Transcript
Transcript: Exploring Energy in Canada Series: Unpacking Energy Security
[00:00:01 Text appears on screen that reads "Welcome" "Bienvenue".]
[00:00:06 The screen fades to Isaac Gielen in a video chat panel.]
Isaac Gielen (Senior Analyst, Canada School of Public Service): Good afternoon and welcome to today's event, the third of our Exploring Energy in Canada Learning Series: Unpacking Energy Security. Thank you for joining us. My name is Isaac Gielen and I am a senior analyst at the Canada School of Public Service, and I am very excited to moderate today's event. Before we begin, I would like to recognize that I'm speaking to you from Tiohtià:ke or Montreal, which is the traditional unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá:ka Nation.
I want to express my gratitude to the generations of Kanien'kehá:ka, past and present, as the original caretakers of this space I occupy. I'm very grateful to be here. I recognize that those of you watching today are from all different parts of the country, and therefore you may work on a different Indigenous territory. I encourage you to take a moment to think about the territory you occupy and your relation to it, and in particular the historic relationship between Indigenous peoples and energy in Canada.
As an energy rich country, it can be easy for Canadians to take their power for granted. We typically don't worry about how we're going to store food or stay warm, and the thought of entering a room at night and flicking a light switch to no effect is bizarre to many. However, accessibility to energy has never been guaranteed in Canada, and there remain many throughout the country today for whom obtaining essential energy services is a constant challenge.
Today, we are discussing energy security in Canada, moments when our country's mettle was tested due to various energy crises and the important phenomenon of energy poverty, a threat to Canada's public health. To address these topics, I am very happy to welcome today's panelists.
[00:01:53 Petra Dolata is shown in a separate video chat panel.]
Petra Dolata is an energy historian and an associate professor at the University of Calgary's Department of History. She is the 2025-2026 Naomi Lacey resident fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, where she also co-convenes the Energy in Society Working Group.
[00:02:11 Mylène Riva is shown in a separate video chat panel.]
Mylène Riva is a health geographer, population health researcher, and an associate professor at McGill University's Department of Geography. She also holds the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Housing, Community and Health.
Following their presentations, we will have a panel discussion which will then be followed by questions from you, our audience. We encourage you to submit your questions to our panelists using the webcast interface. Click the chat function icon located at the top-right corner of your screen to submit your question in the official language of your choice. We'll get to as many as time permits. With that, I will turn the floor over to Petra to begin the presentations today. Please enjoy.
Petra Dolata (Professor at University of Calgary): Thank you and good afternoon or good morning. Still here in Calgary from Treaty 7. So, I would like to start talking about energy security as a foreign policy concept, which is where some of the discussions actually emerged, and we'll talk about what role Canada has played in this. So, first of all, I want to remind us that as a policy field, energy is an extremely complex issue area, particularly because energy resources or more specifically oil and natural gas are among the most globalized commodities.
So, they often create global or integrated transnational energy spaces such as in North America, the one that we in Canada share with United States. Energy also lies at the intersection of politics and economics, bringing together very different rationales of decision-making, thus separating public policy goals from market-driven, profit-making rationales, and energy also involves substate jurisdictions, as we of course know for the Canadian example where Canadian provinces have rights over these energy resources.
As a historian, I'm mainly interested in the origin of the term 'energy security' and the changes it has undergone since its inception. So, this is not to say that we can see even much earlier instances that we now may describe as ideas or worries about energy security, but I'm particularly interested in when that specific term emerged, what it tells us about its meaning, but also what it means for a country such as Canada. So, let me start with that historical genealogy, if you will, of the term.
So, first of all, it's important to note it appears at a very specific point in time, and that is during a moment of energy crisis. These are the energy crises of the 1973-74, and of 1979 and 1998 oil price crisis that the Western world experienced, but it also is embedded in larger crises such as de-industrialization and coal industry. The 1971 Nixon Shock, which essentially ended the Bretton Woods system or of the gold convertibility of U.S. dollars, really indicate that the golden decades of economic progress after World War II came to an end.
It was also mainly driven by the discussion in the United States, which had become a net importer of oil in 1970 and which had already had experience of using a strategic security argument to close their own markets, so something that scholars in security studies, study under the concept of securitization, and this all culminates in the 1980 Carter Doctrine, which essentially says that the United States would be involved in out-of-area, outside of the United States military action if the flow of oil is impeded, for example, by Iran closing down the Strait of Hormuz.
And so, first of all, what we need to note is that when the term 'energy security' emerges, it is about oil in the first place. It is also mainly a U.S. understanding of a concept of energy security, which was closely linked to the availability and affordability because they were focusing on the threats to energy security as a consumer nation, as a net importer of oil. This understanding was also then embedded in the International Energy Agency, which was founded in 1974 by leading OECD members, excluding France.
And as a result of an initiative by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but also the emerging G7, which some of you may know this, started as a G6 in 1975 without Canada and originally included Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, which were all oil consumer states unlike Canada, which had just become a net exporter of oil at this stage. So, what this means is that while Canada might have been affected similarly in terms of queuing at gas stations and also because of the integrated energy market with the United States, it did have a rather unique role in this instance of the origin of energy security.
And we do see that outside the North American context. Canada, for example, was able to keep out energy security from becoming a part of the nature agreement. That was a big discussion in the early 1980s, and Canada sided with a lot of the Western European partners. But if we look at when the concept emerges in domestic discussion in Canada, we can note that in 1975, there was an adaptation and redefinition of the term by NDP leaders in the West, mostly Saskatchewan premier and the Alberta NDP leader who demanded that Ottawa create an 'Energy Security Fund' which would use revenue from higher oil prices to fund exploration and drilling in Canada and make Canada self-sufficient in energy.
So, it was really adapting this original idea, which was driven by a consumer interest and tried to apply it to the specific situation in Canada. It was driven by the unique role of Canada amongst its NATO allies and the IEA and G7 members, but it was dead by 1979 due to much lower Canadian oil prices. However, as I'm sure some people will note, it becomes an integral part of the ill-fated 1980 National Energy Program, which had the stated goal to achieve energy security within a decade. But as one of the subsections highlighted, this was about energy independence.
