Kevin O’Leary loves a good deal. At least, that’s what he’s made it look like on “Dragon’s Den” and “Shark Tank,” where he plays the role of an outspoken investor with a keen eye for value. Now, he’s trying to cash in on that reputation — again — with a proposed $70 billion megaproject in northern Alberta, one that would capitalize on the growing frenzy around artificial intelligence technology and the data centres that will feed its increasingly voracious appetite for information. And this time, it’s O’Leary making the pitch.
The UCP government is already welcoming it with open arms — and celebrating it as the biggest investment in Alberta’s history. “Excited to see this incredible project led by Kevin O’Leary coming to Wonder Valley, located in the Municipal District of Greenview,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said on social media. “With Alberta’s low taxes, free market, abundant natural gas and skilled labour force, we’re positioned to be a world leader in AI data centres.”
First things first: this “incredible project” is, for now, just a website and a letter of intent signed between O’Leary Ventures and a small rural municipality. So far, it seems far more like an attempt to shake incentives and subsidies out of local governments and capitalize on the global investment community’s fascination with AI right now than anything real or tangible.
The website in question features a video that has to be seen to be believed — and even then, only as a punchline. The imagined bucolic landscape of rolling hills, gentle streams and friendly wildlife feels like a Disney-fied version of northern California rather than northern Alberta. The campus itself is straight out of Silicon Valley.
The narration is even more hilariously unrealistic, if that’s even possible. "There's a valley,” we’re told, “where technology and nature will come together in perfect harmony. Where the future will pulse at every turn. Bursting with nature and wildlife, nurturing the present as it embraces the future. The valley where the brightest minds unite, where electrons, machines and data come together in an algorithmic dance.”
Where they’d actually come together, according to the map in the video, is a parcel of land near Highway 40, more than half an hour from the bustling metropolis of Grande Prairie. It will have access to some nearby stranded gas assets, which could theoretically be used to provide some of the electricity that the facility would consume. But at full capacity, it would require 7.5 gigawatts of power, which is almost 40 per cent of what the entire Alberta grid can currently provide — and that’s with increasingly frequent brownouts and some of the highest electricity prices in Canada.
Where, exactly, would all these additional electrons come from? Not wind and solar, which the provincial government has spent the last two years actively undermining with its new regulations — ones whose standards around land use and reclamation, curiously enough, don’t apply to oil and gas operations. Instead, they’d come mostly from additional gas-fired facilities, which just happens to suit the UCP government’s pro-fossil fuel agenda perfectly.
The good news if you care about the climate is that O’Leary’s track record is far heavier on making promises than fulfilling them. His aborted bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada ended with his endorsement of Maxime Bernier (who later lost to Andrew Scheer), and saddled the campaign’s various contractors and contributors with more than half a million dollars in unpaid debt. His eponymous mutual funds, meanwhile, were a well-documented disaster, as Joe Castaldo detailed in a long feature for Maclean’s in 2017. And in a piece for Canada’s National Observer, Bruce Livesey dug deep into O’Leary’s past business dealings and found a trail of disappointed investors and employees.
That’s especially true of Mattel’s purchase of The Learning Company from O’Leary, described by CNBC as one of “worst mergers of all-time” in a 2009 article. As Livesey noted in his piece, “shareholders launched a class-action lawsuit, naming O’Leary as a defendant, accusing him of insider trading and of being part of a scheme to obscure TLC’s financial state. While O’Leary denied the allegations, in 2003, Mattel settled the lawsuit for $122-million — considered a ‘mega-settlement’ at the time.”
Paul Palandjian, the CEO of O’Leary Ventures, also has his own colourful backstory. The Florida-based real estate developer, who joined O’Leary Ventures in 2022, is also a former professional tennis player and actor whose credits include playing the Fenway Park security guard in Fever Pitch and “Cookie Guy #2” in Rescue Me. His Instagram account declares that he “believes in miracles.”
