15:27
Now, that project has taken me all over Alberta, from Smith to today in Hanna, Alberta.
I'm helping fight for freedom one lockdown ticket at a time at no cost to the recipient of the ticket with the support of viewers and donors at fightthefines.com.
We connect people with top civil liberties lawyers and criminal lawyers to help them fight their lockdown tickets in court.
Now, today I'm here in Hanna helping a local bar called the Tipsy Cow Bar with their lockdown ticket.
And I think it's particularly providential that I'm here in this coal mining town filming an intro for the gun show about my discussion that I had earlier in the week with Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science about a whole host of things as I normally do on the show, including Keystone XL.
But we also talk about Bill C12.
Now, Bill C12 is the Liberals' new net zero emissions by 2050 legislation.
It was introduced at the end of 2020 just as the world was locking back down.
And it puts the Liberals' pursuit of no new oil and gas or coal mining projects in Alberta into law.
It will basically outlaw the majority of Alberta's economy.
And no one is talking about it.
Our politicians, conservative or otherwise, are too busy locking us down and taking away our civil liberties to fight for our jobs.
Well, the jobs that remain, I guess.
So please check out my interview I recorded earlier in the week when I was at home, however briefly that was, with Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
Joining me now from her home in Calgary is my friend and good friend of the show, Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science.
Michelle, thanks for taking the time on this frigid February day to join me.
Have fossil fuels never been more necessary than they are these days to keep us alive, hey?
No kidding.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Yes, I had a look at the Alberta Electric System Operators website this morning and wind was putting out 60 megawatts, which is not enough to keep anybody warm.
So, and solar wasn't active at all because it was before sunrise.
So, yeah, we need fossil fuels.
I think we were importing a lot from BC and Montana.
So, coal from Montana, hydro from BC, good to have great neighbors.
Thank you.
And Saskatchewan, too.
Yeah, it's funny how there's this movement to get us all off coal, and then we have to import coal-fired electricity from Montana just to keep us from dying when it's minus 43.
By the way, thank you, fossil fuel workers, for keeping us from freezing to death over these last few weeks.
Michelle, I wanted to talk to you about the inquiry into foreign funding and foreign-funded attacks on Alberta's oil and gas sector and this movement to landlock oil and gas.
The lefties are working really hard to shut this inquiry down.
And it seems to be that if you have nothing to hide, then you hide nothing.
You should be able to participate in these, I suppose, airing of the grievances.
But they really want this thing nipped in the bud right away before any of their, I think, potentially nefarious activities come to light.
Well, yes, I think one of the more popular commentators across Canada cited in the press was Martin Olzinski, who's a professor at the University of Calgary.
It's his associate law professor.
And he was quite mocking of the initial reports that the inquiry had released because some of them dealt with the fact that climate change is being used as an umbrella to literally upturn society, get everyone off fossil fuels.
And honestly, don't people know how things are made?
Like every wind and solar device is made from oil, natural gas, and coal.
So that's just a fact.
We don't have replacement alternative energy other than nuclear, which also is made from oil, natural gas, and coal.
But going back to Martin's blog post on the AB log post, he posted quite an extensive rebuttal denigrating the author historian Tammy Nemuth and claiming that these were conspiracy theories and also claiming that the courts had already tested climate change and gave a few references.
But that's not true.
So I wrote a rebuttal and posted it on our blog.
And also after I posted it, I kind of went along with his view that the courts had tested climate change because I read his blog and thought, well, yeah, okay, here he's giving some references.
But some legal experts pointed out to me that the courts have never tested climate change.
And what he'd actually been referring to is what's known as obiter dicta, or the commentary that surrounds a case, meaning that one side might have said, oh, well, you know, these children are suffering because climate change is threatening their lives and they're afraid for their future.
And it's uncontested that this may be.
an existential threat.
So that simply means that the lawyers on the other side said, you know what, we're just going to accept what you put there because the case is actually about the constitutionality.
This is the Alberta challenge, right?
It's not about climate change.
So when I found that out, I did a video showing that, you know, I'd made a mistake and that in fact he was misleading the public.
Now, I think that's pretty serious for a law professor to mislead the public in that way.
So I hope people will look into that and think about that.
You know, that's one of the, I think, mistakes that we might make on our side of the debate is sometimes we have the tendency to take the other side at their word, that we think that sometimes they're just that they're just wrong on the issue, but not purposefully misleading.
And as it turns out, you trusted that, I'm sorry, his name is Olzhinski, I think is his name, that he was, yeah, Martin Olzhinski, that he was just telling the truth, but he was misleading people on the facts.