By the way, a project that Nixon himself already in 1973 had immediately announced in the wake of the oil price crisis, and this translated into Canadian ownership. It is interesting to note that with the exception of the United States, in the 1970s, other Western countries, which were known to be extremely liberal in terms of energy markets, have equally let go of their liberal practices in the oil and gas sectors and created national champions. For example, the British National Oil company in the U.K. or Deminex in West Germany.
So, this is kind of where it begins. Now, how does it recur and change over time as we now look at energy security today in Canada? First of all, ever since the energy crisis of the 1970s, there's a long history of noisy and cyclically recurring discussions of energy dependence and concomitant security challenges that unfold. These were often connected to higher prices of oil. We can think of 2008, for example, or the instability in oil producing regions, the most recent example being the Ukraine, which highlighted the strategic significance of oil and natural gas, but I wouldn't be a historian if I wouldn't bring this in. Things are never exactly the same.
As we move into the 21st century, the original definition of the concept of energy security as espoused by the IEA and others, that is uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price took on more meanings. First, environmentally sustainable and then also accessible and just. So, the geopolitical and strategic significance of energy that is part and parcel of how it emerges, or more precisely, of course of oil and natural gas, was increasingly overlaid by the climate change agenda.
So, since the 2000s, we see policymakers speaking more of a nexus between energy security and climate change. Now, for Canada, this creates a challenge because it is a net exporter of oil and natural gas, but it needs to balance its domestic hydrocarbon energy production with pledges to decarbonize our economy. And so, it becomes a very different discussion in the 21st century. So, as the concept of security generally broadened and deepened, to move away from state-related security to societal or human security, do we see that the energy security concept moves to domestic meanings to signify the making of individuals' or communities' energetic well-being secure and reliable?
And this brings us to ideas of energy justice, energy access, energy poverty. Now, one of the things that if we understand that the concept itself is not an essentialist concept, it takes on different meanings in different jurisdictions and at different times, is to then also remind ourselves that energy security can both be a policy paradigm, but also used as political rhetoric. And so, we can see that either the way that energy industry in Canada in the 1970s might use the importance of energy security to make certain demands. It could also become a foreign policy argument.
One example would be the ways that the government under Stephen Harper used the concept in the second half of the 2000s to justify certain Arctic policies, even though it was not the Canadian Arctic that would provide energy production and thus energy security, but other regions. But in the international discussions, that was something that could be brought to the table. And so, that might also help us understand the recent history of discussions on energy security, where this idea of Canada being an energy superpower, first espoused by Stephen Harper, is now echoed again by our current Prime Minister.
And by the way, Stephen Harper in 2007, when talking about Canada as an energy superpower, and that is, of course, often in discussion with European allies or maybe also with potential Asian customers, is to always talk about Canada as a bastion of world energy security. The problem though is that ever since we see how energy security is something at the intersection of climate change policies and energy policies, that that becomes more and more difficult as a selling point or rhetoric in particular when dealing with the European Union, who considers itself a norm entrepreneur, if you will, in the realm of climate change policy.
So, what I think has happened more recently, and particularly in a Canadian context, is that that concept, which started in a foreign policy scenario, is now brought into domestic politics. But also, we also realize that energy security is now very closely linked to questions around energy justice, Indigenous energy sovereignty, and other issues that really redefine who needs to be at the receiving end of securing energy and what is it that creates potential insecurities. And what this means, and this is, again, coming back to this idea of broadening and deepening the idea of energy security, is that energy policy itself is always climate policy, infrastructure policy, industrial policy, Indigenous and Northern policy. So, it really transcends this idea of domestic versus foreign policy. It also is very complicated in a federal system such as Canada where different jurisdictions will share or have exclusive powers over some of these.
And I finish this short historical overview of energy security by also reminding ourselves that that energy crises of the 1970s did not only bring us the concept of energy security, but also the idea of energy transition, and that idea was introduced mainly to get away from that very frightening concept of crisis. And so, we see, and I hope you agree with me, understanding the history of the concept also helps us to understand the social and cultural connotation of energy security. Thank you.
Isaac Gielen: Thank you very much, Petra. That was a great look at the depth of energy security as a topic and the fascinating historical look at energy security. But as you mentioned, this is not something that just lives in our national rearview mirror. This is something that continues to persist today and is still relevant. And so, maybe with that, I'll invite our next guest, Dr. Mylène Riva, to talk to us about energy security and energy poverty.
Mylène Riva (Associate Professor at McGill University): Good afternoon. Good morning. Kwei. I'm looking forward, joining you from Tiohtià:ke, Montreal. Great first presentation. So, I'm going to piggyback on some of the concepts that were presented, moving from energy security but to speak about energy poverty which share the same concepts. It's called differently in different jurisdictions. So, what I mean by energy poverty is a situation that happens when households cannot afford or access the energy services that they need at home to meet their needs, maintain healthy indoor temperature, and to live with dignity.
And what I mean by energy services is what we do with energy. We heat and cool our homes. We turn on the lights when we go into different rooms. We refrigerate and we cook our food. We communicate with others. We learn and we work. So, we need energy to fulfill many of our basic needs. And in Canada, we call this situation energy poverty. In the U.S., it is referred to as energy insecurity. In Quebec and in other French-speaking regions, such as in France and Belgium, we will speak of 'précarité énergétique' or energy precarity. But no matter how we call it, it's the idea that households cannot access or afford the energy services that they need to live a decent life.
And there's different factors that will push a household into energy poverty, if you will. There is the energy system, energy governance, the systems that we have that govern energy that fix how much energy cost. There's the housing factor, whether the house or the apartment is energy efficient or not. So, here, we're thinking about the structural condition of the dwelling, the envelope, and then, there's household factors such as income, such as tenure.
