Petro-Canada

I think, you know, free markets are always... a good thing, but there are some cases where it matters about our defense, where things like steel are such important elements of building our defense tools, where we need it for our auto sector, where there's so much, there's many reasons for us to protect that.

But I go back to the days of Petro Canada being a nationalized, a government-owned asset that we then privatized.

I don't know.

I don't know what the answer is.

I think the price of Brent crude today was $114.

All you've got to do is drive to Petro Canada or the Orange Store and fill up your small car for $85 and know where it stands.

There you

go.

Yeah, that's wild.

And so you make all these products and then who are the customers? Like who's buying that? Is it like you're selling to Esso and Petro Canada and Shell or how does that work?

Yeah, so great question.

So most of our sales are within Federated Cooperatives Limited.

Right down the street from me, here in Milton, Mississauga, they're shutting down one of the last lube plants we have in eastern Canada, the Sinclair.

It was known in Petro-Canada.

It's been there since the Second World War.

We do need that for gear oil and for DEF and pretty much everything else that you can think of.

Gas is down around six cents, diesel down around nine.

Uh, but if you wanna hold on till about 4:00 this afternoon, you can tack on an additional 15 cents of savings at the pumps on those fuels, um, for North Atlantic stations and Met-- and Petro-Canada stations.

Uh, the orange stores here in this province and Nova Scotia.

Brilliant marketing, of course.

And so I made a fatal error in eating dinner just on the, where the Highway 22 and Trans-Canada Highway number one intersect.

There's a Petro-Canada and an A&W there.

And I was like, I gotta eat, I gotta eat.

I hadn't eaten all day.

I was born in Cape Breton, so I was in Cape Breton till I was eight, and my father worked for, at the time, Gulf Oil.

And Gulf Oil got bought by Petro-Canada, and we moved to Edmonton till I was 15, and then my mother wanted to get back to Cape Breton, so Montreal was the closest place for Petro-Canada.

So we moved to Montreal and hence how I ended up at McGill.

So did you have a Cape Breton accent when you moved to Edmonton?

Uh, you'll remember we got out of, you know, we got rid of a lot of nationalized entities in the mid-'80s.

Mr. Mulroney got rid of Petro-Canada.

He got rid of Air Canada.

Mr. Chrétien got rid of CN.

so cheap.

I don't think I've ever gotten a pair of sunglasses that aren't from, no free ads, Petro-Canada.

[laughs]

I go there and-

I won- I do wonder about, I mean that, that's an interesting argument, like, you know, the rules changed, uh, the, the private companies got out.

But on the other side, even without the rule changes, you know, we used to build these things, these massive projects, uh, through Crown corporations, right? Petro-Canada, um, TMX ended up being [laughs] Trans Mountain ended up being owned by the Canadian people.

Because it's a public resource and the public should have the benefit of the resource, what do you think about that argument?

We get the benefit of the resource anyway.