Energy Superpower or Suburban Strip Mall?

Dispatch #13: Pre-Debate Game Show - The Debate We Should Be Having

Two weeks ‘til D-Day. The ballots are loaded, the nation is weary and divided, and Canadians get to choose: reheated leftovers in different colour schemes.

Where should a progressive cast their vote?

Well, “progressive” is a funny word—like “moist” or “influencer.” It means whatever the guy selling it needs it to mean.

Pierre Poilievre wants to pre-approve every pipeline like it’s a 36-year-old couple applying for their first mortgage. He wants oil and gas pumping through every province and pipeline—and First Nations too.

What looks like progress to some folks smells a lot like reactionary reheated diesel to others.

“But we need to be an energy superpower!” say the blue and red teams.

For a decade, the Liberals treated Canada’s natural resources like radioactive dragon eggs—sacred and untouchable. Carney, our technocrat-in-chief, even wrote the book on keeping it all buried.

Now he’s flipped—says we need resource development. But this isn’t a simple flip of the switch—it comes with a catch. Just enough red tape to strangle the very economy he wants to build.

As in, fine, let’s develop resources—but only if they fill out twelve climate forms and consult seventeen stakeholders and get a permit from someone named Onika in the Department of Sustainable Suffering.

Paperwork is what’s keeping resources in the ground. Investors flee, foreign capital runs screaming, and the only thing flowing is self-congratulation at a Davos dinner party.

That’s the rub: the thing keeping our resources in the dirt isn’t hippie protests or throwing paint on artwork—it’s bureaucratic molasses. Endless paperwork, climate caveats, ESG rituals. Foreign capital takes one look and vanishes like a snowbird in April.

And here’s the irony: we need that same foreign capital to build the green economy—like nuclear plants, grid upgrades, maybe even trains that don’t suck. So we tell investors, “Come on in, but please fill out these 19 climate disclosures and wait 12–18 months for an answer.”

Bitumen doesn’t have to gush like blood into America’s fleet of anxiety SUVs. It can stay underground, like emergency bourbon or buried gold—saved for defense, leverage, or the day California asks to join Confederation.

Canada doesn’t need to drill endlessly. We need to own what we’ve already got—like it actually means something. Like it belongs to someone who plans to still be here in fifty years.

The oil sands should be treated like a strategic maple syrup reserve: hoarded, guarded, tapped sparingly—only for defense, trade leverage, or a national hangover. Not sold to the highest bidder so we can import EVs and designer clothing.

And what about you? The individual Canadian?

Carney wants to censor your online time while you take a bus to your work station, monitored by an app that flashes green when you’ve eaten enough bugs. Heat pumps and hydrogen buses for all—just don’t ask how he’ll pay for it.

Poilievre says: drill, drive, and double down. Gas up the Dodge Ram, drop the carbon tax, and pave the way to Costco. Sell oil to China, blame Trudeau for everything, and pretend the suburbs are the crown jewel of civilization.

Capitalism good. Entertainment good. Family good. Politics Blue™! Bring it home!

It’s the ideological equivalent of a Slim Jim: salty, mass-produced, and only technically edible.

I say: head north. Ditch the condos and cul-de-sacs. Start over—with horses, rail spurs, and outpost tents that double as town halls and butcher shops.

Where is This Going?

The debates are this Wednesday and Thursday. French first, then English—because if there’s one thing Canadians love, it’s awkward national choreography.

Unless Jagmeet pulls off a triple backflip in both languages—live, on air—and inspires us all with hope, he’s not becoming Prime Minister.

Nobody but Jagmeet ever thought he had a shot. But even he knew he was just in it for the pension. Jagmeet said, “Hey, I’ve got a chance”—while quietly Googling ‘yachts for sale in Victoria BC.’

And then there’s the Green Party. The party that’s not even pretending to win.

Don’t tell me both talking heads are getting debate time. Neither of them deserves a mic—but fine, I’ll allow it. Just know: if they lose their two seats, we’re channeling the ghost of Louis Riel and doing a hard reset.

Can we please rebrand the Green Party?

Not as anti-nuclear, anti-oil, Palestinian missionaries, but as defenders of the land—against suburban sprawl, against GDP-growth LARPing, against Carney’s build-back-boring technocracy.

The future isn’t electric cars and bug-flour tapas. It’s not some low-testosterone surveillance dystopia where you own nothing and “learn to love it” like you’re trapped in a UN-sponsored TikTok remake of 1984.

The future is trains and industrial hemp. It’s butchers, blacksmiths, farmers, and that one guy in town who can fix phones with a soldering iron if you buy him a beer.

Fewer cell towers. More vegetable gardens.

Cities still matter—but only if they follow the old rules of place. Jane Jacobs knew how it worked. Read her.

Carney thinks you can just stack people in glass towers, slap on a bike lane, and call it a solution.

That’s the difference between Carney’s environmentalism and my conservation… ism.

