Economy
Next federal government should discard harmful energy policies—tariffs notwithstanding
From the Fraser Institute
By Julio Mejía and Elmira Aliakbari
Over the last decade, the Trudeau government missed countless opportunities to reduce Canada’s heavy reliance on the United States and instead introduced regulatory hurdles that hindered our energy sector and limited access to new markets
While the full extent of the damage from President Trump’s trade war remains unknowns, Canadians should understand that, with a federal election looming, shortsighted policies here at home have left Canada in a vulnerable position.
Oil and gas are Canada’s main exports and the U.S. is their primary destination. In 2023, nearly 97 per cent of Canada’s oil exports went to our southern neighbour, and the U.S. is our sole foreign market for our natural gas. This concentration of exports to a single destination has given the U.S. significant leverage. For example, Canada exports natural gas at discounted prices—up to 60 per cent lower than what American producers receive in U.S. markets. Similarly, our oil has been sold for less than what U.S. producers receive, with price differences exceeding 40 per cent in recent years. Selling our energy at discounted prices to the U.S. has cost Canadians tens of billions of dollars in lost revenues.
And yet, over the last decade, the Trudeau government missed countless opportunities to reduce Canada’s heavy reliance on the United States and instead introduced regulatory hurdles that hindered our energy sector and limited access to new markets. To unleash Canada’s oil and gas sector, the next government must reverse a whole set of harmful energy policies.
For example, the Northern Gateway pipeline designed to transport crude oil from Alberta to British Columbia’s coast. In 2016, one year after taking office, the Trudeau government cancelled this previously approved $7.9 billion project, which would have greatly expanded Canada’s access to Asian markets.
Then there’s the Energy East and Eastern Mainline pipelines from Alberta and Saskatchewan to the east coast. The Trudeau government effectively made the project economically unfeasible by introducing new regulatory hurdles, ultimately forcing the TransCanada energy company to withdraw from the project, which would have expanded access to European markets.
The record is equally bleak for liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities, which could open access to overseas markets. Regulatory barriers and long approval timelines under the Trudeau government significantly hindered the development of the Énergie Saguenay LNG project in Quebec, the Repsol LNG plant in New Brunswick and the Pacific NorthWest LNG facility in B.C.
And when opportunity knocked to diversify our trading partners, the government failed to seize it. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, political leaders from Latvia, Ukraine, Germany, Greece and Poland turned to Canada seeking new LNG supply, but Trudeau insisted there was “no business case for LNG” and missed the chance to open new markets.
Finally, the Trudeau government’s Bill C-69 created massive uncertainty in project reviews and approvals by introducing vague assessment criteria including “gender implications” for major energy projects including pipelines and LNG export facilities. In fact, according to a recent report, which analyzed 25 major projects that entered the federal government’s review process between 2019 and 2023, almost every project submission remained stuck in the early stages (phase 1 or 2) of the four-phase process, underscoring the inefficiency of the review process.
Meanwhile, the Trudeau government’s Bill C-48 restricts Canadian exports to Asia by banning large oil tankers from B.C.’s northern coast. And its targeted emissions cap, which requires only the oil and gas sector to cut greenhouse gases by 35 per cent below 2019 levels by 2030, is designed to curtail energy production, further limiting Canada’s ability to meet global energy demands.
During the upcoming election campaign, Canadians should demand to hear how (or if) each party will remove barriers that hinder the development of energy projects and streamline approvals to unlock Canada’s untapped potential. Tariffs or not, Canada can’t afford to keep undermining its key export sector with regulatory barriers.
Julio Mejía
Policy Analyst
Elmira Aliakbari
Director, Natural Resource Studies, Fraser Institute
From Resource Works
By Geoff Russ
For major projects, what is old is new again
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s second wave of “nation-building projects” sounds transformative: six new energy and mining proposals, plus a northern corridor, added to the first tranche unveiled in September, and included in the freshly passed federal budget for the fiscal year.
Together, Ottawa says, they amount to more than $116 billion in investment and are central to “realizing Canada’s full potential as an energy superpower.” That is the pitch in the federal news release.
Look closely, though, and a different picture emerges. For major projects, what is old is new again. Almost every file now being “fast-tracked” was already on the books, sometimes for a decade or more.
The new referrals to the Major Projects Office (MPO) are all familiar: the Nisga’a-led Ksi Lisims LNG terminal on B.C.’s north coast; BC Hydro’s North Coast Transmission Line; Canada Nickel’s Crawford project near Timmins; Nouveau Monde Graphite’s Matawinie mine north of Montréal; Northcliff’s Sisson tungsten project in New Brunswick; and the Inuit-owned Iqaluit Nukkiksautiit hydro project in Nunavut. The “Northwest Critical Conservation Corridor” in B.C. and the Yukon is added as a long-range concept.
Long timelines and longstanding obstacles
None of these is a fresh idea. As the Globe and Mail notes in a project-by-project rundown, Ksi Lisims has been in development for years and already faces two Federal Court challenges from nearby First Nations and opposition from Wet’suwet’en hereditary leaders who fought Coastal GasLink. The North Coast Transmission Line was identified in 2023, with B.C. legislation to fast-track it and term-sheet co-ownership deals with First Nations already in place. The Sisson mine has been stalled at the pre-construction stage for more than a decade, despite earlier approvals and new public money to update its feasibility study.
