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Editorial: Raising energy risk realities in Canada

The good news is that Canada’s domestic energy security remains among the highest in the developed world; the bad news is that its security of energy development scores far lower.
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The good news is that Canada’s domestic energy security remains among the highest in the developed world; the bad news is that its security of energy development scores far lower.

The 2018 International Index of Energy Security Risk ranks Canada seventh overall on the list of 25 large energy-consuming countries. It also notes that the revolution in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling has established the United States, once a net importer of oil, as the world’s top oil and gas producer. 

The challenge for Canada, a major global energy producer, is to generate full marketplace return for its energy in a new fossil fuel reality where its southern neighbour is one of its major competitors but also virtually its only customer. Attempts to meet that challenge via the West Coast have been blocked at pretty much every turn, and Canada appears bent on ensuring it gets far more challenging.

As a Fraser Institute report detailed earlier this year, environmental assessment is set to get more complex in Canada with Bill C-69’s introduction because climate change, traditional Indigenous knowledge and gender impacts will all be factored into infrastructure and development assessments that already lack any rigorous standards or criteria.

Those and other elements that raise politically discretionary aspects of approval will make it all but impossible to execute any economically ambitious project in this country.

Canada’s domestic energy security might still be relatively high following the passage of Bill C-69, but its ability to leverage its natural resource riches will be seriously compromised. 

The economic consequences of that might not be felt immediately. But in the long run, development opponents will wonder why their standard of living has dropped as economic realities trump political dogma. By then, however, it will be too late. Canada will have lost the game. It will be an also-ran in the global economy, and politically motivated green demands will be a luxury its citizens can no longer afford.