He’s skipping leg day and flexing a six-pack of ESG metrics. I’m just trying to rehab those useful finger muscles you forgot about.

The carbon-neutral life we already knew how to live—before smart thermostats and government grants replaced common sense.

If your city can’t grow a carrot, defend a street, or raise a kid without taxpayer life support—then it’s not a city. It’s a Netflix subscription with plumbing.

We need dense, walkable, sovereign cities that are, above all, built for humans, not bureaucrats or real estate investment trusts.

Carney wants a spreadsheet dystopia—run top-down, by credentialed managers in zero-emission loafers.

Poilievre wants a discount-bin economy made of asphalt, plastic signage, and Canadiana vibes.

Neither cares about soil health, sound money, or meaningful decentralization.

Neither can fix what’s crumbling—because both of them built careers on the instability they now pretend to solve.

What to Look for in the Debates

Jagmeet will be there, sure—but the real show is Carney vs. Poilievre. Right now, I’m predicting a Carney minority, unless the debate turns into a steel cage match and Poilievre brings brass knuckles and a poll bump.

Carney’s out here doing his best Paul Martin cosplay—awkward smile, vague promises, and conflicts of interest longer than a YouTube comments section.

He’s not gonna say he wants to continue Trudeau’s postnationalism—you’re just supposed to assume it.

Isn’t there a lesson in reading a man’s book before he takes charge of a country?

Poilievre, for all his flaws, is at least honest: drill, baby, drill. If it burns, ship it. If it’s profitable, pave it. If it's scarce, price it and consume it.

The Greens’ll show up at the debate too. Yes, the climate’s having a midlife crisis. No, Canada doesn’t need to shut down oil to fix it. Take the fiat money out of circulation, not the barrels.

I say we hoard oil like we hoarded the Tragically Hip—because it’s distinctly Canadian. Use it (the oil, not the Hip) for military readiness, domestic industry, and emergencies. Not so China can build more ring lights.

Sure, we’ll sell some of it—fund the green shift, maybe pay off a few debts. But we do it smart. We do it Canadian. Which means strategic, slow, and with just enough passive-aggressive guilt to call it policy.

Pipelines should be arteries of national security, not lifelines for Dollarama supply chains and Mary Brown’s Chicken drive-thrus.

Who up there on the debate stage is calling for a decentralized, local-first, techno-primitivist frontier revival? Who’s talking about sovereignty for the soil, and self-respect and responsibility stitched into the flag?

Who’s brave enough to say no to “clean tech” when it means strip-mining the Congo with child-slaves or chewing through northern Manitoba and Quebec like candy?

And who’s saying yes to horses, low-entropy farming, and small-town butchers who actually source locally?

Net-zero? Maybe Poilievre’ll drag it out of him like a bad tooth. Maybe it won’t matter. Carney supports it, sure—but he’ll never define what gets zeroed out: emissions, autonomy, and your last shred of privacy.

Fuck net-zero-libtardism.

What we need is net-worth. In soil. In health. In land that stays in the family longer than your iPhone plan. Not surveillance apps and $3,000 rent for a box with drywall and despair.

We need community, not a demographic Ponzi scheme used to pay for boomer pensions and healthcare.

What to look for in the debates?

Nothing—just listen for subtext.

Who will?

Invest in oil, but treat it like a national relic.

Keep the tech, but encourage us to unplug it on the weekends.

Build defence, but aim it inward—toward resilience, not regime change.

This ain’t about net-zero. It’s about net-survival.

You can’t replace Alberta oil rigs with Toronto podcasts and feel-good LinkedIn posts. But you can pivot toward horses, hemp, rail, and honest-to-God labour that doesn’t end in a Google Sheet.

Carney’s Canada has bug flour, biometric check-ins, and a median condo price of your soul.

Poilievre’s Canada is a losing Roll Up the Rim cup and a plastic Muskoka chair at the end of the world.

My vision of Canada has ox-plowed fields, bison steaks, and a blacksmith who makes knives and YouTube reaction videos.

If you wanna be an energy superpower, fine. But stop exporting the soul of the country with every barrel.

For fuck’s sake, Ricky—let the horses and bison run.

Two Weeks from Now

Either Carney or Poilievre will stumble across the finish line like a dad in flip-flops. No home runs—just a weird tie game that leaves half the country Googling ‘how to secede from Ottawa.’

Maybe one day we’ll get a party on that debate stage that isn’t obsessed with expanding this, shrinking that, or cutting red tape like it’s some goddamn ribbon ceremony.

What about re-rooting the economy?

I’m sure Elizabeth May has already said something like that—probably in 2011, probably during a liquored-up salmon run.

But has she called for urban independence and rural resilience?

Pre-industrial values, post-industrial tools. Pipelines without strip malls. Horse-drawn farming and local cloud storage.

National energy security—without corporate leash-holders whispering in your ear every quarter.

This isn’t left or right. The ballot is theirs. The land is ours.