“We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life…we are simply not capable of processing the full scope of reality. Our minds cope by choosing fragments of it to the exclusion, and often to the erasure, of the rest.” – Maria Popova/The Marginalian
Great words, hey? All part of the human condition. All of us suck, in this regard, at some time or other. Best practice, as a human, is to just become cognizant of this trap we all fall into.
It is even easier to fall into the trap when surrounded by like-minded or sycophantic people, one’s that don’t challenge much. In other words, politics.
Ok I’ll be nice. That quote is an olive branch to the ruling cabal; that it is very difficult to absorb many facets of reality for anyone, and far harder when boxed in by an ideological perspective, baked in on campaign trails, that makes it ten times harder to ‘process the full scope of reality’ if that means walking back cherished positions.
Well, hard as it might be, the time has come. Poke your head up from doomscrolling or cat videos or TikTok and look around. The world is screaming for steady, reliable, natural resources.
The full scope of reality is pounding at Canada’s door, saying, Excuse me, we really, really need Canadian oil and gas and metals and minerals. Even the CBC is running with the idea, including a story, boldly entitled where no editor has gone before, “Nervous nations calling Canada’s energy minister after Iran strikes”. The article quotes energy minister Tim Hodgson as saying, “So we’ve already seen an uptick in inquiries about how quickly Canada can expand its clean and conventional energy exports.”
The recovery program begins with some deprogramming. I seriously doubt many countries are now asking Canada how quickly it can scale up ‘clean energy’, and so what he is really trying to say but it is oh-so-hard is that countries are desperate for Canadian oil and gas (the tagged on reference to ‘conventional energy exports’).
Many countries are looking for oil and natural gas, without qualifiers. Actually, they have been for a while. Several years ago, multiple nations including Germany and Japan came to Canada looking for our natural gas, and we told them to pound sand. Have some green hydrogen instead, our leader lectured, despite the inconvenient problem of developing an imaginary industry from scratch that is just incomprehensibly uneconomic from any vantage point. The countries went away.
Here is why they went away; this was the attitude of our federal government two short years ago. A quote from 2024 has been making the rounds on social media lately, whereby Liberal cabinet minister, no it’s worse, Liberal minister in charge of natural resources, lectures the media: “…oil and gas will peak this decade, in fact oil is probably peaking this year, and the economic plan of the Conservative of Canada is simply to produce more oil and gas into a market that inevitably, if we are going to fight climate change, will begin to decline. That is ridiculous…it will leave Canada uncompetitive and poorer..i would encourage Mr Poilievre and the folks that sit on the conservative benches to at least try to tell the truth.”
It is refreshing to hear current Minister Hodgson speak differently; a critical starting point. We are not out of the woods by any stretch with respect to fully leveraging our natural resource assets, but we also need to remember how immensely difficult it is for anyone to walk back a firmly or nearly religiously held belief. Hodgson wasn’t part of the Trudeau government, but the current apparatus definitely contains much frightening continuity.
Sadly, it takes big negative shocks to the system to shatter complacency. There is no other way. Canadian energy commentators have for a decade been pounding the table about how valuable Canada’s natural resources are to the world, how we take them for granted, how we underestimate the value to the Canadian economy by pushing for the industry’s demise. We glossed over the importance of messaging, and symbolism; how devastating it was to investors to hear our very own government flex its muscles to thwart development of all sorts of Canadian resources.
Canada has a black eye to this day. The Bank of Canada, a thoroughly staid institution (which they should be), calls a lack of foreign investment in Canada a ‘break-the-glass’ emergency situation. We can all see the problem. Everyone, everywhere.
It is great to see attempts to woo foreign investment as we are seeing now, but a pile of MOUs is less valuable than a pile of Kleenex. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The problem is not resolved by drunken-buddy level enthusiasm that evaporates the next morning when reality surfaces again.
Canada has to deal with some of the regulatory calcification we’ve let build up for some time, before we will be an attractive investment destination. We are still paralyzed by endless programs and reporting requirements and regulations that make potential investors go “Ewww…is there anywhere else?”
Here are some real life examples, among many. We have a federal plastics registry reporting requirement, with real teeth, that requires virtually any business enterprise bigger than a mom and pop shop to document all plastic flowing through the business – where it came from, how many kg per year, what kind of plastic each piece is (Phase 1 – PHASE 1! – lists 21 different types of plastic), and where it went. The Guide for Reporting for Phase 1 is 60 pages long. You must comply, or else.
