Hear ye, hear ye. I bring to you, upon this, the 6th day before Christmas, a purloined list of characters both naughty and nice, as well as some ideas for gifts for our favourite characters and influencers from the year just past. And to be fair, there is no shortage, at all, of worthy and unworthy recipients of the Big Guy’s largesse or ironic gifts intended to be lessons for one and all.
Upon review of this list, we will be able to decide whether the named individual is to be bequeathed a gift of suitable magnificence or the proverbial lump of coal. And no, not the “Lump o’Coal” that I occasionally gift. No, we are talking about chunks of dirty fossil fuel – anthracite and metallurgical coal – the kind that power half the world and make iron and steel – you know the stuff that makes the world go around. All while being nasty manifestations of emissions-spewing humanity’s disregard and disdain for the planet.
Also, how about a shout out for my dad whose birthday is today (he’s on the nice list BTW), famous for, among other things, designing the epic Crude Observations logo.
But I digress.
It has been an eventful year. Across the world, leaders and followers have done their best to keep us entertained if not firmly on our toes. Where 2024 foisted upon us Donald Trump (2.0!), tariffs, Elon Musk and, yes, Vivek Ramaswamy, 2025 has given us Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre, more Trump, more Tariffs, naval blockades in South America, MOU’s and… inflation. Once again, one year has seen fit to outdo the prior – I shudder to think what 2026 will bring. Oh wait, I know. Keystone XL and tariffs.
Notable this year were continued (and not at all transitory) inflation, interest rate cuts, market gyrations, elections, insurrections, war in Europe, war and atrocities in the Middle East, Bitcoin, Trump, sky-high energy prices, collapsing energy prices. energy price recoveries, coal recovery, coal price swoons, natural gas rallies, natural gas collapses, COP30, EV production records, EV production abandonment, AI induced market hysteria, X abominations, still low valuations for energy, record highs on the Dow, the magnificent 7, many indictments, vibecessions, Katy Perry, waves, vacations, Nvidia, deals aplenty at the good ship Stormont, Brexit, Wexit, Texit, Calexit, Smith, PP, Trudeau (wait, he’s gone) – you name it, we’ve seen it.
One thing I find interesting about the end of the year is that there is always a rush of news leading into it and then it goes quiet. And there are doozies to close out the year that either signify the coming apocalypse or that we are living in an AI simulation that is running a Monty Python skit algorithm….
Last year that sign was Trump selling cologne.
This year appears to be the threatened invasion of Venezuela – a corrupt dictatorship and environmental basket case that I have written about previously pleading for some kind of change in government to save the people there from needless poverty and misery. Just didn’t expect the “largest Armada ever” to be the vehicle.
We also have the unusual spectre of a once ascendant Conservative Party in the process of self-destructing and it is, if you are into these things, engaging. Maybe, just maybe, our man Pierre Poilievre will find out what happens when Conservatives lose elections that were in the bag. Then again, maybe not. That’s for another blog.
Fortunately, this is my last full-on blog of the year, and I am moving into “rest mode”. You won’t see me again until 2026, when I do my Fearless Forecast self-assessment.
But first, as noted above, I have a list. And I’m going to share it with you. Because you are all special.
Some new names, some repeat names. And as always, a tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Donald Trump – Naughty
Donald Trump is almost a permanent entry on the naughty list. This is the 983rd year in a row on the naughty list for young Donald. He was on the naughty list before he was born. It was expected that being President might soften the Don and that spending a few years under the thumb of Nancy Pelosi would bring to him a more conciliatory perspective. Nope. Or that losing an election would humble him. Nope. Or that criminal investigations and guilty verdicts would shame him. Nope. Or that winning an election again or an assassination attempt might round the corners a bit. Nope. Oy. DJT’s gift is going to be a lump of coal – along with a 25% tariff.
JD Vance – Naughty
JD Vance is the classic example of someone failing upward. While Donald Trump, as much as people dislike him and his policies, came about his electoral success “honestly” in that people actually voted for him, JD is clearly surfing coat tails and is only along for the ride, put in place by his weirdo Silicon Valley billionaire backers as a safety valve should the old man falter. But as a political opportunitist turned Vice President, JD is all hat and no cattle. His lectures to Europe on free speech and accusations directed at immigrants that they caused elevated house prices are hypocritical and devoid of facts. The existence of JD one tripped over speaker cable away from the presidency is reason enough to wish good health on Donald Trump. He is a venal climber and, while I liked his book, he’s not the kind of dude who makes the nice list. JD’s gift is coal.
Justin Trudeau – Nice.