Their company will need a few of those in order to get “Wonder Valley” built. As Enverus energy analyst Carlson Kearl told the Calgary Herald’s Chris Varcoe, “the idea that you need to have seven and a half (gigawatts) all in one place — so far away from the end markets and not in the United States — just makes me think that there’s a lot of obstacles to overcome in order to find hyperscaler tenants looking to do their [AI model] training there.”
Yes, the project has already secured the enthusiastic backing of an Alberta government that seems willing to believe almost anything if it leads to an increase in the use of fossil fuels. But as O’Leary should know better than most, not everyone is so wilfully blind — or so easily duped.
Conservatives are still lying about food prices
A normal person might respond to the release of Canada’s Food Price Report 2025 by reading its findings and sharing those that seemmost interesting. But if you’re a Conservative MP, apparently it’s yet another opportunity to mislead Canadians about the carbon tax. The deceit and duplicity on this front has gotten so bad that you almost have to think they’re having some sort of internal competition over it.
Jasraj Singh Hallan, the CPC’s shadow minister for finance, led things off with a widely mocked social media post claiming that “Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax will cost families $800 more on food in 2025.” The report he was referencing said no such thing, of course. Instead, it pointed to a basket of factors — from climate events and labour disputes to new policies, the U.S. election and exchange and interest rates — that would lead to a three to five per cent increase in food prices. There’s no mention, you’ll note, of the carbon tax.
That didn’t stop CPC leader Pierre Poilievre from drawing his own spurious correlation between the report’s headline conclusion and the non-existent role of the carbon tax in it. But it might be former leader Andrew Scheer who took the proverbial cake here. In his own social media post he shouted that “ Trudeau plans to QUADRUPLE the Carbon Tax” and said that “this isn’t climate policy—it’s economic punishment.”
All of that is demonstrably false, of course. If it increases according to schedule it will go from 17.6 cents per litre in 2024 to 37.4 cents per litre in 2030, which is a bit more than a doubling — not even close to quadruple. It bears repeating (and I know you’re tired of it by now) that the rebate will also more than double over that period, with the biggest benefits accruing to the lowest income families. If Scheer actually cared about the two-plus million people who have accessed food banks over the last year, a statistic he mentioned in his post, he’d be defending the carbon tax and rebate rather than attacking it.
But the most galling part of his post was the image, which featured a quote from members of the Indian Resource Council of Canada. “We will not stand by while our communities are pushed further into poverty by a tax we never agreed to.” In using this quote, Scheer is trying to weaponize the genuine and legitimate concerns of Indigenous communities in Canada — ones that will soon be represented in a court action.
As our own Natasha Bulowski shows in her story, their words have nothing to do with grocery prices paid by people in Toronto or Calgary. “We're not here to fight government, but we're here to defend our rights as Indigenous Peoples, as treaty people,” said Delbert Wapass, Chief of Thunderchild First Nation in Saskatchewan. “Our kids are busy trying to survive with the trauma that they've gone through … we don't have the monies to deal with trauma, right? But yet, we're expected for our kids to be ready for the world that's coming. And then, here we are slammed with the carbon tax.”
Part of the problem is that many people who live on-reserve don’t file federal taxes, and therefore can’t avail themselves of the rebates that flow through that system. The federal government is apparently moving to address these concerns, although it’s doing it at its typically glacial pace. Even so, it has nothing to do with the Conservative Party of Canada’s long-running campaign against the carbon tax. As Wapass said, they don’t want “to get involved in the politics” of it all.
Fair enough. If only some politicians were willing to respect that.
Chamath Palihapitiya sells the truth short
Chamath Palihapitiya is, by all accounts, a quintessential Canadian success story. After immigrating to Canada with his family from Sri Lanka — and starting work at a Burger King at age 14 — he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in electrical engineering. From there, he worked in finance on Bay Street before moving to California to work in the tech industry, where he ended up at Facebook before starting his own venture capital fund.