So, whether a household owns or rents their dwelling, specific needs that household members might have that require increasing use of energy, such as people relying on medical devices that requires power, the size and the composition of households. So, these are all factors that will have an influence on energy poverty, and I just want to stress that we call it energy poverty but it's not just a question of poverty. It's not just a question of low income.
So, if you think of tenants in social housing, for example, or people, renters, again, who have their electricity bills and heating bills included in their rent. They might be viewed as not experiencing energy poverty because they don't have to pay for it, but they still might well live in a dwelling that is not energy-efficient where the heating system is not working properly. So, energy poverty is not just a question of low income, it's a question of housing, households, energy system.
And of course, it's impacted by the climate. With the increasing in frequency of extreme weather events, households can lose power for hours, sometimes days at a time, and this can have important impact on their well-being. So, I've talked about the concept of energy poverty. Then, there's how we measure it. There're different ways of measuring it. I'm just going to give you two broad overviews. One is through population surveys. We can ask Canadians, for example, to report on the thermal comfort of their dwelling, or we can ask them to report on financial hardships of paying utility bills.
Another way of measuring poverty is looking at the proportion of household income that goes to paying for energy services for the home, and we use set thresholds. A common threshold that is used is household spending more than 6% of their income on energy services for the home. And if we use this 6% threshold, it's about 19%, so almost one in five Canadian households that is facing energy poverty in Canada, and that is a number that we arrived at when we analyzed data from the 2016 census, from the 2017 survey of household spending.
So, we need to update this number. But given increasing and energy price inflation and the housing crisis, probably the number is similar five years later. There's spatial variation in energy poverty. It's lowest in Quebec, in Alberta, in B.C. It's highest in Atlantic Canada, where it's about 30%. One in three households are facing energy poverty. But even if we look at a local scale, there will be variation. So, there's regions and there are households in Quebec that are facing energy poverty.
So, not only is the distribution of energy poverty unequally distributed across space, it's also distributed unequally between different population groups. So, some of our work has shown that households with people living with an activity limitation or with a disability, older adults, people living alone and lone parent families are more at risk to be facing energy poverty. We also see energy poverty to be higher among renters, among people living in single detached family dwelling and people living in dwellings requiring major repairs and in older dwellings, so potentially in less energy-efficient dwellings.
International research, including a report from the World Health Organization, has highlighted energy and energy poverty as a risk factor for health. So, energy poverty is associated with a range of health conditions, such as cardiovascular and respiratory disease. It can exacerbate certain chronic health conditions, such as asthma, arthritis and sickle cell anemia. It can create stressful living situation leading to anxiety and depression. It can have an impact on social relation inside the house when household members have to compromise on when and how energy can be used and to fulfill which needs.
It can have an impact on sleep quality. It has an impact on food security. Many households will engage in the heat or eat trade-off, so having to choose between paying for utility bills or putting food on the table. And in Canada, some of our research has shown that facing energy poverty is significantly associated with a higher likelihood of Canadian adults reporting their general and their mental health as being poor compared to those who are not facing energy poverty.
In 2023, Statistics Canada realized the Canadian Social Survey and it focused on energy and well-being. So, I just want to show a few slides for Canada as a whole. And then, I want to take a few minutes just to speak about a study we are conducting in Bridgewater in Nova Scotia. So, results from the pan-Canadian survey in 2023 shows that about 3% of Canadian household had receive a disconnection notice from utilities company in the past year. 10% reported being late or being unable to pay energy bills, and 15% said they had to forgo expenses for necessities such as food and medicine in order to pay for utility bills.
In Bridgewater, we conducted a survey with about 500 people. So, Bridgewater is a town of about 9000 people, an hour west of Halifax, and we conducted a survey in collaboration with the town to assess the extent of energy poverty in the community. And among survey respondents, it's almost 40%, two in five, that reported spending more than 6% of their household income on energy services for the home. 20% reporting having difficulty affording to keep their dwelling warm. 35% had to juggle to pay for utility bills and 34% said they had to either cut on food or on energy to afford the others. So, energy poverty has wide-ranging impacts on different aspects of daily life. It's closely tied to housing and to food security.
When we conduct interviews with service providers, we hear stories of people who have to cope with maintaining their dwelling warm in the winter, such as people starting burning furniture because that's the last source of heat that they have. We hear stories from service providers but also from people experiencing homelessness that energy poverty is a pathway into homelessness and a barrier from escaping it. It's a pathway into when someone loses their unit because they're unable to keep the light on or they can't heat it properly, they are evicted, or if they accumulate arrears with utilities company, if they cannot have utility bills in their name.
Re-entering the rental markets means that for them, they can only access units with utilities included in the rent, and this is less common in some jurisdictions. So, energy poverty is not on the policy agenda in Canada. It's making its way there but there's several of us across the country working to making it a little bit more known, and there's different solutions that can be deployed to tackle energy poverty, either head on or by influencing or by acting on household income or by improving the energy efficiency of dwellings.
And there's great programs that have been launched over the past years, the new iteration of Canada Greener Homes targets, lower income households, but we have to keep in mind that even if programs are targeting low-income households to reach the people that we need to reach, it's very complex. The message, the vocabulary that we use, the program that we make available in some of the interviews we've conducted with different entities deploying home energy retrofits across the country, they say, well, we have this amazing suite of program where we can do home upgrades at no cost for low-income households.
And for them, it's just too good to be true. They don't believe us. So, how do we engage everyone in home energy retrofits? And targeting households in situation of vulnerability is very important because inadvertently, we can increase social equity, we can increase housing inequity if we don't target those who need the program the most. I will end here, if that's okay.
Isaac Gielen: That's great. Thank you very much, Mylène. It was a fascinating look at energy poverty. It really just goes to show that this is an enormous beast with its tentacles touching so many different parts of Canadian society, and I appreciate you demonstrating the complexity of that for us. Right now, we'll move on to some discussion questions to hear from both Dr. Dolata and Dr. Riva about the topic of energy security. And maybe I'll start with you, Petra. Petra, you've described energy transitions and energy systems as 'inherently social'. What do you mean by that?