And here we thought he was gone. Nope! Where does he fit? Great socks, fabulous selfies, but… he left a giant mess on both the left and the right when it came to policy implementation, pipelines under construction, an energy sector wondering which way is up with carbon taxes and renewables, relations with China, India and the US completely off the rails and an economy that is seriously underperforming its developed world peers.
Yet, he is dating a fellow narcissist in Katy Perry and they look cute together in a Ken and Barbie kind of way.
There is a business case that he should get coal, but for being an airhead dating an airhead, he makes the Nice list.
Mark Carney – Naughty. And Nice.
He’s new to the game here and Santa is confuised at how to deal with him. On the one hand, he is the newly elected Prime Minister of Canada and he has delivered what might be largest deficit in the history of Canada when all the dust settles. Ouch. On the other hand, he has managed to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding with Alberta and Danielle Smith that could deliver a new pipeline to tidewater if he is able to sprinkle some of the leftover Trudeau magic fairy dust on any new project proposal (oh, and exercize his constitutional authority). The jury and Santa are entirely out on this one, but if effort to change can be rewarded, he gets himself by default on the nice list. I know some of you will be mad at that, but that is where everyone starts.
Jagmeet Singh – Naughty.
Single-handedly responsible for propping op the Trudeau government well past its best before date and then overseeing the complete decimation of the whole Jack Layton legacy as the NDP got completely eviscerated in the 2025 federal election, leaving a sad husk of a party that barely has official status and is currently running a leadership race that no one cares about except the CBC. For his crime against the party – a giant lump of coal.
Stephen Guilbeault – Naughty
Canada’s recently resigned from Cabinet and “thorn in the side of Alberta” has certainly outdone himself this year. Not only has he pissed off pretty much every province in Canada, but he was also responsible for the one-of-its-kind in the world energy industry killing policy called the emissions cap, swoing the seeds or stoking the fire of a national unity crisis in Canada of such proportion that even Trudeau the elder and the ghost of Rene Levesque would be impressed. Except this crisis doesn’t even involve Quebec. Rather, it is entirely Alberta based and would have been entirely avoidable with sensible and cooperative policy making, avoiding the ineffective targeting of a specific industry and skipping the shallow virtue-signalling and posing for an international community that doesn’t care about us anyway. His smug and condescending attitude is only outdone by his dismissive and uncooperative hubris. And now that someone has come along and agreed to roll back his signature madness, he quits and goes home. Loser. Stephen’s gift? The legacy he deserves and giant steamy bag of methane emitting manure instead of coal.
Joe Biden – Nice
How can you not put Joe on a nice list? He’s Grandpa Joe! Joe is the epitome of the nice list. Everyone’s go-to for empathy, hugs and a socially-distanced shoulder to cry on. He slew the dragon against all odds and, crises notwithstanding, achieved a historic amount of legislative success (yes, it can be called a success even if you don’t like the policy). He delivered historic mid-term electoral success against all precedent. He is boring. He is quiet. He rocks his aviators and drives a vintage Corvette. Sure, he drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to secure the mid terms, but who among us wouldn’t? He poured money into infrastructure than any president in history. The unemployment rate hit historic lows. The Dow Jones hit record highs before the election! He doesn’t put up with any malarkey and he has been the one person of prominence trying to hold the US together from the centre. By any objective measure, he did pretty good.
Of course, he did get stabbed in the back by his party and was forced to step aside and let Kamala Harris lose the election. But hey, what’s a little betrayal between friends.
Joe’s gift? Peace and quiet, a train ride or two. Ice cream.
Jason Kenney – Nice. If you can find him.
“Where did it go?” said my youngest daughter at age 3 in a quiet terrified voice whilst taking a bath and watching a small toy go shooting down the drain. I feel much the same fate may have befallen our once-upon a time premier who went from ever-present thorn in everyone’s paw to “where’s Waldo, Alberta premier edition” in record time. Like he had barely hung up the phone after personally calling everyone in Ontario to exhort them to move to Alberta before he packed up his Winston Churchill portraits from his legislative office, tossed the keys to the parliamentary cat, flipped everyone the double bird and beat it out of dodge.
What’s that? Oh – in the last month, herr Kenney has indeed emerged from exile into a media frenzy reminiscent of a former federal politician smelling blood in the water and angling for a new job as saviour of the Conservative Party of Canada.
Gift for Jason this year is a lump of coal and an instruction manual on how to debate the rabid hyena that is a cornered Pierre Poilievre.
Pierre Poilievre – Naughty
I don’t know what to make of PP. He is the parliamentary manifestation of fingernails on a chalkboard. Channelling the sneering condescension that I had thought only achievable by climate zealots, he pontificates and gesticulates and orates at a near non-stop breakneck pace about “inflation” and “money printing” and “axes” in such a bizarre and awkward fashion that it boggles the mind.