Iqaluit hydro is hardly a novelty either. As Globe reporting shows, dam concepts near the city have been studied since the mid-2000s, with the current Inuit-owned proposal building on that earlier work and backed by federal engineering funds. The Crawford nickel project was acquired in 2019 and has spent years lining up investors and a complex financing stack, documented in both CBC and Financial Post coverage. Matawinie received its Quebec authorization in 2021, has an impact-benefit agreement with the local Atikamekw Nation and now enjoys federal price-floor guarantees on graphite.
The first tranche, announced in September, follows the same pattern. LNG Canada Phase 2 in Kitimat, new nuclear at Darlington, Contrecoeur container capacity at the Port of Montréal, McIlvenna Bay in Saskatchewan and the Red Chris expansion in B.C. were all in various stages of planning long before Carney entered office. The MPO is not inventing a new project pipeline; it is trying to accelerate the one Ottawa already had.
Acceleration is the point — and industry welcomes it
Acceleration is, to be fair, the point. The Calgary-based MPO, led by former Trans Mountain head Dawn Farrell, is designed to run permits in parallel, not one after another, and to coordinate financing through bodies like the Canada Infrastructure Bank and Canada Growth Fund. Farrell told CBC that work which might have taken “five or six more years” could be cut to roughly two. In a country where large projects regularly die of regulatory exhaustion, that is significant.
Industry likes the signal. Canada Nickel CEO Mark Selby says MPO referral “puts us in the fast lane,” even without the more controversial “national interest” label in Bill C-5 that would allow cabinet to set aside parts of the Fisheries Act, Species at Risk Act or Impact Assessment Act. Inuit proponents of the Iqaluit project welcome Carney’s description of their hydro plan as a breakthrough for Arctic sovereignty, replacing millions of litres of diesel.
But a superpower strategy this is not
Still, if this is what becoming an “energy superpower” looks like, it is a modest start.
Notably absent from Carney’s list is any new oil pipeline. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has spent months pushing a concept for a bitumen pipeline from the oil sands to the northern B.C. coast, doing provincial groundwork in the hope a private proponent will one day take it over. A BBC report sets out the feud with B.C. Premier David Eby, who dismisses the idea as “fictional” and “political” and insists no company wants it, accusing Smith of jeopardizing B.C.’s LNG ambitions. Smith has called that stance “un-Canadian.”
Western frustration is growing. In the National Post, Whitecap Resources chief executive Grant Fagerheim warns of “fury from Alberta and Saskatchewan” if a pipeline to tidewater is never prioritized and argues producers are tired of a U.S.-dominated system where Canadian barrels sell at a discount while others capture the margins. He favours an energy corridor carrying oil, gas, power and rail, not just more rhetoric about nation-building.
Northern ambitions lag behind rhetoric
Another gap is the North. The Indigenous-led Arctic Gateway partnership, Manitoba and Ottawa are already spending heavily on the Hudson Bay Railway and planning new storage and loading systems to expand the Port of Churchill for grain, potash, critical minerals and Arctic resupply. Carney talks up a “huge host of opportunities” in northern Manitoba, but Churchill sits only on the MPO’s lower-profile “transformative strategies” list, with a full plan now pushed out to 2026.
Meanwhile, the one project that has fundamentally shifted Canada’s oil export position is the long-delayed Trans Mountain expansion. As Resource Works points out, TMX now sends diluted bitumen from Burnaby to Asia, shrinking the old “captive discount” and giving Canada genuine leverage in global markets. But TMX predates Carney’s government by more than a decade and only exists because Ottawa nationalized a struggling private pipeline to get it built.
Evolution, not revolution
Carney’s major-projects push is real, and for the companies involved, the prospect of faster permits and clearer federal backing is very good news. Yet for a government that talks about mobilizing a trillion dollars and remaking Canada as an energy superpower, the current list is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. For now, Ottawa is mostly trying to build what was already on the drawing board. The tougher choices on pipelines, ports and interprovincial trade still lie in front of it.
Headline photo credit to THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
From the Fraser Institute
By Jason Childs
From 2015 to 2024, the government sector in Canada—including federal, provincial and municipal—added 950,000 jobs, which accounted for roughly 30 per cent of total employment growth in the country, finds a new study published today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.
“In Canada, employment in the government sector has skyrocketed over the last 10 years,” said Jason Childs, a professor of economics at the University of Regina, senior fellow at the Fraser Institute and author of Examining the Growth of Public-Sector Employment Since 2015.
Over the same 10-year period (2015-2024), government-sector employment grew at an annual average rate of 2.7 per cent compared to only 1.7 per cent for the private sector. The study also examines employment growth by province. Government employment (federal, provincial, municipal) grew at a higher annual rate than the private sector in every province except Manitoba over the 10-year period.
The largest gaps between government-sector employment growth compared to the private sector were in Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Quebec and British Columbia. The smallest gaps were in Alberta and Prince Edward Island.
“The larger government’s share of employment, the greater the ultimate burden on taxpayers to support government workers—government does not pay for itself,” Childs said.
A related study (Measuring the Cost to Canadians from the Growth in Public Administration, also authored by Childs) finds that, from 2015 to 2024, across all levels of government in Canada, the number of public administrators (many of who
work in government ministries, agencies and other offices that do not directly provide services to the public) grew by more than 328,000—or 3.5 per cent annually (on average).
“If governments want to reduce costs, they should look closely at the size of their public administration,” Childs said.
Examining the Growth of Public Sector Employment Since 2015
Jason Childs
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