Some context:
“We as a nation need to build some new pipelines for conventional energy”
Before Carney had even become prime minister, his campaign for the Liberal leadership included pledges that a Carney government would be championing some kind of new fossil fuel infrastructure.
In one of his first sit-down interviews since declaring his entry into federal politics, Carney said he supported “the concept” of a pipeline to move oil from Alberta to the Atlantic Coast. “We as a nation need to build some new pipelines for conventional energy,” he told CBC’s Rosemary Barton in February.
“You need to look forward in the future … that may mean you need pipelines that go East-West.”
In the final days of the premiership of Justin Trudeau, his industry minister told reporters that an oil pipeline could very well be a new national imperative. “Times have changed,” François-Philippe Champagne said in February, before adding that Canada may “need pipelines that go East-West.”
The comments had been spurred by threats of ruinous U.S. tariffs against Canadian goods, with U.S. President Donald Trump just beginning to lean into his rhetoric about annexing Canada as a 51st state. Champagne is no longer industry minister, but he was picked for the Carney cabinet and is currently serving as minister of national revenue.
“It’s about getting pipelines built, across this country, so we that can displace imports of foreign oil.”
In March, just before calling the 2025 federal election, Carney flew to Edmonton for a memorably tense meeting with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, followed by a scrum with reporters. Postmedia’s David Staples asked Carney if he would be repealing legislation that the oil sector had identified as a barrier to new infrastructure, such as the 2019 Impact Assessment Act.
Carney didn’t address the core of the question, but he did say that Canada needed oil pipelines, if only to ensure that consumption of imported oil in the country’s eastern regions was supplanted by Canadian supply. “It’s about getting pipelines built across this country so that we can displace imports of foreign oil,” he said.
“We have to choose a few projects, a few big projects, not necessarily pipelines, but maybe pipelines. We’ll see.”
Carney soon started adding caveats to his “new pipeline” promises. The above quote, delivered in French, was one of the first instances of Carney dialling back the notion that he would be leading a pro-pipeline government. The comment was delivered in April, two weeks before election day on Tous le monde en parle, Quebec’s most popular talk show.
In June, Carney said any new pipeline couldn’t be built without “consensus of all the provinces and the Indigenous people” — a threshold far higher than anything previously entertained for a Canadian infrastructure project.
“Will I support building a pipeline? Yes.”
Just two weeks after the election, Carney was asked about his support for oil pipelines during an interview with CTV. Carney replied that he not only supported them, but that he had said so “multiple times.”
“First off, I’ve said repeatedly: yes,” he told host Vassy Kapelos on May 13. Carney said he couldn’t unilaterally approve any pipeline, and that “consensus” would be needed. But he added “I’m a prime minister who can help create that consensus.”
That way, one can understand the whole pile of nothing that will happen after:
According to Radio-Canada (the CBC’s French-language service) Prime Minister Mark Carney will not include an oil pipeline in his list of national priority projects to be released Thursday. Radio-Canada says three sources with knowledge of the list have confirmed the Liberals’ decision.
Well, so much for Canada becoming an energy superpower, as Carney has promised repeatedly. That’s not going to happen without at least one, and likely two, pipelines to go east and west to new export terminals.
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Despite Prime Minister Mark Carney’s hyperbole in announcing five “nation building” projects Thursday, what he actually proclaimed was rather modest in scope.
The projects are not new and many of them have already spent years on Canada’s regulatory run-around circuit.
Now they must go through Carney’s new Major Projects Office as well as intense scrutiny from a new Indigenous Advisory Council.
The projects — and all future projects — must also meet Liberal climate goals before they can be approved. ...
“One factor behind declining business investment is the heavy regulatory burden imposed by the current federal government on the extraction sector, which includes: mining, quarrying, and oil and gas,” said a Fraser Institute report last year.
“In the last few years, federal diktats and expansions of bureaucratic control have swept the auto industry, child care, supermarkets and many other sectors.”
The effect of all that red tape was that “Canada’s cumulative real growth in per-person GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) has been a paltry 1.7 per cent and trending downward, compared to 18.6 per cent and trending upward in the United States. Put differently, if the Canadian economy had tracked with the U.S. economy over the past nine years, average incomes in Canada would be much higher today.”
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