Yet here we are – he’s the guy. He got himself a makeover and discovered housing affordability and the economy are the twin issues that were sure to sink the Liberal ship such that he rode the dissatisfaction with Trudeau and the LPC to wipe out territory on the electoral map. Then along came Mark “Adult in the Room” Carney and the Trump tariffs and Poilievre learned the hard way what an electoral whiplash is. He even lost his seat. MPs are crossing to the LPC. This is a proverbial “rats leaving the ship” scenario. And now he faces a leadership review.
The CPC shows signs of becoming more serious and are slowly getting rid of the parliamentary stunts that please the base but annoy the F out of middle of the road centrists. We are finally done with Trudeau. But Carney is a different cat. You can’t beat him with smarm. The CPC leader needs to keep presenting a credible and stable alternative to the Liberal money puking machine. Accountability and jobs. The economy. Tariffs and Canada. Protect the key pillars of the Canadian economy. That should be his singular mantra. Avoid rhyming couplets and rein in the clown-show. This all appears to be a tall task for Pierre – it is too ingrained into his DNA.
Gift for PP is simple: A Joe Biden course on how boring is better. But the likely gift is coal.
Shale Oil – Naughty and Nice
Wait. What? How can shale be on both lists? Well, shale, as a general rule, has been on the naughty list since 2014 when runaway production growth upended the energy market and catalyzed a seven year disaster. In particular, the Permian has been a blackhole for capital, sucking up investment that might otherwise have gone elsewhere (Oh Canada!) all in the relentless pursuit of production growth at all costs, right here, right now.
But the light tight oil moment, such as it was, appeared to have finally come to an end. Which would be nice. Look, production and investment in US light tight oil plays is going to continue, but the go-go days should be in the rear-view mirror. Now it’s all capital discipline, production maintenance and gradual reinflation – which is good! Except – suddenly we have record production from LTO. What in the actual F? It appears that in the current M&A craze, a bunch of private companies worked really hard to goose production and price. And it worked. Now what? A gradual deflation of capex and rig count. Again. But the damage is done to a lot of portfolios and the associated gas from all these wells has created a natty surplus that will take months to work off unless it gets super cold, which it won’t because, well, climate change. WTAF. Don’t even get me started on water. The Permian may actually have more water than oil.
Then along comes Trump with his “Drill Baby Drill” mantra. Which everyone is going to ignore because they don’t want to spend money and OPEC is opening the taps, but it’s just another distraction.
Anyway, shale’s gift? Still too much production. An eye roll. And a lump of coal to plug every unneeded well in the Permian. Come on guys. Work with me.
Canadian E&P’s – Nice
It has been a tough go for the Canadian oilpatch, there is no way to sugar coat that. The pandemic started with layoffs and the current market isn’t exactly a job-creating machine, notwithstanding prices and growing production. That said, we have managed to achieve some much-needed consolidation to achieve market scale, a renewed “Canadianization” of our little patch of oil (third largest in the world, ahem) and some long overdue attention from the markets who have suddenly come to the realization that Canadian oil and gas companies, in particular oil sands companies and, to a lesser extent, natural gas players are cash flow vomiting machines. Not even Stephen Guilbeault can dampen our enthusiasm. OK, he can. But it’s Christmas and he’s out. Gift – TMX, Coastal Gas Link, bought deals, institutional interest, stable prices, money for CCUS and an MOU. No tariffs. Is it finally time to load up on Canadian oil and gas? No! Are you crazy? But if you own good names, keep them. They pay well. Gift to Canadian E&P is stability and predictability.
Oil and Gas Investors – Nice
After suffering through what is arguably the worst ten years any investor anywhere has ever seen, the energy industry has been, a relatively bright if annoyingly blinking light since the election of Donald Trump. Go figure. While I am sure most investors have simply ridden their growth stocks to glory and avoided any inflation correlated commodities, for the ones who decided they were masochistic enough to stick with it, they could be now participating in what may be the greatest value play in history. Gift? Positive annual returns and cash – very quiet double-digit returns. If not next year, then the year after, for sure. Data centers. AI. It’s all there for the taking.
Saudi Arabia and OPEC/OPEC++++++ – Naughty
Saudi Arabia has since done a fine job these past few years of being respectful of the tenuous and uncertain status of the energy market and the need for stability in the face of war, inflation, potential recession, China meltdown and energy transition head fakes like fusion and mega-trillion dollar data center investments that never materialize. Secular decline disguised as production and quota cuts have helped to stabilize prices and draw down inventories. Except now they are unwinding all the fake cuts and the market is buying into surplus so much that there is now a media driven glut. An appropriate gift in return for roiling the market? How about some coal. Dirty lumps of coal. Did anyone actually ever expect the Saudis to let prices collapse again? Come on guys.
