Authors of Transport Revolutions Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl

In their recent book Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil, Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl take a global view of peak oil. In it, they present their solution to the impact an oil-depleted world would have on transportation.

The book concentrates on two cases, the United States and China. But in conversation, both had lots to say about what they believe is the uniquely perilous position of Canada. An energy superpower, you think? Think again.

CBCNews.ca reporter Eve Savory spoke with Gilbert, an urban issues consultant in Toronto, and Perl, a professor of urban studies at Simon Fraser University's Vancouver campus.

Here are some excerpts from those interviews:

Richard Gilbert makes the point that there are two Canadas — oil- and gas-rich Western Canada, and everything from Ontario east — and predicts dire consequences for the East in an oil crisis:

YOUR INTERVIEW

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Eastern Canada imports most of its oil, actually more than the U.S. in percentage terms, and it imports it from places like Venezuela and the Middle East and so on. And it's actually in a worse position than the U.S. because Eastern Canada has no Strategic Petroleum Reserve like the U.S. has. So the U.S. has this big reserve of oil. It's in tanks and so on that, depending on exactly where it stands, provide 90-120 days of oil while they figure out what to do. In Eastern Canada, we don't have any reserve. If there is a crisis, we are immediately exposed to it.…

Eastern Canada is very much an oil importer [and] very much an oil importer from the same kinds of unstable places that the U.S. imports much of its oil from. And has no strategic reserve and is, in a crunch, is going to be screwed.

Anthony Perl says Canada is on 'a path to a quick shutdown':

All of this suggests that we better send care packages to our friends in Ontario because they are the most exposed to all of this industrially, but also energy-wise.

Peak Oil

For an in-depth look at Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil, and more on the authors' forecast of radical worldwide social and political changes as the world's oil supply dwindles, click here.

And there's no way to get the oil from Western Canada to Eastern Canada except through the United States and if you think that we could say, "We want to send some of this to our friends in Eastern Canada and could you please pass it along?" — the likelihood in a global energy crisis that it would ever show up at the other end passing through the [American] Midwest.…

We're talking about a couple of weeks in which Ontario in particular would grind to a halt. There just wouldn't be gas available, there wouldn't be planes flying. That would be for the whole country, because the way our system is set up, if Ontario goes down — you see that in a snowstorm — the rest of the system doesn't work too well. And this would be a lot worse than a snowstorm.

So we're actually extremely vulnerable, probably the most vulnerable of any affluent G8 … country. We have zero reserves in the part of the country where most of our population lives, we have no way to connect the energy production where we do have it to those people, and we have no strategic backup plan.

Canada is on a path to a quick shutdown. We would be one of the first to have a crisis in transportation and other areas.… We'd find out very quickly what a transport revolution would be — the bad kind, where you have to just sort of stop doing everything pretty much and just have emergency services and very limited public transportation.

So of all the countries that are on the hook for crisis if things really go south, so to speak, Canada is the most vulnerable. So we ought to be the most motivated to do something early.

Perl says Canada is unlikely to prepare in time because its investments in automobile manufacturing means it is "deeply invested in business as usual":

If we want those jobs in Windsor and St. Catharines [in Ontario] or other places that currently are about building SUVs, you know, internal combustion engines, to be able to transition so that those communities and the people who live there can have a comparable kind of work and standard of living, we better be ready to, you know, face reality ahead of some of the other people.

Because if the Chinese or the Indians or others figure this out sooner, they'll just build the [electric vehicles] there. Then what will happen is our auto industry will look like what the U.S. one did in the 1970s and '80s, and it'll just … go away because at ten dollars a litre, people are not going to be buying SUVs, or even, you know, sort of big heavy regular cars anymore. They'll be buying, at a bare minimum, hybrid electric cars that you can plug in or charge overnight. We don't build that stuff in Canada.

Here in B.C., we'll be a bit better off because we don't have an industry to collapse around the automobile. But you know, Ontario's future, of all places in Canada, what we tend to think of as, at least until the oil boom hit, the richest, you know, most established part of Canada — their future is hanging by a thread on this.

The two authors saw reason for optimism in Canada, predicting that electric vehicles could be a huge growth industry. Perl points out several reasons for that:

The largest … private manufacturer of electric rail vehicles in the world is [Quebec-based] Bombardier. They make a lot of other things that are going to be less useful and demanded in the future, like snowmobiles, and you know, regional jets and things like that, but they make a lot of trains. They even make some of them in Canada. We just don't use many of them here.

So these things are not completely alien, which they are pretty much to the United States. I mean the U.S. has zero … electric train-building capacity for passenger trains and … very little for freight as well.

So we can do it. I mean, we have a horse in the race. It's not totally hopeless.

When asked whether the U.S. might buy Bombardier, Perl laughed and said:

Maybe the U.S. will have to buy Bombardier because they are going to be even further behind the curve on this in that regard. We're farther behind the U.S. in using the equipment, though: even the electric trains that Bombardier built in Canada, passenger trains I'm speaking of, they sold to Amtrak, which runs them between Boston, New York and Washington. We are the last country, of the G8 ones, that [doesn't] have electric high-speed trains … I mean even the U.S. has the Boston-[New York]-Washington corridor, so Canada is literally in the caboose in terms of using this type of technology.

The authors write that "There are huge amounts of money to be made, and lost, in the coming transport revolutions." One of those areas is real estate, Perl explains:

I think the places where you can get somewhere without a car are going to be worth one price, and the places, just speaking broadly, and the places where the only way to get anywhere is by car are going to lose a lot of value, if we don't come up with an alternative system pretty fast.

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