Political leaders reacting to tariff threats from the United States are considering oil and gas projects that may put them at odds with Canadians seeking to protect the country’s natural resources and transition to renewable energy.
Natural Resources and Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told reporters last week that the “world has changed” and no one could have predicted a U.S. president would treat Canada as an “adversary” instead of an ally.
Wilkinson said there were “vulnerabilities” in the country’s energy infrastructure and did not rule out reconsidering an oil pipeline eastward from Alberta and Saskatchewan to Ontario and Quebec, in order to avoid the U.S.
Currently, nearly half of Ontario and Quebec’s fuel needs are met by Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline, which moves Western Canadian oil down through Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario, operating in part “at the whim of the Americans,” writes John Paul Tasker for CBC News.
Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist at Greenpeace Canada, said that rather than considering new oil routes, “the smart play” for Canada would be to reduce its reliance on oil exports.
“Doubling down on new pipelines when the rest of the world is moving to electric vehicles and heat pumps would be like buying a Blockbuster franchise as Netflix is taking off.”
Spectre of American Ownership
Still, the idea of invigorating the oil and gas sector to boost Canadian sovereignty has taken seed with some business interests. A few weeks ago, the Business Council of Canada (BCC) published an op-ed calling for the country to become an “energy and resource superpower” in order to remain “strong and free.”
Its plan relies on American funding of key natural resources projects.
Heather Exner-Pirot, special advisor on energy transition for the BCC, wrote that getting more gas to the coast for shipping would, among other things, “provide Canada with more soft power on the world stage and reduce our economic dependence on the U.S.”
She called for the government to build more pipelines, mentioning the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) project and the now defunct Northern Gateway pipeline, urging that both be completed by 2030.
Her reference to the 800-kilometre PRGT pipeline, which would bring fracked gas to the coast from northeastern British Columbia, doesn’t mention that the company proposing it, Western LNG, is American-owned.
The Ksi Lisims LNG terminal would receive the gas, then process and ship 12 million tonnes of LNG per year from a floating platform off the province’s northwest coast, close to the Alaska border.
Western LNG’s funding comes from at least one of Trump’s allies, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, who chaired a council of influential CEOs advising Trump during his first term. His name was floated for treasury secretary in the new administration, though the job went to Scott Bessant.
Blackstone was 20th on the list of organizations funding political parties (mostly Republican) during the 2024 U.S. election, OpenSecrets.org reports.
Environmentalists Follow The Money
Some Indigenous groups have had concerns about the Ksi Lisims LNG project for years and have tried to block construction. At least one, the Nisga’a Nation, supports it and has partial ownership in the pipeline.
But John Young, LNG senior strategist for Climate Action Network Canada, sounded the alarm in a news release: “Governments across the country must stand firm in the face of the President’s bullying, not make rushed decisions that compromise our sovereignty for the benefit of American billionaires.”
He added that “handing control of Canada’s strategic energy resources to Trump’s corporate allies would be a grave mistake.”
Dogwood BC has been warning about the connection of LNG projects to American billionaires and the aspirations of the Trump administration. Communications director Kai Nagata writes that “we only have to look at the people promoting this industry to understand the real purpose of projects like Ksi Lisims LNG.” He points to a tweet by Trump in 2020 who said he wanted the U.S. to “remain the number one producer of oil and natural gas on earth.”
People like Trump and Schwarzman are driven by an America-first mindset and see Canada as “a quaint resource colony,” Nagata said.
Calls to revisit oil and gas projects have sprung up across Canada, but many were originally proposed, funded, and would have been owned by the U.S. or other foreign countries.
Quebec Revisits Gas Pipeline
Those calls extend to Quebec, where Environment Minister Benoit Charette told CBC News last week his province was willing to take another look at GNL Quebec, a 780-kilometre gas pipeline project that would have delivered 11 million tonnes of gas annually from northern Ontario to an LNG terminal in northern Quebec.
The terminal was rejected by the provincial and federal governments in 2021 over environmental concerns.
