Friday Focus: America's security guarantee is tested, while Canada's AI strategy comes up short

Iran's strategy is to drag this out virtually to the point of pain as long as it can. What that tells me, they believe they still have time.

Yeah. [upbeat music] Welcome to the Friday Focus Podcast for the 5th of May, 2025. I'm Roger Griffiths in studio with my co-host, Janice Gross Stein. Hey, Janice.

Good morning, Roger. It's a beautiful sunny-

It's been a scorcher of a week here in central Canada-

It-

... and a nice respite from, uh, a slow start, uh, to the spring. And now it seems like we're in summer.

We are.

Uh, let's start the show, unfortunately, ha- as we've had to for the last number of weeks, just catching our audience up on the events of, uh, the Iran-Israel-US war. Um, I guess the latest news as we record Friday morning is, uh, a seeming indication, demand from the Trump administration that an agreement be signed in Geneva, no less, uh, next week. Um, are we starting, Janice, to run out of time here? Is there a scenario where this, for either protagonist, has to be brought to some kind of step change to move out of this stasis of a ceasefire that's not really a ceasefire, which is causing, obviously, big repercussions for both, uh, Iran and the United States, or could this go on for weeks?

This could go on for weeks, Roger. You know, what's the deadlines here? And I think that's a really great way to think about this. When does this have, absolutely have to come to an end? When Iran cannot store the oil on tankers that it is taking out of its wells. That's really the deadline here, and why is that? Because if it can't store the oil, it has to turn off, um, the oil wells. And once you do that, it can be a few years before you can restart them, and the cost to Iran of doing that are just huge. How many more rusty tankers, um, can Iran find at this point? Because it's offloading oil into cargo island. So estimates, there's no consistency here, but it's w- it's weeks, at most a few more months. So there is that hard stop, frankly.

But Janice, a few more months out, we would be seeing, uh, by every indication, oil at 150 to $200 a barrel-

Yeah

... jet fuel drying up in Asia. There are now shortages of plastic bags and other plastic products in, in Japan. There's a lot of analysis to suggest literally the next few weeks-

Yeah

... could see that hockey stick chart emerge-

Yeah

... of world energy prices skyrocketing as the reserves that were either floating in the water or sitting in people's tanks, those tanks have been drawn down. And interestingly, a bit like the Iranian problem, the- we have a problem, which is you can't draw your tanks all the way down.

That's right.

You, uh... It's a bit like your plumbing system in your house. You have to have pressure in the pipes. You, you can't empty [laughs] your-

You're right

... your pipelines of, of oil. So we're, we're hitting so-called tank bottom too, in roughly, if you believe, again, a lot of different analysis out there, but roughly in a schedule that corresponds with the Iranians. So-

That's what this is-

What do we do? I mean, how did, how do these deadlines that clearly lie out there, in some cases maybe weeks in the future, not months, impress back on this moment?

Y- That's exactly right. So what