At last, the long national nightmare for Canada’s oil and gas industry is over. It loves to pretend it’s been labouring under the yoke of green socialism for almost a decade now, so industry leaders were positively jubilant about the news that Justin Trudeau plans to resign as prime minister. As Bob Geddes, the president of Ensign Energy Services, told the Calgary Herald’s Chris Varcoe, “There’s no question from the beginning that his purpose was to kill the oil and gas business. This is a good day for Canada.”
There is, of course, very much a question about that, especially when you look at the increase in oil and gas production over Trudeau’s term. We’ll get to that. But this is the consensus view within the oil and gas industry’s information bubble: Trudeau was the source of all their problems, and removing him will be the solution. "The Liberal government (under Prime Minister Trudeau) has made Canada's oil and gas sector uncompetitive," Heather Exner-Pirot, special advisor on energy to the Business Council of Canada, told the Canadian Press. "So there is some optimism now that Canada will finally be a place that's open for business."
It’s worth noting that while Canada was “closed” for oil and gas business, the industry increased its oil production by more than a million barrels per day. Its biggest companies posted record profits in 2022, and then almost did it again in 2023. Meanwhile, in 2024 the federal government completed the construction of the first pipeline to Pacific tidewater in decades, one that immediately (and significantly) increased the oil prices received by the same companies complaining so bitterly about Trudeau’s leadership. LNG Canada, meanwhile, is set to begin operations in 2025, and will have a similarly beneficial impact on the price of natural gas in Canada and the companies that sell it.
The truth here, one the oil and gas industry’s advocates would never dare acknowledge, is that Justin Trudeau has been the best prime minister their industry has seen in decades. He has done more to advance their interests, often at the cost of his own political capital, than any of his living predecessors. In addition to TMX and LNG Canada it also fought successfully for Line 3, a major expansion project that faced significant political resistance from the Democratic governor and other politicians in Michigan. Oh, and it also threw more than a billion dollars at the oil and gas industry to help it clean up its old oil and gas wells.
Trudeau’s biggest impact on the oil and gas industry’s economic wellbeing may be yet to come. Its longer-term viability in a decarbonizing global economy, after all, will depend on it reaching its stated net zero targets. That’s an increasingly unlikely prospect given the industry’s lack of recent progress and the perverse political incentives that Trump and Poilievre will create around climate change. But if they do somehow get there, they’ll have Trudeau’s policies to thank for ushering them down that road.
His government took the baton from Rachel Notley’s NDP on industrial carbon pricing, enforcing the rising carbon price that would have otherwise been abandoned by the UCP government and its oil and gas industry funders. It created a generous tax credit for the carbon capture and storage projects the industry claims are essential to its decarbonization efforts. It even provided industry with a kind of insurance against Pierre Poilievre’s pledge to “axe the tax” in the form of so-called “carbon contracts for difference.”
And yes, the Liberals created an emissions cap for the oil sand that formalized the industry’s own stated commitments and capacities. Said industry could have used to advertise its dedication to being the most ethical source of petroleum on earth, and embraced the challenge of doing what it said it would. Instead, like so many of the Trudeau government’s climate policies, the emissions cap was portrayed as an intolerable affront to their economic interests — yet another supposed example of Trudeau trying to “kill” their industry.
Ironically, this might have been Trudeau’s biggest gift to the oil and gas industry: a boogeyman that it and its political patrons could use to distract shareholders and voters from the sector’s litany of failures. Trudeau’s election in 2015 almost immediately blinded many Albertans to the true source of their economic challenges that began with the 2014 crash in oil prices engineered by Saudi Arabia. Most have declined to regain the use of their sight ever since.
At some point, though, they’ll have to open their eyes. When they do, they’ll see that Alberta isn’t in control of its destiny here, and it hasn’t been for a very long time. It’s at the mercy of a petroleum market that’s in the midst of a massive transformation that no domestic politician can arrest, much less reverse. Global demand for oil will almost certainly peak in the first four years of a Pierre Poilievre government, with demand for gas soon to follow. By then, the big question will be how fast it will fall.
Trudeau’s government and its climate policies were all about preparing Alberta’s oil and gas industry for that moment. When it arrives — and it will — they might want to apologize to the prime minister they’ve so loved to hate.