Petra Dolata: What I mean by that is the way that we try and even understand energy systems is, first of all, something that we as humans do, and that is not a small matter, because we then decide what will be the (inaudible) movers and shakers in an energy system. We also decide what are the priorities and we try and make sense of what we describe as an energy system for us, so very often, and that's people like Vaclav Smil and others who have suggested that one way of looking at energy systems is to combine the kind of energy sources that are there, which can differ in terms of organic or mineral, renewables or fossil fuels, will have all sorts of different ramifications which then are in one way or another, transferred through so-called prime movers.
And early civilizations only had our own organic prime movers, which is muscle power or animal muscle power or some early mechanical prime movers like wind sails, for example. And then, at the end, we have the uses for energy, and we heard already that these can range from providing heat, providing foods for cooking and providing motion. And so, we kind of look at this and it looks very technological. We also understand how our energy systems have become increasingly complex because we have multiple sources and multiple prime movers that become then also mechanical, and we have multiple uses, and that really looks like a very manageable system.
However, at every one of these points, it is human invention and innovation. It is human choices in terms of policies that really decide how these pieces fit together. So, in that sense, there is no determinism. There is no way to say, once we have coal, we will have the industrial revolution. Because actually, London used coal many centuries before, which really annoyed the Queen at the time, Queen Elizabeth, but it was only used in terms of heat energy and only when coal was combined with steam technology, so as a mechanical energy, then the industrial revolution began.
So, we need to get away from these easy trajectories of things that happen. But equally, not every technology that may be the best technology in terms of an engineering perspective will be accepted. And so, this is the biggest learning, I think, for anyone who's discussing current energy transitions, that social innovation piece. We expect humans to be rational beings and we are not, and that's the one thing that history can show us. So, in that sense, not only the way that we perceive of an energy system, the way that an energy system in itself depends on human choices, but then also, the idea that the best will win, that is all inherently human.
And so, that's what I mean when I say that energy systems are inherently social. What this means, and that's my last point here, is that any energy transition is a social transition. And so, if you do not include the humanities and social sciences, then you're missing out a big piece of that coming transition, and particularly in terms of determining who are the losers. Any energy transition has winners and losers. Who are the losers? And how do we make sure that there's no one is left behind, or marginalized groups are equally benefiting from this?
Isaac Gielen: Thank you, Petra. That's a fascinating answer. It's like the example of London's. One thing to have your dad mad at you for playing with the thermostat but the Queen of England, that's something else. Mylène, this next question is for you. You talked about energy poverty and how it typically affects renters more. You mentioned the Atlantic region, but we also know that energy poverty is felt acutely by Indigenous peoples in Canada. How is Indigenous knowledge and leadership tackling the issue of energy poverty?
Mylène Riva: Great question, so many different ways to answer that question. I don't know if they're tackling energy poverty as a concept, but they are clearly leaders in the energy transition. And over the past few years, we've seen great example of Indigenous leadership taking place around energy matters. Across Indigenous peoples in Canada, to give a few examples, Tarquti, which is a renewable energy developer in Nunavik, was created several years ago. It's spearheaded the hydroelectricity dam in Inukjuak.
Then, there's Indigenous Clean Energy (ICE), which is an Indigenous-led organization that aims to strengthen capacity and action in the clean energy transition. There's Ishkoday, another nonprofit First Nation organization that supports energy needs of First Nations in Ontario. The Inuvialuit Regional Corporation has its energy action plan. So, we see different ways that Indigenous leadership is addressing energy needs, energy poverty or the energy transition in ways that make sense to them. So, from a housing perspective, housing needs are quite high in many Indigenous communities across the country. So, recognizing that improving thermal comfort, improving housing conditions is also is also part of this discussion.
Isaac Gielen: Thank you. Petra, you talked about the energy crises that defined much of the 1970s. These were crises that affected much of the Western world, of course, not just Canada. Were there any countries that responded to this crisis very differently from Canada? And if so, how did they fare?
Petra Dolata: That's a good question. So, one of the things that we've seen everywhere is, of course, the search for alternatives but that search for alternatives can include all sorts of things. So, it can include finding new places where oil might be, and that's something where we definitely see in Canada with the frontier regions in terms of oil exploration, which at that stage were the Alberta oilsands. And then, of course, the High Arctic or the Mackenzie Delta and the Arctic Ocean and then also the coast of Newfoundland, and that's something that also the Americans were doing. Of course, they had just struck oil in 1968 at the coast of Alaska. So, that was one way of doing the alternative. The other alternative is, of course, to replace oil, but other energy resources.
So, that leads to the resurgence of coal in countries like the U.K., West Germany, but also the United States, but it's also the look, the search for new renewables. So, this is also when the research into wind power and solar starts. Equally, we have these things that go into looking for shale, looking for more of a kind of oil sands or heavy oil. So, there's a lot of searches for alternatives. But I think if you look at Japan, which is, of course, massively hit because it's so dependent on outside energy sources and West Germany in terms of its dependency on oil, they determined that there's another alternative that we often forget, and that is energy efficiency.
And so, they invested a lot more in terms of that other piece of alternative, creating more efficient... and that meant efficient housing so that you would need less heating and energy, so double-glazed windows, all these kinds of things. And in Germany, you make it a law and then everyone has to stick to it. Japan, for example, decided that an electrical equipment could be made better so as to use less electricity, and then they become a world leader when you look at things like washing machines and all these things, which today, you would call it smart technology, but they're really invested in improving these kinds of things that would demand so much energy.
And so, I do think that and then it re-enters the United States and Canada, because this is when the small cars that are produced in Europe and in Japan entered the North American market, energy-efficient cars. So, it is, of course, not surprising that countries that are extremely dependent on outside energy would look for anything that they could do. And if they don't have their domestic energy sources, that energy efficiency was the route to go, but it really gave them an industrial edge in some of these technologies. But equally, as I said, it actually led to a resurgence of coal in many places in the Western world that was just undergoing a de-industrialization phase.
