U.S. President Donald Trump’s 10 per cent tariff on Canadian energy should be a cause for celebration in Ottawa. After all, Trump is only finishing the job the Trudeau government started: systematically crippling the energy sector in pursuit of their net-zero dream.
It’s hard to imagine Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault or his Liberal predecessors, Catherine McKenna and Jonathan Wilkinson, shedding a tear over this development. These are the same people who have spent years declaring oil and gas the great evil of our time. Now, the tariffs are here to speed up the decline of an industry they have worked tirelessly to strangle with regulations.
Canada’s energy sector has always been the backbone of our economy. Last year alone, we exported over $130-billion worth of energy products to the United States, our largest export by far. The second-largest, vehicle exports, trailed behind by a staggering $80 billion.
The energy industry is Canada’s most powerful bargaining tool on the world stage. Or at least, it would be, if the Trudeau government hadn’t spent nearly a decade making sure we remained dependent on the U.S. market.
Among the 10 Canadian companies most at risk of losing money due to the Trump tariffs, according to a report from Syntax Data, four are energy production giants: Enbridge, TC Energy, Suncor and Parkland. These aren’t just faceless corporations — they represent thousands of Canadian jobs, billions in tax revenue and are crucial pillars of the national economy.
The Trump tariffs highlight a brutal reality: the Trudeau government has left Canada with few options. Because of Liberal climate policies, we have limited pipeline capacity to send oil east or west, ensuring the vast majority of our exports will continue to go south.
The Energy East pipeline, which would have transported 1.1-million barrels per day to New Brunswick refineries and on to European buyers, was killed in 2017. The Northern Gateway pipeline, which would have shipped Alberta crude to the West Coast for export to Asia, was rejected outright in 2016.
The Pacific Northwest LNG project, a $36-billion investment that would have made Canada a major player in the global liquefied natural gas market, collapsed in 2017. These are just a sample of the many energy projects that never made it to market due to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s regulatory hostility.
All of these projects had one thing in common: they would have given Canada leverage in a moment like this.
Just last March, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said that, “The government is opposed to using government money to fund inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.… We are not interested in investing in LNG facilities.” However, upon hearing about Trump’s tariffs, he suddenly changed his tune.
As the Financial Post reported, “Wilkinson told Bloomberg there is a ‘renewed emphasis’ on finding a way to double the capacity of LNG Canada,” which is one of the few LNG projects that has managed to make it through the regulatory labyrinth drawn up by the Liberal government. This project is slated to start shipping fuel to Asian markets this year.
Now, as the reality of the Trump tariffs set in, Liberals suddenly claim to see the value of the very projects they spent years opposing. Suddenly, when real economic pain arrives — when the price of virtue signalling is no longer theoretical — they are the first to backpedal. If Liberals truly believed in net zero, they would welcome the 10 per cent Trump energy tariffs as a climate victory.
For a party obsessed with killing Canadian oil, they should be thanking Trump for the assist: he is finishing what the Liberals started.
National Post
Lucy Gay is a recent master’s of economics graduate from George Mason University and a research assistant at an economic policy research centre in Arlington, Va.