Now it’s time for Jagmeet Singh to go
Somehow, the image of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fighting back tears to announce his resignation wasn’t the saddest thing that happened in Canadian politics on Monday. Instead, it was Jagmeet Singh’s tone-deaf statement that replaced the usual notes of grace and gratitude with petty political chest pounding. It was another reminder, if federal New Democrats needed one, of why they need their own leadership change.
The proof is right there in the political polling, which has consistently put the NDP below 20 per cent support. In more normal times this would — or should — be troubling. But when the Liberal Party of Canada is in the midst of a generational collapse that has pushed its support down by as much as 15 per cent from the last election, it ought to terrify federal New Democrats. If they can’t gain political ground while the Liberals are actively giving it away, when can they?
A fresh poll from Pallas Data shows just how bad things are for Singh’s party. After Trudeau’s resignation, Liberal support bounced up to 25 per cent, with the CPC well ahead at 42 per cent and the NDP at 18 per cent. Worse, Singh’s NDP is trailing the now-leaderless Liberals by nine points in British Columbia and seven points in Ontario, both provinces where they ought to be doing far better. Somehow, Singh’s NDP is even trailing the Liberals in Alberta.
This is the opportunity of a political lifetime for New Democrats, a clean breakaway on an open net, and Singh is lying face down on the ice. He’s done little to win over unhappy Liberals, and his recent broadsides against the Prime Minister and his government aren’t going to help there. But he’s also losing his party’s blue collar voters to Poilievre’s Conservatives, who have been more than happy to point out Singh’s fondness for the finer things in life, such as the Maserati he was recently seen stepping into on Parliament Hill. Champagne socialism rarely sits well among blue collar voters, but Singh’s Dom Perignon brand of social democracy is particularly galling.
There are, I’m sure, plenty of federal New Democrats who would do a better job of putting the puck on that political net than Singh. Rachel Notley, for example, just resigned her seat as a provincial New Democrat. So did Shannon Phillips, the former environment minister in Alberta. And then there’s Wab Kinew, the wildly popular (by comparison to his peers, anyways) premier of Manitoba. There isn’t a shortage of options here, in other words. If anything, their bench of prospective leaders might be deeper than the Liberal one.
But that only matters if the party’s leadership is willing to seize the moment and do what must be done by dumping Singh. If they wait until after the next election, they might be working with a much smaller caucus — and against a rejuvenated, or at least rejuvenating, Liberal Party of Canada. If they want to outflank those Liberals and replace them as the de-facto progressive option in Canada, now is the time to make the move.
The LNG Dream that Just Won’t Die
For Canada’s LNG enthusiasts, it’s always Groundhog Day. No matter how many times they’re told that Canada can not, and will not, get credit for any emissions reductions associated with the LNG cargoes it ships off the west coast, they inevitably return to where they began: pretending that exporting more fossil fuels somehow constitutes a climate strategy.
Now, it seems, they even have the leader of Alberta’s NDP in their corner. As The Hub’s Sean Speer argued as part of his recent set of predictions for 2025, the carbon tax will be replaced with “public investment in nuclear technology (both domestic and abroad), tax incentives for the development and adoption of low-emitting technologies, and LNG exports to help other countries get off higher-emitting energy sources. Political support for this policy mix will extend from federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre to Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi.”
This argument ignores the fact that emissions reductions have value and the countries that would theoretically buy our LNG wouldn’t surrender them for free — or likely at all. If we’re assigning credit to countries on the basis of what they export, meanwhile, we’d lose a bunch of credit for all the higher-emission oil we sell to America while China would gain huge volumes from the wind and solar technology it exports. So much for the “but China” argument.
It’s technically true that under Article 6 of the Paris Accord, countries can reach arrangements with other nations whereby credits for reductions are transferred. But this can only happen under very specific circumstances: namely, ones where the reduction wouldn’t have happened otherwise and where both parties consent to the transfer. This clearly doesn’t apply to garden-variety LNG exports, since it’s a competitive market with other shippers who could easily meet that demand. Instead, it would have to involve Canada paying to help a coal-fired plant in China or India transition to gas. Are Canada’s LNG enthusiasts prepared to subsidize the energy transition in those countries with their own dollars? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
The LNG-as-climate-policy argument also ignores the growing body of scientific evidence showing LNG is not necessarily the climate solution its proponents make it out to be. From upstream leakage of methane — a gas with a warming potential that’s 84 to 87 times that of carbon dioxide over a 20-year timeframe — to further leakage as its transported, shipped and regasified, recent studies suggest that as much as 60 per cent of its emissions happen before it’s even combusted in a power plant. Even then there’s the potential of further methane leakage, which can make its climate footprint even bigger.