Isaac Gielen: Thank you. Petra. That's interesting. So, while Canada tended to focus on increasing supply, it seems like a lot of these other countries were more focused on reducing demand. That's interesting. Mylène, my next question is for you. But Petra, of course, if you've got your two cents, feel free to jump in. Most of our audience, federal public servants, most of us live in areas and circumstances that enjoy some of the most secure energy in the country. Of course, our job is to work on behalf of all Canadians. So, how do we make sure that those who experience energy poverty aren't being left out of our federal policy or program?
Mylène Riva: Yeah, great question, and it's difficult. It's how to reach the hard to reach, and I think boots-on-the-ground community presence is very important, and that's what we hear when we interview entities providing home energy upgrades across the country, that having a community contact, having a navigator, having a one-stop shop, un guichet unique, where people could go ask questions, get the support that they need is one of the facilitators of deploying or implementing home energy upgrades program, reducing the complexity of the application process.
So, in Bridgewater, for example, what they did was that they created a navigator position and this person grouped five different types of programs together and delivered them to households. So, if you're an individual household and it started like five years ago, so things have changed since. But five years ago, if you're applying to some of these programs, each program requires a separate energy audit. What if you had only one energy audit, then that would open the doors to many different programs, making sure that the language is accessible.
Keeping in mind that in Quebec, I would be surprised if it's not the same across the country, it's about 50% of the population that do not have the literacy skills to understand complex messages, have difficulties. So, we have to keep that in mind when we are trying to recruit people. What I would say also is I've been wanting to respond to some of Dr. Dolata's comments is when dealing with households who are facing energy poverty, people are super ingenious in all of the mechanisms or strategies that they will deploy to save on energy, unplugging all appliances when not in use, boarding off rooms, whole spaces of apartments or houses, not to have to heat certain rooms.
We've heard people taking showers at community centres, not to use hot water in their own home. We've heard that in Quebec, where we have the lowest electricity rates in the country. So, these people might not be in energy poverty if we use the metrics that we use because they are so crafty and so ingenious. They compromise so much on their comfort to save on cost that maybe they don't go over the 6% or the 10% threshold, but they are making important compromise. So, we have to be attentive to that. So, how do we make sure having more people experiencing energy poverty in discussions with policymakers when we think about what it means to be in energy poverty? Yeah, I think community approach bottom-up rather than top-down can go a very long way here. And also, can I just, sorry, piggyback on Dr. Dolata's comments?
Isaac Gielen: Of course.
Mylène Riva: When doing home energy retrofit, it's often about reducing greenhouse gas emission, reducing energy consumption. We lose sight that thermal comfort is improved, which can have really, really important impacts on people's health and well-being. So, there is the Jevons Paradox or the rebound effects. So, we see sometimes in houses where there's retrofit implemented, people might use more energy because now when they turn on the thermostat, they're warm in their house or they can use AC that they didn't have before, so that's factored in.
But just being able to use the mechanical system, the heating system, the appliances, the way that they meant to be, we hear that when we talk to people that they don't mind paying a little bit more because now they're warm. Now, their kids can be warm and now they can cook and they can have their family over visiting. So, there's non-energy benefits of these interventions and we should keep an eye for that because that might be where we have a big impact.
Isaac Gielen: Yes. Thank you. Petra?
Petra Dolata: Yeah, if I can add to that. So, for me, I think the important thing would be to really work more around energy literacy more generally, that there needs to be more education even in the… do people even understand what is meant by energy security, as I showed it can mean many things, but I do think it will be worthwhile to generate a narrative that encapsulates all the different aspects of energy security and doesn't so quickly fall into something that has not been defined necessarily by Canadian experience but by the experience of the United States and mean certain things, so that will be one thing.
The other thing would also be to… I know numbers are important in energy, but so are stories. And so, one of the things that I think we need to don't only go by the numbers which can hide so many things and do find ways that stories and histories about energy in Canada from different people and different places is something that is equally integrated into it. And then, the last point that I would make is that, be careful to not put the onus on the individual. It's so easy to remind people, if you just lose less of this or less of that, that it's almost I think it's more important to understand this as we have individual rights to energy.
But I think it's a communal responsibility. It's a collective responsibility, and it's not the other way around. It's not the individual responsibility on the collective right. And I think that's sometimes what is missing, that it's so easy to just ask people to do certain things. The last point that a lot of us energy historians, I'm thinking of my colleague Ruth Sandwell from Toronto, because we are so removed energy, unlike our forefathers, mothers in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, we really don't understand what is behind, flipping that switch or not. So, this is why energy literacy is also important.
I have this exercise with my students where I'll give them, journal for a week your energy use, and they realize that so many things they don't even look at it. So, I would say, create maybe a narrative that is more inclusive but that's available to all around energy security, invest more in educating Canadians, creating energy literacy. And then, try to balance out the numbers with stories and histories, and get away from that idea that it's on the individual to remedy these kinds of problems.
Isaac Gielen: Great. Thank you both. That's a lot of fantastic advice for our public servants here. Speaking of energy stories, Petra and Mylène, women have a unique relationship to energy in Canada. Energy poverty disproportionately affects them, and historically, women have played unique roles in Canada's larger energy story. A question for you both, how do the energy stories of women differ from the dominant narrative that we typically hear?
[00:51:48 Mylène Riva raises her hand on screen.]
Yeah, Mylène, please.
Mylène Riva: Yeah, great story. So, for us in the studies that we conduct on energy poverty, speaking with people in Quebec, in Nova Scotia, in Alberta, and different places across the country, it's this idea of care and care provision that came up, and we were expecting it but not that much, how energy is essential to providing care but also to receiving care as well, and how care could be care of a spouse who is ill, care of children, care of older adults, it could be receiving care, so care coming into the households, and this is a narrative that we don't see yet that much in Canada. But in the scientific scholarship on energy poverty, there's a few studies that have paid attention to the realities of women, but this question of care and what was quite eye-opening for me is the interviews we conducted in Bridgewater.