Now, I wanted to talk to you a little, staying on the topic of the inquiry.
Seems like EcoJustice wants the whole thing shut down.
Yes, they're going to court this week, February 11th and 12th.
They're going to try and quash it.
And they claim they had a webinar last week, which was quite funny because they claim that they're doing this to protect the fairness and freedoms of speech of people.
And if you recall, Freedom, EcoJustice is the group that tried to shut us down, have us fined thousands of dollars and thrown in jail for our billboards.
So yeah, they're real defenders of freedom of speech.
But yeah, they think that the issue is biased and, you know, it may be biased, but actually the tar sands campaign was biased.
So, you know, I wrote down some figures here that in the 2009 oil sands developers group forecast that there would be between 2010 and 2035, the oil sands would go from generating 75,000 jobs to 905,000 jobs, almost a million jobs, and that it would generate 2.1 trillion in economic stimulus for Canada and provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue.
So that's what we're out.
I think that people in Alberta and in Canada deserve to know who was behind these anti-Alberta campaigns, why, and where that money went, and what these actors are up to.
And I don't think that this kind of thing should go on anymore because we're broke.
We're in serious trouble.
And these guys are claiming that this is charitable activity.
So I want to ask you how charitable it is that you're putting people out of work, that you're costing taxpayers billions, trillions of dollars.
Yeah, that we need to know.
And this idea that the inquiry is biased, I'm sorry, but I'm completely fine with that because the Alberta government is the marketer and the stewarder of the resource that we all own.
So they're supposed to be out there defending the resource and finding ways to get it to market, make sure it's profitable so that the owners of the resource, that's you and I, are getting the best return on our resource when it hits the market.
So yeah, if it's weighted in favor of the oil and gas industry, well, that's you and me, and I'm perfectly fine with that.
Well, you know, and it's interesting when you look at, say, the Rethink Alberta campaign.
They had no shame in saying Rethink Alberta.
They tried to smear our tourism industry worldwide.
They tried to smear potential businesses coming to set up in Alberta, you know, making them feel like, oh, this is a crummy place to set up business.
And, you know, they don't have any environmental standards.
You know, that's a fairly serious reputational damage.
And for whatever reason, at the time, people didn't respond strongly to it.
But this carried over.
And actually, I think it was with Tammy Nemuth was talking with Danielle Smith the other day and was saying how, you know, over in the UK where she now lives, she'd run into these people who were anti-tar sands activists.
And she was wondering, like, why?
What are they doing here?
Where do they come from?
So, you know, it's really been a global movement, very carefully orchestrated.
And on Michael Mark's Corporate Ethics International website, he seems to be quite proud of it.
He said that he coordinated over 100 international groups against the Alberta oil sands.
So I think we should know.
Well, and I think it's really important for us to know who paid for all of this because you follow the money, you find the motive.
We've seen, I forget who it was at the United Nations saying that the Russians were paying the anti-fracking movement in the United States.
And it makes perfect sense when you look at who stands to benefit if fracking collapses in the United States.
And it's Gazprom in Russia.
So, I mean, don't we deserve to know at least who is behind all of this?
And these anti-Alberta movements, they're very protective of where all that money comes from.
And also, you know, I think in Canada, probably less in Alberta, but certainly in Canada, because we're geographically removed from other world markets, we really only are aware of the United States.
We don't realize that Europe has virtually no fossil fuels.
They get most of their oil and gas from Russia.
Norway supplies a bit, and France refines most of the stuff that comes out of the Middle East and out of Africa.
So these are our competitors.
You know, this is a very competitive market.
And if they can just block pipelines, great.
You know, and if you look back, I think it's a financial post in 2014 said that we had managed to evade the European Fuel Quality Directive, which was trying to label Canadian oil sands oil as dirty oil and unacceptable.
We managed to evade that.
We got a small footprint of a market in Italy.
We announced that we were going to build pipelines in all four directions and boom, all four of those pipelines were stopped, blocked.
So that seems pretty suspicious to me.
Yes, definitely.
Now, you have also, I mean, you just don't talk about where the money is coming from to block oil and gas.
But you, at Friends of Science, you do some pretty serious analysis of proposed green energy projects.
For example, you have a new analysis of the Carmen Gay solar farm and how much it costs average people like me who live nowhere near Carmen Gay.
And I think this is particularly pertinent given that all of a sudden the city of Edmonton is pursuing this mega solar farm in the River Valley, which makes me side with environmentalists who say stuff like not in my backyard on the heels of solar projects in Medicine Hat going bankrupt.