Let’s set all of this aside. That’s because, in the end, what’s standing in the way of more widespread investment in LNG exports from Canada are underlying economics that have little to do with government policy that a future Poilievre government won’t be able to change. “The favourable market conditions of the 2010s that drove energy companies to try to make Canada a major player in the global LNG market have softened,” a recent report from Investors for Paris Compliance (IPC) concludes. “Canadian LNG faces an array of economic risks, rising in severity over the lifetimes of the projects. As a glut of supply comes online and as demand faces uncertainty, longer-term equity and debt exposures to Canadian LNG projects will be increasingly risky.”
Translation: even if we take the most bullish projections for global LNG demand at their face (those which necessarily imply lower climate ambition and renewable energy investment) there are still no guarantees that new Canadian projects would be in the money. As the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis notes, “the looming LNG glut means the industry is facing significant financial risks, with more costly LNG producers potentially facing the choice of underutilising their export facilities during the glut, or selling LNG at prices too low to earn an economic return on their significant capital investments.”
There’s also the fact that, as University of Alberta economics professor Andrew Leach pointed out recently, additional LNG supplies are fundamentally incompatible with the world’s stated climate targets. “If you're betting on growing LNG demand as part of aggressive action on climate change, the IEA doesn't see those lining up,” he said on social media. “ NG demand grows if the world isn't acting on climate change. Otherwise, we have enough capacity.”
There is precisely zero chance that Canada’s oil and gas industry and its political proxies will acknowledge these realities, much less accept them gracefully. They will instead try to scapegoat progressive politicians, climate policy, and anything else they can use to avoid looking in the global mirror. In Nenshi’s case, apparently, they’ve found a way to recruit him. But all the political allies in the world won’t save them from the realities of the market, much less the ever-declining cost of renewable energy and ever-expanding global interest in deploying it. That’s an irony I hope they learn to appreciate in time.
Quick(er) Hits
In time, I think we’ll look back at the rapid expansion of legal gambling that’s happening right now with the same morbid curiosity people have about duels, bloodletting and other barbaric practices that have mercifully been resigned to history. Why, people will ask, did they ever allow that to happen? Who thought that would end well?
Over at Ricochet, my friend Rob Csernyik wrote a long story about the folly of legalized gambling and the lives it’s destroying all around us. Read it, if you can. Share it, if you want to.
Donald Trump hasn’t even taken office yet and we’re already witnessing a near-bumper crop of face-eating leopard stories. Whether it’s the Trump-supporting 9/11 firefighters who had their benefits cut or Trump voters who are shocked, absolutely shocked, at the racism now being directed their way by MAGA, it’s going to be a long four years of this stuff.
And finally, it’s worth pointing out the flagrant hypocrisy on free speech coming from the supposedly free speech right in America. Never mind Elon Musk’s near daily hypocrisies, which range from banning and demonetizing various critics to his recent request that people post more “positive, beautiful or informative content” on X, which just happens to coincide with Trump’s return to office.
There’s the more important matter of Trump’s ongoing assault on his critics and their right to have an opinion. His plan to sue media outlets into submission has already yielded some pre-emptive white flags from news organizations like ABC, while his constant carping about the apparent injustice of paid fact checkers on Meta’s platforms caused it to bend the knee this week in spectacular (as in, spectacularly cowardly) fashion.
Or, take JD Vance, the vice-president elect who has spoken out frequently about the perils of censorship and the importance of free expression. On Twitter/X in late December, he decided to draw attention to Ivana Stradner, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who had called out Elon Musk’s support of Germany’s far-right AfD. “I wonder how much money this person’s employer gets from the American taxpayer?” he asked.
In Trump’s America, it seems, the people who talked most noisily about the importance of free speech are about to get very, very quiet. As Canadian columnist Stephen Maher noted, “I don’t think [Kamala] Harris ever called for defunding a think tank for criticizing a tycoon close to the president. I suspect we will never hear him speak up for the free speech rights of critics.”
I suspect Maher’s right. Once again, every accusation — especially the loudest ones — is really just a confession.