Economy
Panama Canal drying up woes could have benefited Canadian LNG – If only we had any

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
There’s a disturbance in the force of global shipping, as if a major transit point started slipping away.
There’s a very serious problem occurring a few thousand miles to the south of us, one that Canada could have taken tremendous advantage of, if only we had built and completed some liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals by now.
The Panama Canal, one of the wonders of the modern world that utterly changed trade and geopolitics, is drying up.
The canal, which usually handles about 36 ships a day, has in recent days reduced that to 24. By Feb. 1, it is expected to fall to 18. And the largest ships who do transit the canal have to reduce their cargoes, lest they scrape bottom.
That’s because the canal uses fresh water, captured by dams and forming the massive Gatun Lake. That fresh water is collected from ample rains. Every single time a ship passes through the canal, water used to operate the locks is flushed into the ocean. While the greatly expanded third set of locks allows much, much larger ships to use the more than 100 year-old canal, they also use a lot of water despite an innovative water recovery system. And the Canal Authority says they’ve had the lowest rains in 73 years, since 1950.
So when you add up the additional, much larger locks, with a local drought, the canal is rapidly falling into crisis. And the world is starting to take notice.
As they should, since soon half of all ships that usually use the canal will be turned away.
No one depends on the canal more than the Americans. They built it, after all, for a reason. And one of the biggest is it allows for quick access for Gulf Coast ports to Pacific markets. This was a very real reason why building a half dozen large LNG terminals made so much sense (in addition to their proximity to gas production.)
Well, a lot of that just got thrown out the window. Cutting ship transit numbers by half means a dramatic curtailment of the ability of US LNG cargoes to access the Pacific markets. Their alternative is to add something like 8,000 miles going around South America’s Cape Horn, which absolutely no one wants to do due to the treacherous weather and seas.. Otherwise, they have to cross the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Straits of Malacca to get to east Asia markets.
The net effect will be some cargoes from the Gulf Coast destined for Asia will have to go much, much further to deliver their product. That means fewer cargoes per ship per year. It’ll tighten up ship availability, and likely put pressure on LNG prices.
And if Canada had moved quicker on building out LNG terminals, particularly on the West Coast, we would be perfectly positioned to cash in on this situation. Not only is Kitimat, Prince Rupert and the like much, much closer to China and Japan, there’s no drying up Panama Canal to contend with, either.
Small wonder, then, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre chose on November 10 to post on his various social media channels, “Since Trudeau took office: 18 LNG terminals have been proposed. 0 have been completed.”
To be fair, LNG Canada, the largest proposal, is in the finishing stretch. In July they reported 85 per cent completion. In recent weeks, TC Energy reported the completion of the “golden weld” on the Coastal GasLink pipeline that will supply LNG Canada and presumably other facilities on the West Coast. Without pipeline, which was both massively delayed and overbudget, no small thanks to pipeline protesters, LNG Canada would be useless.
Other projects are finally gaining traction – Woodfibre LNG at Squamish on the south coast, and Ksi Lisims LNG right on the Alaska/BC border, and Cedar LNG, a floating LNG terminal adjacent to LNG Canada and served by Coastal GasLink.
Remember when the German chancellor came to Canada, seeking LNG, and was told by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau there was “no business case?” And then the Japanese prime minister was told something similar a few weeks later?
The Ukraine War has proven a business case for almost two years in the Atlantic basin. The Panama Canal reduction in service will soon prove it in the Pacific. What more do we need?
Canada should have built these projects years ago. We’d be securing markets and cashing in today.
No business case, indeed.
Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of PipelineOnline.ca, and occasional contributor to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected].
Business
‘Time To Make The Patient Better’: JD Vance Says ‘Big Transition’ Coming To American Economic Policy

JD Vance on “Rob Schmitt Tonight” discussing tariff results
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Hailey Gomez
Vice President JD Vance said Thursday on Newsmax that he believes Americans will “reap the benefits” of the economy as the Trump administration makes a “big transition” on tariffs.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,679.39 points on Thursday, just a day after President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs against nations charging imports from the U.S. On “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Schmitt asked Vance about the stock market hit, asking how the White House felt about the “Liberation Day” move.
“We’re feeling good. Look, I frankly thought in some ways it could be worse in the markets, because this is a big transition. You saw what the President said earlier today. It’s like a patient who was very sick,” Vance said. “We did the operation, and now it’s time to make the patient better. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We have to remember that for 40 years, we’ve been doing this for 40 years.”
“American economic policy has rewarded people who ship jobs overseas. It’s taxed our workers. It’s made our supply chains more brittle, and it’s made our country less prosperous, less free and less secure,” Vance added.
Vance recalled that one of his children had been sick and needed antibiotics that were not made in the United States. The Vice President called it a “ridiculous thing” that some medicines invented in the country are no longer manufactured domestically.
“That’s fundamentally what this is about. The national security of manufacturing and making the things that we need, from steel to pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, and so forth, but also the good jobs that come along when you have economic policies that reward investing in America, rather than investing in foreign countries,” Vance said.
WATCH:
With a baseline 10% tariff placed on an estimated 60 countries, higher tariffs were applied to nations like China and Israel. For example, China, which has a 67% tariff on U.S. goods, will now face a 34% tariff from the U.S., while Israel, which has a 33% tariff, will face a 17% U.S. tariff.
“One bad day in the stock market, compared to what President Trump said earlier today, and I think he’s right about this. We’re going to have a booming stock market for a long time because we’re reinvesting in the United States of America. More importantly than that, of course, the people in Wall Street have done well,” Vance said.
“We want them to do well. But we care the most about American workers and about American small businesses, and they’re the ones who are really going to benefit from these policies,” Vance said.
The number of factories in the U.S., Vance said, has declined, adding that “millions of workers” have lost their jobs.
“My town [Middletown, Ohio], where you had 10,000 great American steel workers, and my town was one of the lucky ones, now probably has 1,500 steel workers in that factory because you had economic policies that rewarded shipping our jobs to China instead of investing in American workers,” Vance said. “President Trump ran on changing it. He promised he would change it, and now he has. I think Americans are going to reap the benefits.”
COVID-19
Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

From LifeSiteNews
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.
Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.
The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.
A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.
MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.
However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.
For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.
Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.
“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.
“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.
Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.
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