Hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and economic activity have been forsaken – intentionally. Pictured: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Photo Credit: Justin Trudeau/X.
Since 2015, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a cadre of environmental ideologs took office, the federal government has pursued a climate change agenda at the expense of the country’s resource development and economic growth. In doing so Canadians have witnessed a decade of lost opportunities with the Liberals’ anti-oil and gas policies. Literally, hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and economic activity have been forsaken – intentionally.
To understand what has occurred with the Canada’s economy through the last 10 years, one needs to appreciate that the Trudeau Liberals’ economic and energy strategies have been developed with global environmental goals in mind. The chief architect of the Liberals’ approach to the country’s economic growth and development is Trudeau’s former principal secretary Gerald Butts, an ardent environmental activist. Butts has been – and remains – a central driver of the Liberals’ green agenda, an agenda that has shaped the country’s economic and energy policies.
Ontarians will recall that in the 2000s Butts was former premier Dalton McGuinty’s principal secretary and he designed the bundle of pricey renewable energy incentives introduced in Ontario’s Green Energy Act. Butts moved from Queen’s Park to Parliament Hill with the rise of his close friend Trudeau to advance green initiatives on the larger, national canvass. He was instrumental in crafting the Liberal Party’s 2015 and 2019 election platforms, central in seeing the environmental promises realized in government policies.
Butts quarterbacked the prime minister, finance minister Chrystia Freeland, and environment ministers Catherine McKenna and Steven Guilbeault to ensure the Liberals green agenda impacted all economic decisions in Canada. He worked closely with both Freeland and global banker and UN’s Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney to ensure Canadian policies were tied directly to the global objectives of the World Economic Forum, the international agreements relating to 2030 Agenda, and the UN goals set for 2050. For years he operated from his perch in the Prime Minister’s Office (until he had to resign amidst the SNC-Lavalin/Jody Wilson Raybould scandal). Today he remains active, marshalling a team of environmentalists in the international Eurasia Group consultancy, overseeing an untold number of contracts with the government of Canada, and delivering on untold services for his networks through the country (including managing Mark Carney’s bid for Liberal Party leadership and prime minister).
This background on Butts is important context to realize that what Canadians have experienced with the country’s energy and natural resource development through the last decade is not some chance occurrence, but a specific state-interventionalist approach that was orchestrated and has been doggedly executed to fulfill a set of environmental priorities. The environmental activists and globalists within the Trudeau government have been effectively sabotaging the development of the country’s rich store of natural resources. The Liberals have routinely rejected promising economic enterprises that would have grown the Canadian economy – building the country’s energy infrastructure and expanding the country’s export markets.
Canada’s oil and natural gas industries serve as one of the country’s greatest assets and greatest wealth generators. The economic growth resulting from Canada’s oil and gas production and exports underwrites why Canadians can afford and enjoy such a high standard of living. Given this reality, it is remarkable to track to what extent the Liberals have destroyed Canada’s energy sector’s potential during their time in office.
For example, the Liberals finally passed in 2019 two pieces of legislation they had been pushing through Parliament for years, designed to shut down oil and gas exports in the west: Bill C-48 placed a moratorium on oil tanker activity along the B.C. coast, and Bill C-69, which is better known in Alberta as the “no more pipeline act.” With respect to the latter, even after the Supreme Court of Canada rendered a decisive ruling in 2023 that the act is unconstitutional with respect to federal overreach into provincial jurisdiction, the Trudeau Liberals maintained they were pressing forward with their environmental assessment process.
As an aside, with these “anti-oil and gas” laws there are three striking ironies that have never made much sense respecting the government’s environmental focus. First, Canadian resource development projects are subjected to the rigor of the new regulations, but the same carbon emission and environmental standards are not applied to oil and gas imported from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Second, B.C. can object to Alberta’s oil while the Vancouver port is the number one exporter of coal in North America; and Quebec can obstruct pipeline development while its provincial ports handle significant increases of imported Saudi oil. Finally, oil tankers are banned off the coast of B.C., but coal tankers and mega cruise ships remain free to traverse B.C. waters.