Today, he’s one of the self-described “besties” behind the All-In Podcast, which also includes Elon Musk super friend Jason Calacanis, tech entrepreneur David Friedberg and newly appointed “crypto czar” David Sacks. He and Sacks famously held a fundraiser for Donald Trump in May 2024, to create a permission structure for other so-called “tech bros” to support the Republican presidential nominee.
And now, for some reason, he’s sharing demonstrably false charts about Canada’s economy in an effort to undermine Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “This is pathetically bad,” he said on social media. “Canadians opted towards warm, fuzzy DEI nonsense. Look at how the international community voted economically as a result.”
As I noted for him, the chart doesn’t say what he thinks it does. Trudeau’s election in 2015 happened long after the decline in real non-residential investment began in late 2014. That decline, as I’ve had to point out dozens of times now, was a function of the collapse in oil prices in late 2014, one that was driven by Saudi Arabia’s decision to flood the market with supply and try to choke off the growth of oil sands and shale crude. Blaming Justin Trudeau for that is like blaming Stephen Harper for the collapse of the US housing market in 2007 and 2008.
The chart, and the credulous responses on X from folks like Shopify’s Harley Finkelstein, was bad enough. What’s worse is the effort made to shield Palihapitiya’s followers from the truth. My response there showing the correct chart — that is, one with dates on the x-axis and a line that showed when Trudeau was actually elected — was hidden, as were dozens of other posts that tried to do the same. Whether it was actually Palihapitiya going in and hiding the responses or one of his staff, the net result is the same: they’d rather suppress the truth than admit a mistake.
For a guy who talks a lot about the virtues of free speech and the importance of good data, this is a deeply ironic choice. It’s also weirdly unnecessary, given that you can make a compelling case about the Trudeau government’s failure to attract investment without fudging a chart as obviously as this. Then again, when you embrace Trumpism the way Palihapitiya has lately, maybe the truth just doesn’t matter as much any more.
About that JD Vance tweet
As some of you may have noticed, the vice president-elect of the United States tweeted at me last Friday. After I pointed out that CPC MP Jamil Jivani’s suggestion that “we must protect Christians in Canada from governments and corporations abusing their power in our country, and from anti-Christian bigotry” was little more than an attempt to create and amplify non-existent grievances, JD Vance stepped in to defend his college friend. “All over the world, Christians are the most persecuted religious group. Jamil is speaking the truth. Shame on journalists who refuse to see what’s obvious.”
You can, I’m sure, imagine what followed.
The outpouring of Christian love and kindness didn’t bother me much, if only because I’ve come to expect this sort of thing on Twitter. As Hunter S. Thompson once said: buy the ticket, take the ride.
But I do think it’s worth examining what folks like Jivani and Vance are trying to do here. Yes, there was an outburst of arson and burnings that targeted Christian churches in 2021, in the wake of the revelations from Kamloops about the possibility of bodies near a former residential school. We know how the Prime Minister responded to that — and how it’s been weaponized by his opponents ever since.
We also know that the data around religiously-motivated hate crimes shows a one-off increase in 2021, followed by a return to previous levels in 2022. The Jewish and Muslim communities remain, by far, the biggest recipients of religiously-motivated hate, and those numbers have only gotten worse over the last year.
There’s no question that Christians face discrimination in other parts of the world. But here in Canada, especially on the part of governments and corporations? It’s the thinnest of gruels, one designed to keep the people eating it hungry. As Reverend Daniel Brereton said on social media, the sort of fear-mongering that Vance and Jivani are trading in is decidedly un-Christian. “In the story central to the celebration of Christmas, all the main characters: Mary, Joseph, shepherds are told “Fear not.” Yet Christians are being whipped into a constant frenzy of defensiveness and anger by pastors and pundits telling them how much there is to fear.”