One of my PhD students, Laurianne Debanné, did the interview, and of course, I flew her in during a hurricane. So, she arrived in Bridgewater, it was a couple of years ago. It wasn't Fiona. It was the big hurricane after, whose name escapes me. And so, she had to go to a shelter. Many people had to go to a shelter. So, she had to adjust the interview, and she started helping and speaking with people, and people would say, when we have these big winds coming and when we have these storms, if my mom is on dialysis or if my husband needs the temperature inside the home to be kept at a certain temperature because of his health condition, these climate events create an important stress.
So, it's intersection. I can speak of other dimension that it impacts women's health. But for me and for us in our group, this is what came up as, I want to say, a surprise because we know about something that came up much more often, let's say, than what we had anticipated and especially in relation to climate change. So, that's something that we're going to explore a little bit more.
Isaac Gielen: Great. Thank you, Mylène. Petra, do you have anything to add to that question?
Petra Dolata: Yeah. So, I think from my perspective, that is much more informed by historical analysis of past energy systems. The biggest problem is that for the longest time, energy history was really driven by that specific interest in either great innovators or white middle-class man innovating things or in the history of oil and gas, the history of coal. So, within that energy system, it was always on those energy sources. So, one of the things that is missing, and we do know a good example, is the introduction of electricity. So, we think about Edison, we think about Westinghouse and maybe Tesla and all the good and incredible work which they have done.
But the adoption and diffusion of that technology was often driven by women because women are the ones who made the decisions of whether electricity would even enter the house, what lighting middle class houses would go for, and it even had an esthetic component. We have Abigail Harrison Moore, a U.K. colleague who is an art historian, looked at these books that Victorian women would be writing about how to decorate your home, and a lot of it is really about adopting or not adopting, for example, electricity.
So, very often, we have written that part out of it. And until today, on a daily basis, a lot of the decisions that revolve around the use or non-use of energy is done by women, and that is something that we just do not consider in the way that we are interested in the history of oil and who first found or invented things. And so, that's one part. The other part, my colleague Sheena Wilson at the University of Alberta, she always highlights as well as do other scholars, that it is women and racialized people who are really much more impacted by climate change.
And so, it is surprising that in the discussion on energy transition, we consider it as a technological problem. It just necessitates a technological fix, and she reminds us any technology will fix will reproduce the same kind of exclusion disadvantages that we have. And so, this is where I think now is the time to write women back into, to write racialized communities back into, to write Indigenous communities back into these stories, and that's really what is needed.
Also, I know there's question about, how do we rewrite that energy security piece? So, generally, this is again, we need to educate Canadians what energy systems mean as social systems and not just technological systems, but it is surprising how little has been written historically about Canada and energy. Maybe because you have so much that's here and maybe that is the reason, but it's really surprising to see that.
Isaac Gielen: Thank you, Petra. It's very cool. We've getting some more questions submitted from the audience here. I wanted to encourage our audience members to keep submitting those. Click that chat function on the top-right corner of your screen, and we're going to get to those questions in a moment. But first, I wanted to ask you both. The fossil fuels, they provide reliable, even if imperfect, energy for some of Canada's most vulnerable communities. I'm thinking of people up north off-grid. My question for you is, how can Canada reduce its greenhouse gas emissions without threatening its energy security? I don't know who wants to take that one first.
Petra Dolata: I feel if I knew the answer, I wouldn't be a professor out here in Calgary. I'm sure I would be in a much more influential position. That is exactly the one internal question, but I would also warn against that that is the main challenge that we need to address. So, especially, when we talk about remote communities which are often Indigenous communities in the North, the first thing we need to address is process, that energy sovereignty demands that we leave it to the communities to make that decision. And if the community decides that they want to continue with fossil fuels, then that is something that we might have to respect and then support them to make that though in the most sustainable way of using it.
So, that is one of the things that I would always preface before is it's not on us, I think, to make the decision for those communities and there are various options there. Because even if we look at some of the fossil fuel that might be even drilled in the North, that is not necessarily what supplies the community. They are still supplied by diesel that is shipped in or that is batched up. I work with the community in Norman Wells in the Sahtu Region and that is something that really impacts them. So, I do not have the answer, but what I would say is that anyone who works on the answer, needs to think much broader and in terms of social processes before even considering what the policy would look like.
And that's why I do think at the moment, we are at a very crucial time in Canada because due to the latest discussions on infrastructure, we are revisiting questions of process. Who sits at the table? Who is actually involved in making those decisions? Because only if communities are on board can you continue with these technologies. So, this idea of I create a technology, I bring it to the community and then I hope they will accept it. The social acceptance of technology, that has shown time and again, especially in history, that that doesn't work.
So, how do we up and even the process of creating technology by bringing in society from day one? And I specifically say society and communities are not stakeholders because the way that we talk about stakeholders is already where we have decided who has a stake in this and who hasn't, and that is something that is a decision that maybe doesn't reflect well who is impacted by that. So, I know this is a kind of a cop out of answering your question, but I do think that there are questions that are much more important even before that. And yes, if anyone here has the answer to it, I think that is worth a billion or more.
Mylène Riva: I certainly do not have the answer to that question but I just want to illustrate with an example of how if we want to address communities that are off-grid, they know what they need and they have to be at the table and they have to drive the discussion. So, a couple of years, Quebec passed a law that it is now illegal or we cannot have oil furnace to heat in homes. Natural gas is still okay. Electric heating is the main form of household heating in Quebec, so no more oil gas furnace. In Nunavik, the Inuit region in northern Quebec, the 14 communities, all houses have an oil furnace inside their home.
So, what that means, what Quebec's decision means, is that parts are no longer available. Its maintenance needs to be done. People are not trained. So, maintenance work was already an issue to start with, and now it's gotten even more complex. So, Inuit, Métis, First Nations communities, women, racialized communities, newcomers, everyone needs to be around the table so we can come up with a very well-intentioned policy that will have unintended impacts.
