Canada’s Conservatives want their own National Energy Program

History may often rhyme, but it gets downright poetic when it comes to the Trudeaus and Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Take Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program, which has been the bête noire of Albertans for more than 40 years now. It sought to grow Canada’s oil sands sector, build pipelines from coast-to-coast, and wean the country off its dependence on the United States — and enraged Albertans to no end. They responded to his proposed program by turning him into a pariah and holding him personally responsible for the economic turmoil associated with a spike in interest rates and subsequent crash in oil prices that began in 1981. 

In 2025, Albertans might be even more irate about the latest Prime Minister Trudeau’s spuriously-correlated impact on their oil and gas industry — one that, it’s worth mentioning, has posted record-high production, revenue, and profits over the last three years. They’ve turned in droves to another federal political leader named Pierre, one who’s proposing something that sounds an awful lot like…..a National Energy Program. 

“I intend to approve refineries and LNG plants and hopefully pipelines so I can bring that production back to Canada and make us more energy independent,” Pierre Poilievre told Jordan Peterson during their recent interview. Energy East — the very same pipeline connecting western Canadian oil fields with eastern Canadian demand markets that Trudeau first proposed — is at the heart of this vision. If irony was a marketable commodity, Canada would be able to pay off its national debt right now. 

The similarities here are striking. Poilievre, for example, recently suggested that we should build refineries in Canada and stop buying imports from the United States. “You're buying our oil at a discount,” he said last week. “We should build more refineries....and bypass you.” As it happens, the National Energy Program proposed the construction of new refineries in Saskatchewan and Alberta, even promising to incentivize the conversion of existing refineries so they could process more heavy Canadian oil coming out of the oilsands. 

Poilievre isn’t the only Conservative politician pining for a National Energy Program of their own. As Alberta premier Danielle Smith said in recent remarks, “We  also urge our entire nation to use this tariff threat as an opportunity to correct the misguided direction of this country and commence multiple infrastructure projects that focus on developing, upgrading and exporting our oil, gas and other natural resources, instead of effectively land-locking them and keeping us fully reliant on one primary customer.”

This pretends that the current Liberal government didn’t sacrifice enormous amounts of political capital to get the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion built, the first meaningful increase in our export capacity on the Pacific coast since the 1950s. It ignores the fact that LNG Canada, the single biggest energy project in Canadian history, will begin shipping to customers in Asia later this year. And it completely elides the fact that under Stephen Harper’s government, the oil and gas industry’s dependence on US markets was significantly increased through the approval and construction of projects like Keystone and the Alberta Clipper. 

The original National Energy Program and the one Conservatives like Poilievre and Smith are envisioning aren’t exactly the same. Pierre Trudeau’s approach focused heavily on reducing the cost of energy for Canadians, largely through the creation of a “made-in-Canada” price that would remain below world oil prices. That was framed in Alberta as an attempt to steal their riches and buy votes in Eastern Canada, even though subsequent analysis has shown that the NEP — and particularly its incentives for oilsands crude — would have been a boon for Alberta. Even so, there’s no question that one of its goals was reducing the cost of gasoline (and living) for Canadians across the country along with increasing the federal governemnt’s share of petroleum-related revenue. 

This time around there will be no such concerns. Instead, it’s all about using national security as a fig leaf for Alberta’s longstanding desire to build more pipelines to the west and east coasts that could enable the doubling in oil production that Danielle Smith has talked about repeatedly. The ends, as ever, always justify the means. 

Never mind that, as the Financial Times reported this week, China may have already hit peak oil. Never mind that oil demand in Europe is in clear and irreversible decline. And never mind that Donald Trump has sworn up and down that he intends to massively increase American oil production — a pledge that could be met with a similar surge in OPEC supplies that would in turn collapse global prices. For Canada’s new petro-nationalists, trifling things like supply and demand are apparently problems for another day. 

Canada should not trade our dependence on one country for a dependence on ever-increasing global oil demand. The real National Energy Program we need right now would massively reduce the oil and gas industry’s carbon emissions, as it has pledged to do repeatedly, and helps prepare Canada for a world in which barrels of oil are priced at least in part on their carbon intensity. Europe has already signaled that it’s prepared to head in that direction, after all, while incoming US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has signaled his openness to so-called “carbon tariffs” in America. We need a program that focuses on increasing our exports of the key minerals and clean technology that will drive the global energy transition. 

Energy independence is a laudable and important objective for Canada, and it’s one we should pursue. But it means something very different than it did when Pierre Trudeau was in power. In the end, Pierre Poilievre’s National Energy Program would end up being an even bigger disaster for Alberta’s oil and gas industry than Alberta ever imagined Trudeau’s was.