Politicians are doing this too, of course, even if Rev. Brereton was too polite to specifically call them out. It’s part of a broader attempt by Conservatives to stoke a sense of victimhood in their supporters, from vaccine skeptics and oil and gas workers to Catholics and other Christians. As someone (who shall remain nameless) pointed out to me the other day, this offers up a striking contrast with how progressives tend to talk to their faithful. “The left is devoted to telling people how they are to blame for someone else’s suffering. The right is devoted to telling people who is responsible for your perception of suffering. It’s not hard to see who wins in the long term.”
Quick Hits
The new-and-improved Vancouver Art Gallery, which has been talked about now for well over a decade, is going back to the drawing board. The proposed $600 million project, which was supposed to be finished in 2028, has already gone so far over budget that it had to be scrapped. All told, the VAG has spent $60 million on planning and pre-construction costs and has very little to show for it.
I hope you’ll indulge me as I take a brief victory lap here. When I was the editor of Vancouver Magazine back in 2015-16, one of the last pieces I commissioned before getting turfed was a feature on the flaws in the idea of a new art gallery. The whole idea has always struck me as needlessly decadent and weirdly indifferent to the opinions of people in Vancouver’s art community who have money and experience.
People like Bob Rennie, for example. As he told the CBC, "It's disappointing to see anything in my city fail. I think it looks very bad for the city, but since 2012, there's never been a concrete plan. It's always been imaginary….There seems to be an addiction to new, and I think it's maybe time_ to really look at all options.” Maybe now they’ll actually listen to him.
Former Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna wrote an interesting op-ed in the Toronto Star, one that acknowledges some of the errors she feels she made in trying to persuade Canada’s oil sands companies to take climate change seriously. “I really believed that the environment and the economy could go hand-in-hand and include a vibrant oil and gas sector. I was convinced that we could reduce emissions from the oil sands as part of an ambitious climate plan, finally showing to the world that Canada was committed to meeting our targets and doing our part to tackle the climate crisis.”
I can relate. As someone who worked in the Alberta NDP’s climate change office, I felt the same sense of guarded optimism — and believed some of the promises these companies were making at the time. Heck, I even helped equip some of our government’s senior staffers and elected officials with key messages about the industry’s decarbonization efforts.
I have to laugh at that now, if only because the key messages haven’t changed. They are, almost word for word, identical to the ones that we created in 2017 and 2018, and that’s because, as I’ve pointed out on social media many times, per-barrel emissions from oil sands companies have actually gone up slightly since then.
McKenna appears to have had a similar revelation. “It was only after I left politics that I came to understand the truth: The oil sands sector and the politicians they sponsor aren’t just greenwashing a product. They are working to brainwash Canadians into buying a version of reality that no longer exists. One where oil will forever be the hero of the Canadian economy rather than an impediment to Canada’s future prosperity in a low carbon, climate-safe world.”
I agree with much of what she says in this piece, but I think she’s being a bit too hard on herself. She is, by her nature, an optimist — that’s what Liberals are. Sometimes, that optimism can come back to bite you. But being bitten is still better than giving in to nihilism and defeatism.
If there’s a lesson here for Liberals and other optimists, it’s that winning a battle doesn’t mean you’ve won the war. A lot of people — McKenna and myself included — thought that getting all the oil sands CEOs on the same stage as leaders of environmental NGOs and progressive politicians meant that they were buying into our mission.
Instead, they were just buying time. When Murray Edwards said that “(w)e applaud Premier Notley for giving us … the position of leadership on climate policy,” what he really appreciated was the fact that he didn’t have to pay for it himself. And when the opportunity to return to business as usual presented itself, they leapt at it. Of course they did.
Going forward, we don’t have to abandon our natural inclination to see the good in things. But we should temper it with a bit more realism, and remember that winning the war requires a level of patience and discipline that has to endure through electoral cycles. We haven’t lost this one yet, either. But maybe that’s just my optimism speaking.