Isaac Gielen: Very true. Thank you both for discussing these important considerations, and we'll turn now to some of the audience who submitted questions. And maybe, the first one that we'll discuss is, in each of your respective views, what do you think is the biggest misconception about energy security or energy poverty that still shapes public debate today?
Mylène Riva: Can I go first just to speak to energy poverty? And Petra, I'll let you address energy security. So, for us, it's always having to justify that energy poverty is not a question of low income, or it is not just a question of low income. So, that's why in Quebec, we use 'energy precarity' and we're trying to bring that terminology in the work that we do at the Canadian scale. Energy precarity is also used in other jurisdictions. Energy poverty is still the terminology that prevails, but there's always a lot of explanation that needs to happen to say it is not just a question of low income. If everyone had a basic minimum income overnight, people would still struggle to access and afford the energy services that they need. So, it's a multi-component approach that is needed.
Isaac Gielen: Thanks, Mylène. Petra, do you have something to add?
Petra Dolata: Yeah, I'm wondering. I think for me, one of the misperceptions that comes out of its origin is that it is so tied to a geopolitical, strategic understanding of availability, and what this means is that it is really about state security. It is about Canada as a nation state within an international energy system needs to be secured, and this is why it is so difficult to see that energy poverty is just as much an integral part of it. And so, one of the things that is indeed a misconception that it is about oil and it is about availability when it can mean so many different things. Of course, the other misconception is that it means one thing when it can mean so many different things. That is in the nature of this idea of security.
And I'm always surprised because Canada is the one country that really pushed in the nineties, the human security agenda, and that's literally moving from energy security, as I have portrayed it as a geopolitical, strategic concept to meaning energy poverty is it moves it away from the state and collective security, which is very amorphous for us as individuals, as citizens here, to something that is about individual security in terms of energy. So, I do think that that is still one of the biggest misconceptions. The reason why that will not go away is because it can be so easily used also as rhetoric.
I live in a province where you can understand why energy security is used as a rhetoric, to talk about how important it is to continue producing oil because we need to be secure in oil, but then, of course, it gets more complex. The question is, where is that oil going? Is that oil really mainly supporting Canada? Or is it supporting Canada because it provides energy? Or is it supporting Canada because it provides revenue? And these are all the much more complex issues that are encapsulated, but I would say these are some of the misconceptions, and it also depends on which area you talk about this.
This is what I mean with the policy field of energy intersects with so many different areas and depending on where you sit, if you're more involved in foreign affairs, it will look very different than it will be if you are in Indigenous and Northern Affairs, and what might be important is to bring them together, to understand that they are connected. And sometimes, you can't maybe have it all and also unintended consequences about when you look at the history of energy transitions.
Isaac Gielen: Very nice. Maybe I'll follow up to that with another question that we received, and that's about these conversations about energy affordability and national energy security. These are conversations that often happen in silos. So, how do we better connect those two conversations?
Petra Dolata: Maybe I'll start as I just finished with this, I would say we need to better understand that or we need to open up this black box of national energy security. What do we mean by that? For who is this and what does it entail? That already would help us a lot because it's like somehow, and this is the reason why I study the history of the concept because in the world, everyone seems to… yeah, energy security and we all seem to think we know what it means.
And once you start talking about it, you realize it means very different things to very people. But also, I'm German. I'm originally from Germany, and I can tell you the discussion around energy security, it means a very different thing than what it means in Canada. So, opening up that black box of Canada's energy security would be extremely useful, and I would think it would make it much easier to then bring in ideas of energy poverty in that discussion because at the end of the day, as a democratic nation, you've got to ask yourself, well, for whom then is this energy if I talk about national energy security?
Mylène Riva: And to that…
Isaac Gielen: Thank you very much, Petra.
Mylène Riva: Sorry.
Isaac Gielen: No, please go ahead, Mylène.
Mylène Riva: Bring different disciplinary perspectives on the discussion. The energy transition is social, it's political. It's also economic because it's political. The technology, it's there, but it is social. So, we cannot have these discussions in the room with engineers and people from the oil and gas, electricity and energy sector. We need to have different perspectives. We need to have different sectors of federal governments. We need to have provinces, and we need to have different representative groups as well.
So, I think we need to have a very inclusive approach to these discussions and to recognize, understand, and listen. I think listening is really important, yeah, being willing hear things that we weren't expecting to hear or positions that is different from us coming from different sectors, but it's only by working together, breaking silos that we will be able to address energy poverty or energy security.
Isaac Gielen: Very nice. Yeah, it's interesting. When I first met with you both, when I was designing this series, a member mentioned this will be an event about energy security and energy poverty, and both of you said, well, that can mean a lot of different things, and we got into a discussion about that. So, I think that really proves the point. I think back to our first event in this series: Comparing International Energy Contexts, and one of our speakers, Christine Wörlen, Petra, she was from Germany and she talked about energy security, meaning we've depended on Russia for natural gas for so long. Now, we are being discouraged to do that. What does this mean for our energy security? So, it's an interesting conversation.
Petra Dolata: Can I maybe just add one point?
Isaac Gielen: Please.
Petra Dolata: And that is, of course, Canada is in a challenging position on that because if you're an energy producer who at the same time is also having to address decarbonization, net-zero goals, that places you in a different position than, for example, Germany, because that is an industry that will also generate jobs and generate revenue. So, it's an enviable position to be in, as a federal government, where we also know energy is a provincial power. Climate is a federal power. And also, there is revenue and jobs generated that other countries that we compare Canada to, does not have. So, I am quite cognizant of the very challenging position there, especially in terms of public policy, where you really have to balance out these different goals for different constituencies.
Isaac Gielen: Very true. And Mylène, you talked a bit about the need to have these different perspectives at the table. Both of you have talked about the importance that the humanities can play in energy conversations. So, I think that that ties in nicely to one of our audience's submitted questions, and that is, what are some promising entry points for collaboration between researchers and us, the federal public service, on these issues?