Why do municipalities keep doing this with other people's money?
Well, you know, they sign up for a power purchase agreement and it's something that's very hard to get rid of once you sign up, but it virtually guarantees the success of the project.
And we have another post on our blog on that, which I can send you the link to.
But with regard to Carmen Gay, what's hilarious is that we're paying the 261 citizens of Carmen Gay a subsidy of $920 each to have their solar farm, which they claim gives them net zero.
And aren't they proud of that?
But actually, that means the CO2 reduction emissions cost in Carmen Gay is $350 a ton, but the global rate is more like about $24.
So they could have just bought carbon offset credits for $1,580 a year and saved us a whole bundle of money.
And then it still could have claimed to be net zero.
So, you know, even in the best of times in Alberta, solar generation is extremely low and certainly nothing that takes care of the needs that we have, especially not on a day like today.
So it's just another green boondoggle.
And it's popping up all over.
It's so incompatible with everything that I know about the people of Carmen Gay.
Like you might get some buy-in in the socialist cesspit of some of the darker recesses of Edmonton.
You know, Ralph Klein said that Edmonton's a nice place with too many socialists and mosquitoes and it's a government town.
But Carmen Gay, this doesn't make any sense.
Those people are so conservative.
And yet, for some reason, there's a solar farm that's plunked right there and they're going to be paying for it for a very long time.
Big Push for Carbon Offsets00:09:53
We all are.
Yeah.
Yeah, we are.
Oh, it's terrible.
Go ahead.
Oh, I was just going to say, I wanted to mention that we have a new report out speaking of net zero, which is one that Robert Lyman wrote.
And Robert Lyman, as many of the viewers know, was a public servant in the federal government for about 27 years and a diplomat for 10 years.
And now he's an independent consultant.
He contributes these to us free of charge.
So he's written about Bill C-12.
And this is a move by the ENGOs where they're trying to force net zero legislation into law, climate accountability law.
And this is really an impossible dream.
The reason why Canada has not met its previous targets is that they're impossible to meet without any strange new advance in technology.
So trying to make laws to force people to meet targets that are not attainable is it's going to be a great publicity project.
That's one way that Robert looks at it, that it's baking the idea of the necessity of reaching net zero into the public mind.
But in fact, under the Paris Agreement, there's absolutely no obligation to meet any of these targets.
It's a non-binding agreement.
There's no consequences for not meeting it.
And all the other countries in the world are not meeting any of these targets.
So, you know, this is death to industry.
It's going to create all kinds of legal issues.
And, you know, it's just really a waste of time.
And again, these ENGOs are working for somebody else's agenda.
And I think that with the Alberta inquiry, we'll probably find out more about that as well.
So people should read this report and see what it means for Canadians because it's not good.
You know, I'm glad you touched on that because nobody seems to be talking about C-12 except for Friends of Science, really.
And it is, as you say, net zero legislation.
So what they're trying to do is take those Paris target goals that everybody said, don't worry that we're signing on to the Paris Agreement because it's non-binding.
We've heard that from conservatives saying, oh, you know, it's no big deal if we support the Paris Agreement because it's non-binding.
Well, now they're trying to take those targets, make them into binding law.
And when you see something that says net zero, you should, in your mind, translate that into zero growth, zero projects going forward, and zero recovery for Alberta at all.
Right.
And it also may mean, I don't know how it could be translated to individuals, but we know that George Monbiot out of the UK has his plan since 2006 was that people would have a personal carbon ration.
So, you know, you would be accountable for everything that you do, every flight you take, every kilometer you drive.
If you have steak, you know, you might get charged more or you might have more credits knocked off.
So, you know, these things can go to extremes that are not anticipated when you first see the legislation.
And Robert Lyman did another report earlier this year called Ballparking the Decarbonization, and he found that Canadian families, a family of four would have a million dollars of foregone income due to the net zero program.
Wow.
They're offering you a thousand bucks return on your climate action tax bit, your rebate.
So a million dollars.
So not to mention just the general destruction of society.
It's these are impossible dreams and we're not getting any cost benefit analysis from anybody on them.
Well, they say that, you know, if they're going to give you more back in what you paid, which sounds like a bit of a Ponzi scheme to me.
The liberals say that all the time with a straight face.
We're going to give you more back than what you paid in.
Well, where does that come from?
Where does the extra bit come from?
They're clearly misleading the public.
But there is very little skeptical reporting on all of this, which is why I think the work that Friends of Science does is so critical.