The decision led two American companies, which were behind the company promoting GNL Quebec, to file for US$20 billion in compensation from the Canadian government under the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement. But the rejection drew praise from a local group in Saguenay, Quebec, which saw it as the first LNG terminal blocked by a government and “a big step to end the era of (fossil) fuels.”
Quebec’s independent environmental review showed the project would likely increase greenhouse gas emissions in Canada by eight million tonnes annually, and that its risks far outweighed its benefits. At the time, the Innu Nation said it would oppose a pipeline on ancestral lands.
Fast forward to today, and the “fundamentals of the project haven’t changed, and neither have the environmental concerns,” Mark Purdon, a business school professor and holder of the decarbonization chair at the Université du Québec à Montréal, told CBC News this week.
What has changed is the intense pressure from Trump for Canada to become a “51st State.” But a new poll suggests the president’s continued threats have the majority of Canadians hardening their opposition to U.S. ownership of the country’s natural resources projects.
Resistance Builds Against Foreign Ownership
An online Leger poll shared [pdf] by Climate Action Network Canada found that 80% of respondents opposed American companies taking greater ownership of natural resources projects, with 70% strongly opposed. The sample of 1,553 people has a margin of error no greater than ±2.49%, 19 times out of 20.
Asked specifically about the PRGT pipeline and LNG terminal in B.C., 53% of respondents said they did not want to see the projects fast-tracked. British Columbians in the sample opposed rushing approvals at an even higher rate of 62%.
Newfoundland and Labrador bet heavily on the C$16 billion Bay du Nord offshore oil project, which is majority owned by Norwegian state fossil company Equinor. The project, a partnership with BP (formerly British Petroleum), was put on hold, but then restarted about a year ago.
When an industry group representing oil service and supply companies posted a video statement in early February about Canada’s response to the tariffs, there was an immediate reaction from environmental groups.
Energy NL’s CEO Charlene Johnson said in the video that the province should be “producing more oil to increase energy security.”
“With such uncertainty in the economy right now, it’s not the time to be bringing in things like the emissions cap,” Johnson said, claiming the measure would drive away investment.
Sierra Club Canada accused the company of taking advantage of the situation, saying it was “the latest in a long line of attempts by oil and gas corporations to exploit international crises to their own short term benefit.”
“Offshore oil must show it is greener in order to compete, and an emissions cap could allow the existing offshore oil industry to sell carbon credits to more polluting projects in Alberta,” the group added.
Sierra Club Canada’s national programs director, Gretchen Fitzgerald, suggested that with Trump blocking offshore wind in the U.S., “Canada should be taking this opportunity to lead on that file and build energy resilience and connectivity, and a greener data future.”
In Manitoba, another controversial gas pipeline and LNG terminal project would not be ruled out by Mike Moyes, Manitoba’s environment and climate change minister, writes CBC News.
“We’re going to look at every single project on the merits of that project,” Moyes said.
The Alberta-based proposal is to “thread an oil pipeline parallel to the Nelson River, along the south side of Wapusk National Park and below a section of Hudson Bay itself to a floating, offshore terminal capable of servicing oil tankers with ice-reinforced hulls.”
Environmental activists have said a spill on Hudson Bay would be impossible to even reach, let alone clean up.
“Putting bitumen into Hudson Bay is a terrible idea,” Eric Reder, a campaigner for the Wilderness Committee, said in 2023.
No funders have yet stepped forward for that project.
So we have politicians who know they are just posturing to some perceived need they see in the shifting political climate- even though they know there is no business case and nothing has changed about that. Correction- we have federal and provincial conservative politicians who see pro fossil fuel industry utility in this posturing. And liberal politicians who parrot the same garbage to protect themselves.
Depressing that shallow understandings in the public lead people to say they now support these phantom pipelines
And some of these projects are actually owned/financed by US billionaires working with Trump. Or other foreign countries. So, spreading the word about who may be behind the pressure tactics is essential. Let’s not “sell the farm” (to use an old idiom) in our panic over tariffs.