In recent years, the Trudeau government has continued their assault on the oil and gas sector with a plan to introduce an emissions cap that would in effect throttle back production by as much as 1.3 million barrels a day in order to meet new accelerated 2030 Agenda targets committed to the global community by the government. This, along with new legislation setting new net zero targets for 2035 as well as a labour program designed to specifically transition oil and gas workers to renewable resources and service jobs, has succeeded in putting a chill on investment and project development in the sector.
The Trudeau Liberals zealous pursuit of shutting down the oil and gas industries in Canada has resulted in $670 billion of investment lost in abandoned resource projects in the last decade, according to industry media source EnergyNow. There is a total of 31 projects that have been shelved since 2015, including Northern Gateway pipeline, a $7.9 billion investment that Trudeau himself vowed in 2014 he would personally kill. There was also Energy East pipeline ($15.7 billion), Pacific Northwest LNG (a $36 billion export plant), Energie Saguenay ($20 billion LNG plant), and Mackenzie Valley Pipeline (joint-venture partnership with Aboriginal Pipeline Group at estimated cost of $16.2 billion). The Trudeau government is prone to herald their involvement with Trans Mountain, but this is no success to boast about: an abandoned pipeline project purchased by the Crown for $4.4 billion and an estimated cost of completion of $7.4 billion in 2018 and then completed in 2024 at a final cost of $30.9 billion of taxpayers’ dollars.
Then there is the well-publicized cancellation of possible LNG resource development in Canada in the past two years. With Trudeau making the punctuating statement that there is “no business case” for developing the country’s LNG export markets, Canada has turned away no less than six countries and lost a total of $224 billion of LNG project development: Kitsault, Kitimat, Aurora, WCC, Steelhead, Prince Rupert, Goldboro, Grassy Point, and the above-mentioned Pacific Northwest and Saguenay.
The Trudeau government’s anti-oil and gas stance defies the fact that the country’s prosperity is reliant on a healthy oil and gas sector. Oil and gas, including extraction and support activities, petroleum refining, pipeline transportation and natural gas distribution, account for 7.5 per cent of national GDP. The oil and gas industries account for one million Canadian jobs and nearly one quarter of all Canadian exports. Canada is the fourth largest producer of oil in the world and is “the preferred country” to supply oil to the world, according to a 2023 Ipsos international survey.
The foreboding signs on the horizon for the Canadian economy bracing for the full impact of the U.S. tariffs suggests the federal government can no longer afford to throttle the oil and gas sector, the country’s engine of growth. There is renewed interest in laying new pipelines and investing in energy projects. And yet, even with a changing of the guard within the Liberal Party, there is a good chance that the new leader – likely Mark Carney – will maintain an environment agenda that is just as aggressive against the oil and gas sector.
Having spent years as a WEF Trustee in Davos and the special envoy for climate initiatives at the UN, Carney is fully committed to the 2030 Agenda and a green transition away from fossil fuels. Moreover, environmental zealot and self-proclaimed socialist Steven Guilbeault is odds-on-favorite to continue serving as the environment minister. But more significant is the fact that Carney’s wife, Diane Fox has a reputation as an “eco-warrior,” passionate about environmental and social justice causes. For the past few years Fox has been working beside none other than Gerald Butts at the Eurasia Group. She is a senior advisor, and her area of expertise is “global climate and energy policy.”
Given this tight circle of influence around the likely new prime minister, a Carney government will not deviate from the energy policies that the oil and gas sector has endured through the “Lost Decade” of the Trudeau government. It will be more of the same – perhaps worse: evermore lost investment and squandered opportunities that will ultimately jeopardize the country’s economy and Canadians’ prosperity.
Chris George is an advocate, government relations advisor, and writer/copy editor. As president of a public relations firm established in 1994, Chris provides discreet counsel, tactical advice and management skills to CEOs/Presidents, Boards of Directors and senior executive teams in executing public and government relations campaigns and managing issues. Prior to this PR/GR career, Chris spent seven years on Parliament Hill on staffs of Cabinet Ministers and MPs. He has served in senior campaign positions for electoral and advocacy campaigns at every level of government. Today, Chris resides in Almonte, Ontario where he and his wife manage www.cgacommunications.com. Contact Chris at chrisg.george@gmail.com.