We've seen, as you guys rightly point out here, that the Canadian Association of Journalists, they fall for this.
11,000 scientists all agree on this, so it absolutely must be true.
Journalists are falling for this.
And it's not the way that they're reporting it at all, is it?
No, no, well, that's quite funny because Josh Thomas of the Spruce Grove Examiner, he also, going back to the Alberta inquiry, he wrote an op-ed really ripping the Nemuth report apart, especially on the part that journalists were being critiqued.
And he was saying, you know, journalists have an obligation to report the truth from all sides of the story.
And it's kind of like, okay, we'd like to see that.
It's anytime you can start anytime now because they're not reporting both sides of the story.
For the most part, they have become repeaters and not reporters.
And we'd like to see that change.
And obviously, the media are carrying the mainstream media are carrying along all these narratives.
Like most of the mainstream media in Canada have signed up for covering Climate Now, which is with the Columbia Journalism Review, and 400 media outlets reaching 2 billion people, and they're all singing climate emergency.
So we have two items that people should have a look at.
One is Dr. Roy Spencer, NASA award-winning scientist, stating that there's no climate emergency and all the reasons why.
And Donna LaFranvoise, investigative journalist, showing how climate activists are undermining every one of your freedoms.
So we have these two presentations on our event website.
They are $15 tickets, or you can become a member of Friends of Science and your viewing is included for both.
So, you know, it's really important that, like, we've sent out press releases on these two events, and the media have not covered it at all in Canada.
So they're not reporting both sides of the story.
Well, and they're incentivized not to, because if you want some of those Trudeau bailout bucks, you better tow the Liberal Party line.
And we've seen these failing newspapers and these failing outlets, they get funded specifically for a climate journalist.
And so they'll get money to have a climate journalist on staff.
And if you're going to close up shop or lay off people or take Justin Trudeau's money for a climate journalist, they are deciding to take money for a climate journalist.
And so that's why when you are consuming the media and you think, oh, all I'm reading about is climate change.
Well, that's because they're getting money to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it must be a big push for carbon offset trading.
And all those climate bonds that are worth trillions of dollars are probably teetering on the edge.
And so that's why the massive push.
Even Mark Carney is coming up with even more catastrophe notices about climate change and how it'll be worse than COVID-19.
Well, you know, you're not a scientist, you're not a climate scientist, Mark, and you're associated with carbon trading companies in your past and renewables companies in your present.
So I think there's a pretty big conflict of interest there.
Yeah, it feels a little bit like insider trading now, doesn't it?
Michelle, I want to give you an opportunity to tell people how they can find the work that you do and support Friends of Science because you are just this little organization up against the foreign-funded environmental activists and they get millions of dollars dumped their way.
And you guys are just, you know, it's a David and Goliath kind of story with what you're doing here.
So please tell us how we can support you.
Sure.
First of all, you can share our stuff.
We're on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram.
Where else are we?
Facebook.
So we're pretty much all over social media.
So please share our stuff, comment, engage with us.
You don't have to agree.
If you'd like to become a member, that's easy to do.
$40 for one year, $80 for three years.
And that will entitle you to receive all of our press releases, our by monthly cli scien extracts, which are roundups of material that you won't see in the mainstream press, and our reports.
And we'd love to have more members.
We'd love to have your support.
And, you know, you can do a monthly donation.
Even a dollar a month would be helpful.
More is better, but we know these are difficult times for everybody.
So we appreciate whatever help you can give.
And if you can't give financial help, please share our stuff.
Well, Michelle, I think the work that Friends of Science does is so valuable because you take these big, complex ideas where it feels like it's just a tangled ball of yarn and you break it down into digestible pieces that normal people like me can take out into the world and use as arguments against people who truly believe that the sky is falling.
So I really appreciate the work that you do.
Thank You For Tuning In00:01:02
And I want to thank you for coming on the show.
And we'll have you back on again very, very soon.
Okay, thanks, Sheila.
Have a great day and thanks to all of the viewers.
All the best to everyone in 2021.
Let's hope this is a much better year.
Me too.
Thanks.
Let's imagine for a moment if the Liberals were mandating an end to the Ontario auto manufacturing sector or the Quebec maple syrup cartel or the entire East Coast fishery.
Well, that's what Bill C-12 stands to do to the Western natural resource-based economy.
And if our Western-based politicians could just set aside their own attacks on our civil liberties for just a minute, maybe they could take the fight in defense of whatever jobs remain around here back to Ottawa.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here-well, wherever I might be at this time next week.