Trans Mountain Expansion – Nice
Think of all that the TMX had to go through in its formative years. File an application for a project, spend a billion dollars, get denied for political reasons, spend another billion, become a political football, get denigrated, demonized, misrepresented and otherwise vilified for years and still be at the table with a smile on your face, ready to spend capital to create jobs, opportunity and prosperity for the biggest set of ingrates that exist. And that was before the Federal Government bought it. But buy it they did, and the project is complete and operational. That’s right, the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Memorial Pipeline is complete, not even close to on budget or on schedule but it is done and it is shipping oil and barfing up cash. Gift? A safe operating environment, high prices and even higher tolls. And grudging acknowledgment of why this stuff is important.
LNG – Nice
So, this is the year that the great LNG build out in Canada started to feel real. Once Vlad (the Impaler) Putin invaded Ukraine it was all bets off for an already undersupplied European gas market. Enter LNG. Replacement for Russian gas. Replacement for domestic coal. Baseload for intermittent, renewable power. The underpinnings of a modern industrial economy. Cooled to minus a bajillion and shipped around the world, LNG has been a game -changer for countries producing it and those importing it. At least those with the foresight and the b*lls to get on with it. Gift: A universal business case that can be shared near and far, also in Ottawa where it appears on the surface at least that the Carney government actually gets it. And money from the sky for all the new LNG projects proposed for the West Coast.
Vladimir Poutine – Naughty
Where to start. Vlad (the Impaler) Putin spent 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 mired in a pointless land war in Ukraine that is currently at a bloody stalemate. Russian casualties are estimated to exceed a staggering 1,000,000 which is almost twenty times what the Americans suffered in Vietnam. It is amazing to me that there isn’t more blowback on this in Russia. Look, the naughty list is all about redemption – every year is a fresh start, maybe even for Trump. But there is no redeeming Putin. Trump is self-aggrandizing narcissist and longs to be a dictator. Putin is a modern day Hitler. So, for Christmas this year Vlad gets absolutely nothing while we wait for him to get what he deserves.
People in Calgary and the Energy Sector in Western Canada in general – Nice
It’s been a long decade. We can’t give you another boom, but I think it’s fair to say that the pieces are in place for a continued recovery. Seriously, cautious optimism folks! Things are looking up! Gift – jobs and investment.
Danielle Smith – Naughty and Nice
Alberta’s premier is having a bit of a rocky road. If it isn’t apologizing for the latest slip of the tongue, it’s having to defend a bunch of cockamamie schemes or ideas that are the flavour of the day with her most virulent and rabid base. Oh, I know there are lots of people who think dancing with the Wexit crew is a genius plan that will give Alberta everything it wants. I’m just not one of them. I am of the firm belief that it is an economy impacting sideshow that gets us nothing, except eye rolls and mockery. Much like the Republicans in the US who spent years investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop, this is a distraction from the very real issues that are confronting Alberta including health care, education, cost of living, the opioid crisis, energy, economic diversification. We don’t need an Alberta Pension Plan.
It feels like Danielle Smith is running her government like she ran her talk show – all controversy all the time.
That said, she has been OUTSTANDING in dealing with the Carney government and the MOU was a massive win. More of that please. In winning the MOU concessions, she perfectly and effectively encapsulated the frustration felt by a majority of the province that can’t shake the inescapable feeling that under the previous Liberal government if our local economy completely collapsed there were people in the federal government who would be just fine with it. That feels different now and she deserves full credit.
It remains to be seen how far she allows herself to go down the kooky road – Alberta can be a weird place because the dirty laundry that we actually share with all the other provinces actually gets played out in the media for all to see.
Gift for Danielle? A chance to spend some time with moderate voices. A biography of Rene Levesque. A coffee klatch with Stormont.
Elon Musk – Nice and Naughty
That’s it. Can’t say anymore or he will suspend my account. Gift. A copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Me – Nice
This is obvious. I am always on the nice list.
My gift? All of you. (barf, right?)
That’s it folks. I hope I didn’t miss anything!
As many of you know, this is my last blog of the year, when you next hear from me, I will be reviewing my disastrous forecasts from last year before rolling the dice on my 2026 Fearless Forecast (hint – Oil! And gas!).
I do of course reserve the right to send out a note on the Night Before Christmas – it’s kinda my thing.
But if I don’t or you don’t see it…
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from us to all of you.
Stay safe, stay warm, be kind.
Be Crude.