Mylène Riva: I can go. I have different examples I did not mention, but our study in Bridgewater is funded initially by Infrastructure Canada, which morphed into Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada. So, they are the one who showed an interest in the work that we were doing. Bridgewater also won the 5 million prize of the Smart Cities Challenge. So, our project is assessing the health and well-being implication of the Smart City project, but there's several points of intersection, having discussion across different sectors of the federal government. So, I've been discussing with colleagues at NRCan around energy poverty and how we should measure it.
When I do research, I like to work with policymakers to make sure that the research question that I ask is useful. The results will potentially be useful to inform practice and policy. So, there's different ways of working and of doing research. So, I speak from a researcher's perspective, of course, but I find that there's so many connections that can happen between academia and between the federal government when discussing energy. It's just a matter, for me, for example, of having Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada, of having HICC, NRCan, NRC, Environment and Climate Change Canada, probably many others, Indigenous Services Canada, all these different sectors together at the same table. That is a challenge, but it is possible. It's happening.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a Home Energy Justice Conference in Ottawa organized by Efficiency Canada. There were many, many people from the federal government attending. NRCan was there in great numbers. So, there are intersections possible and this event today is great for that. It's putting us in contact. You know us now. Reach out if there's any questions.
Isaac Gielen: Wonderful. Thanks. Petra, do you have something to add?
Petra Dolata: Yeah, so I would answer this maybe in two ways. One is, our university, for example, has really endorsed transdisciplinary research agendas, and that is something that we just need to see more, and we already see how the tri-agency funding agencies are supporting these projects that really not just do the easy interdisciplinary, where I, as a historian, maybe work with a political scientist but where I work with engineers, but the transdisciplinary also means including community. So, I think we need to change the way, we as researchers, but maybe also anyone out there, how we build in as I mentioned before, anyone who's involved in this from the beginning of a research project.
So, thinking more about what does transdisciplinary research look like? How can this be supported? I do have an example. I'm actually part of…. it's called 'CanCO2Re'. It's supported by both NRCan and ECCC, and this is looking into carbon removal technologies, and they invited me as a historian, they invited a social scientist as well. That has been really useful in terms of coming in there and talking about exactly the things that I've shared with you here today. I would say though, it is challenging and the challenge is not so much that there's no willingness. Everyone is really understanding that this is important, that we are there as well. The problem is just in terms of our disciplines.
We have been trained in such different ways in terms of what counts as evidence, what is even and how do I even talk about my research? The humanities is, at the end of the day, an interpretive discipline. And so, we don't have the yes or no, true or wrong. It's more about, can I support this by evidence? We will be the ones in the room, and I know my colleagues hate that sometimes when you're like, where's the nuance? It needs to be complex because it's easier, of course, as a historian to say that when I only look back. Now, if I'm involved in talking about what should we do, we'll be much more hesitant but that's what's needed.
We need direction in terms of policy decision. So, I would say generally good things are happening, but maybe we also need to much broader change the way that we think about that collaboration. I'll be confident enough to work with someone who uses very different methods of arriving at research results or even sharing them, and that's something where I hope and I've seen if civil servants are engaged in that and really pushing for that and saying I think we need to do more of this so that we understand what the thinking is in these other disciplines, which is, although I'll put this at the biggest challenge, extremely time consuming. And most of us, that's the thing that we have the least of.
Mylène Riva: I just want to continue on that because it is really, really time consuming and to be able to arrive to speak a common language takes time and dedication. So, at McGill, we have the McGill Energy Centre, and myself and Darin Barney in Communication Studies, Eric McCalla in Chemistry, we are on a project that's called 'Just Storage'. We're looking at justice in storage technologies, focusing on sodium-ion batteries. It took us a year and we're still struggling to understand one another through frequent meetings. It takes time. It's not going happen overnight.
So, we need to give space for these interactions to happen, and it's interesting, Isaac, I don't want to put you on the spot, but you said that humanities addressed to Petra and myself, I'm not someone coming from humanities. I'm a social scientist. So, humanities and social sciences are very different, have very different approach to how they study things. So, I was explaining to an engineer who is part of our 'Just Storage' discussion that I can understand much easier to some degree, my colleague in chemistry who does lab work because his approach to empirical study is similar to mine when I either survey data or and when I ask a bunch of questions to people and then I analyze the data.
So, just understanding these disciplinary differences takes a lot of time. So, there's a lot of grants that are supporting transdisciplinary research. And often, what happens is people in the humanities and social sciences were invited on these big grants. And often, there's a maximum of 20, 25, maybe 30% of the funding that can go to social sciences and humanities. The bulk of the funding is going to natural science and engineering research. So, we have to carefully think about how we want to discuss and engage in transdisciplinary discussion as a way that all types of knowledge, whether it's Western, whether it's the three research council, whether it's Indigenous knowledge. We have to value each knowledge equally and that takes time.
Isaac Gielen: Very well put, Dr. Riva. I think one takeaway from this conversation is that energy security and energy poverty is in the purview of a lot of people who work in this federal government. This isn't just an NRCan discussion. It relates to public health, to foreign policy, to housing, and we've got a lot of people here who work in all sorts of different departments and on different files. So, I hope that our audience will keep considerations with them in mind, even if energy isn't their main. And with that being said, we have come to the close of this event. This will conclude today's discussion.
I want to thank the organizing team at the Canada School of Public Service, and of course, our excellent panelists today, Drs. Petra Dolata and Mylène Riva for being part of this important conversation, and I'd also like to thank you, the audience, for submitting these questions and doing your part to facilitate this important discussion. If you're hoping to learn more about the key role that energy plays in Canada and the energy challenges and opportunities facing us, keep an eye on the school's website for future events and products in our Exploring Energy in Canada Series. Thank you for joining us and have a wonderful day.
[01:24:10 The CSPS logo appears on screen.]
[01:24:14 The Government of Canada logo appears on screen.]
