OPEC kicked the United States, the West, and the world’s poorest nations in the teeth recently with oil production cuts that will raise prices to help finance Russia’s war against Ukraine and Europe. And what has Canada done to help allay this situation, given that it is a country with one of the biggest oil and gas reserves on the planet?
Trudeau turned down Germany which was hoping to get a deal to
import LNG from Atlantic Canada. But Australia did not and within days of rejection by Canada, German utility Uniper signed an enormous
deal with an Australian company to bring in more natural gas. Even Norway, another virtue-signalling petro-giant, has
boosted production to help Europe fight against Russia’s war against Ukraine and the continent.
Ducking an opportunity to help defeat Vladimir Putin is hardly surprising given that Trudeau’s regime has destroyed all but one of the 18 proposed LNG projects in Canada in the past decade with its destructive, anti-resource agenda.
The Trudeau government has also failed to protect Canadians against foreign vested interests that spent millions on advertisements and activism to prevent and damage Canadian developments, pipelines, and oil projects, according to
research from the Alberta government’s Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns in 2021.
It showed that Ottawa also damaged Canada’s energy sector, between 2004 and 2019, by giving more than $414 million in Canadian taxpayer funds to 26 environmental organizations, many of which were directly involved in anti-energy campaigns. Only $41 million of the total was handed out before Trudeau’s election in 2015.
Such self-sabotage is, frankly, unforgivable. Imagine if Trudeau forked out $414 million to groups against Quebec’s power exports, B.C.’s forestry industry, or Ontario’s auto and banking sectors?
The war in Ukraine highlights the fact that Canada has become a lightweight nation due to a government run by a woke coalition that doesn’t understand economic development, how to protect domestic industries, or the importance of tending and fostering geopolitical alliances. Canadians live in a great, big, rich country that is run by very small-minded, isolated people.
Canadians live in a great, big, rich country that is run by very small-minded, isolated people
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In an attempt at damage control, Trudeau’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland
said in a speech in Washington that Canada was open to approving “economically viable” LNG terminals — a questionable assertion given years of Liberal resource obstructionism. Such promises are futile, commented Adam Legge, President of the Business Council of Alberta: “How many boards of directors are going to approve their CEO to go and spend billions of dollars on a project and a process and an application that is highly uncertain at the end of that?”
'The curse of oil is real, and so is the dependence of many of the world’s democracies on the world’s petro-tyrants'
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Freeland’s pronouncement set off a shockwave in Canada, surprising some trade experts and drawing praise from energy and mining groups who have been pushing for more regulatory certainty to encourage investment in Canada’s natural resource sector.
Critics of the Canada’s current regulatory process have argued it has hampered investment in oil and gas, renewables, hydrogen, mining and emissions-reduction projects, stalling growth in production and preventing Canadian resources from reaching global markets. While improvements have been made to strengthen consultations with Indigenous people under the federal Impact Assessment Act — the changes have not yet translated to more regulatory certainty for investors.
Still, Canadian industry groups have welcomed the deputy prime minister’s recent comments, urging the government to use the tools at its disposal to move critical minerals and energy projects forward more quickly.
However, the recent visit to Canada by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his departure from the country without an agreement on liquified natural gas (LNG) has exacerbated pessimism in the resource sector that the Liberal government will ultimately be willing to facilitate further fossil fuel production.
Canada’s ability to deploy renewables and low-emission fuels and technologies also face the prospect of being bogged down in the same regulatory processes that are hampering conventional energy production.
“It’s just too slow,” Legge said. “We have countries that we’re competing with in some of these more transition-oriented fuels like hydrogen, like rare earth minerals, in countries like Australia, who are doing a far better job, far faster job of approving these projects that are going to be essential to enabling these countries to compete in the low-to-zero emitting future.
“We’re going to miss that boat if we don’t begin to think more competitively, more nimbly.”