If we want to be economic masters in our own house, then “buying Canadian” to protest U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign to attack our sovereignty through a tariff war, while admirably patriotic, isn’t enough.
Nor is there any instant solution to this ongoing threat posed by an aggressive and often irrational Trump administration that we’re going to have to deal with for the next four years, based on its first two weeks in office alone.
During that brief time, we’ve also been given a crystal clear warning about what we need to do to help protect our economic sovereignty and assure our energy independence.
It runs contrary to the utter nonsense we’ve been told for a decade by the Trudeau government that oil and natural gas are dying forms of energy and that it’s better for Canada if the lion’s share of our vast reserves of both are left in the ground.
In the real world, fossil fuels are going to remain the dominant source of energy globally for a long time.
The idea that Canada, the world’s fourth-largest producer of crude oil and fifth-largest producer of natural gas, should voluntarily remove itself from global markets in favour of handing it over to some of the world’s most corrupt dictatorships is irresponsible and economic madness.
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As the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers noted in the National Post, oil, natural gas and petroleum products account for one-quarter of all Canadian exports — with the vast majority of it, valued at $150 billion a year, exported to the United States.
Because we lack pipeline capacity to get these valuable resources to tidewater — meaning the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans — from their landlocked territory primarily in Western Canada, we have to sell them at a huge discount to the Americans because they are our only major customer.
That means the Canadian economy is losing tens of billions of dollars every year that could fuel our economic growth at home.
There is no doubt that we could sell our oil and natural gas at competitive prices to global markets from Asia to East Asia, from Europe to the United Kingdom, from Germany to Taiwan and Japan.
Indeed, that’s why many of the leaders of these countries have come to Canada asking us to sell these valuable resources to them.
But that possibility has been stifled by the Trudeau government making it as difficult as possible to fill this global need through wave after wave of anti-fossil fuel legislation designed to keep most of it buried underground in Canada.
To be fair, the Trudeau government did buy one troubled pipeline project, Trans Mountain, which as a result of this federal intervention officially opened last year and is now transporting 900,000 barrels of oil a day from a port near Vancouver for export to the U.S. West Coast and Asia.
Later this year, Canada’s first liquified natural gas export facility funded by private investors is scheduled to begin operations in B.C. for shipping natural gas by tanker to global markets.
But these two projects are only a fraction of what could have been achieved by a federal government that wasn’t killing pipeline projects either through direct intervention or by passing legislation making them economically unfeasible.
Finally, from an environmental perspective, one of the most effective ways to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions globally is to replace coal-fired electricity with cleaner-burning natural gas.
This played an instrumental part, for example, in enabling the previous Liberal government of Ontario to eliminate the use of coal, which had provided 25% of the province’s electricity, over 11 years from 2003 to 2014, described by the government at the time as “the single largest greenhouse gas reduction initiative in North America.”
We can help ensure our energy independence from the whims of Trump or any U.S. president, inject billions of new dollars into the Canadian economy, and help the environment through the sensible development of Canada’s oil and gas resources — a win, win, win.
What we need is the political will to do it.