There is the Forced Labour in Canadian Supply Chains legislation, which is very similar; companies need to report on whether or not there is child or forced labour in any of their supplies, no matter where they originate and no matter how impossible it is to determine. It’s not just a computer you purchase; the reporting structure wants to know the possibility of child or forced labour that went into each of the components. How the hell would anyone know that? Doesn’t matter. You must comply, or else.
If we are serious about attracting investment, we need to get rid of a vast number of “You must comply, or else” programs that will accomplish little, at great cost. The federal web page announcing the plastics registry gleefully states that the program will create 42,000 jobs. More bureaucratic bloat, higher costs of business, higher taxes to pay those salaries…why?
It is a noble cause to reduce plastic going to landfills, as it is to stand against child and forced labour. But are these the ways to do it? Has no one in government heard of the 80/20 rule, whereby 80 percent of a typical problem can be resolved by focusing on the easiest/simplest 20 percent? These government approaches are completely devoid of any sense, because they are ideologically driven. The goal of the plastics registry, plainly stated on the federal website, is to have “zero plastic waste.” Is that realistic? Sensible? At what cost to investment?
Perhaps these two programs alone do not deter investors, but they are far from the only two. There are monsters like the industrial carbon tax, which still remains – only the consumer end was removed, because consumers vote. In other words, removing the consumer carbon tax was for purposes of electability, and nothing else.
Consider the effect of the current industrial carbon tax as of Apr 1, 2026. The carbon tax rises to $110/tonne which works out to about $5.75 per gigajoule. Over the past 12 months, Or Feb 25-Jan26,Alberta’s reference gas price, AECO, averaged CAD $1.63/GJ. In the US, the Henry Hub price for same period converted to CAD/GJ worked out to about $5.05. Hey, look at that! What a competitive advantage! Western Canadian gas has a $3.42/GJ cost advantage – which is massive for energy intensive industries.
Oh, but look out. Canada’s carbon tax added $4.99/GJ to the cost in 2025, and including that, Alberta’s dirt cheap gas now cost users $6.62/GJ whereas any customer that could access HH gas in the US paid the equivalent of $5.05. Purchasers up here paid 30 percent more for fuel than in the US. Let that sink in: here in Canada we are bloated with natural gas to the extent that the price is the same as it was last century, and yet anyone that wants to purchase that cheap gas to fuel a business will find the consumption bill is 30 percent higher than in the US. Welcome to Canada.
Our tax regime does not help either. The baseline is highly successful at chasing away businesses (and people, with taxes upon taxes upon taxes (federal/provincial/city/municipal/consumption)), and the tax code is such a political nightmare that even the CRA’s own advisors often can’t interpret it properly (speaking from frustrating hours of experience). All these things add up.
We can’t attract industry like that, and we can’t supply the world if our other regulatory boat anchors aren’t hoisted. All the MOU press conferences in the world won’t change that.
If we are serious about being a responsible global citizen and helping the world with its fuel supplies, and other natural resources, that has to be the cornerstone of government programs. National priorities, not national options ‘if they fit in the ideological framework’.
Remember back in 2023 when Japan came over and politely asked if we could supply them with natural gas, and we scolded them about carbon until they went away? Well, just this past week, Japan signed a $56 billion energy deal with the US. That will continue to happen unless we get serious as a country about the whole idea of foreign investment as a driver of growth, and not public spending.
Our current federal leader wrote an entire book less than five years ago in which he pledged complete and utter allegiance to an ideological framework. But he also seems pragmatic enough to grasp that the path to that nirvana is not what he envisioned when creating the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero as a mechanism to starve the hydrocarbon industry of capital and insurance.
It is definitely not easy to walk back you Value(s). But the world really needs that to happen. Literally needs it, as in…we need fuel. As soon as possible.
There is an eastern European saying that “Fear has big eyes.” Investing is the same. Investors see all that bureaucratic junk, and go elsewhere.
At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative of imminent fossil fuel demise, facing into the storm. And now everyone is coming around to this realization as well. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here. (His personal energy site, Public Energy Number One, is on hiatus until there are more hours in the day.)