After about 15 years of stonewalling every oil and gas pipeline it could, Canada has suddenly realized this may have been a bad idea. With more than 97 per cent of Canadian oil exports going to the United States, it’s made the country uniquely vulnerable to threats of ruinous 25 per cent import tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump.
As one CBC headline put it, “Trump’s threats reveal the trouble with Canada’s pipelines running through the U.S.”
In Dear Diary, the National Post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. This week, Tristin Hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of the cancelled Northern Gateway pipeline.
Monday
Well, well. Look who’s come crawling back. “No export pipelines for me, thanks, I’m happy to be the only major oil producer on earth that sells all its exports at a steep discount to a domineering neighbour.”
Oh sure, me and all the other cancelled pipelines would have opened new markets for Canadian crude, raising its historically low price and boosting GDP. And yes, I was one of the world’s largest resource projects offering equity stakes to Indigenous partners, instead of just cash payouts.
But on the other hand, it would involve having big scary oil tankers dock on the Pacific Coast sometimes. Never mind that there are already 9,000 oil tankers at sea at any one time, and oil spill incidents are at all-time lows. Or that Canada’s other coast weirdly doesn’t have a problem with the many, many oil tankers docking there with foreign oil.
But yes, Canada, you knew best: It was obviously best to bet our entire energy sector on the United States, and just hope they didn’t elect a dyspeptic populist who wants to annex us.
Tuesday
Let’s play a game, it’s called “Domestic Resource Industry.” How it works is that you’re given a subterranean ocean of a liquid that literally everybody wants, and all you have to do is figure out how to sell it to them.
Do you:
- Develop a diversified international client base, ensuring that your industry is insulated against political upheaval, even from a traditionally stable neighbour.
- Prioritize domestic usage of the resource. Even if your export base isn’t diversified, you can at least ensure that your own population has the means to access, purchase and use the resource.
- None of the above. Send all the oil to the United States at a structural discount. Yell at anybody who suggests otherwise.
I know this is hard.
Wednesday
Now I do understand that I’m bad for the environment; that’s why I’m so controversial, aren’t I? We’d all like to be running everything off windmills and solar panels and somehow flying the prime minister around in a jet that operates off pedal power or some such.
It’s a trait I share in common with my old friend abattoirs. You all seem to like steaks, sausages and hot dogs. And meat, like oil, is a major Canadian export industry. But you may not like the idea of a dedicated building that kills animals and processes their carcasses into these delicious foods.
Well, might I suggest a solution. How about you keep eating exactly the same amount of meat as before, but you make it regulatorily impossible for anyone to operate an abattoir on Canadian soil. Thus, you severely handicap your own country’s ability to export meat at competitive prices, while also ensuring that your own populace becomes dependent on meat imported from places that actually do build abattoirs (places that may threaten you with ruinous tariffs for no reason).
Animals are still being killed for food, of course, but now you don’t have to think about it … and all it cost you was a few hundred thousand jobs or so.
Thursday
I may only be a cancelled bitumen pipeline, but after a cursory look at the modern state of the Canadian economy, it does strike me that your economic productivity sucks right now.
Per-capita GDP is in freefall. Each passing year, the average Canadian worker works the same number of hours as before, but they produce less. The problem is a lack of investment in per-worker productivity. If you hand a construction worker a shovel instead of a front-end loader, they’re simply not going to get as much done — and both your GDP and your people’s living standards will suffer in the long run.
Now, not to belabour the point, but do you know what really boosts worker productivity? A giant multi-billion dollar privately-funded straw that shoots oil over the Rocky Mountains. Hell, you could have built two; one going west and one going east.
Friday
In addition to the whole “U.S. president threatening to destroy our economy” thing, there is another aspect of global geopolitics that’s changed since I was cancelled in 2016. You may have noticed that another major oil exporter, Russia, has used its resource wealth to become an aggressive pariah state.
I know we Canadians like the idea of having a voice in international affairs, of “convening power,” etc. But I’ll note that we don’t have a particularly strong military or diplomatic corps; the usual tools for having other countries listen to you. It’s a similar story with our “soft power”; nobody cares that Ryan Reynolds was born in Vancouver.
What we do have is an ocean of oil that literally every country on earth is desperate to purchase from us, and which would allow us to directly challenge the economic and political influence of sworn enemies like Russia and Iran. The only problem is that you have to be able to sell your ocean of oil and not strand it in the middle of the subarctic because you’ve decided that pipelines are icky or something.
But how could Canada have anticipated the future. It’s not like oil has ever factored into geopolitics before.