Let’s make Canada a great resource-exporting nation again
Calgary Alta. March 18, 2025– In the end, all it took was a trade war. After a decade of heated debates on Canada’s future in resource development and climate leadership, we’ve arrived at some striking conclusions.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre now seem to agree that a consumer carbon tax is a bad idea. While this may shock anyone who has followed Canadian energy debates over the past decade, an even more remarkable development has unfolded in just a few short weeks.
Three out of four Canadians now support the construction of new pipelines, according to a new Nanos poll. This shift has been driven by the realization of ordinary Canadians that most of Eastern Canada’s oil and natural gas travels through U.S. pipelines, making us vulnerable to shifting political winds. Suddenly, domestic energy security is at the top of the agenda.
It’s a pivotal moment for our country to reimagine its role in energy development and climate policy. Now is the time to not just chart a new path but deliver with real action and investment.
From our inception, Canada has been a resource-exporting nation. The fur trade, fisheries, timber and minerals built the Canada we know and love and can no longer be taken for granted. Today is no different. We are blessed with resources the world wants: uranium, potash, wheat, canola, lentils, oil, natural gas, steel, lithium and hydroelectricity. These hold the key to our next era of prosperity.
Yet Canada faces major challenges in exporting these resources. While our geography makes access difficult, we have compounded the problem with unnecessary, self-inflicted wounds that betray the values that have long defined our resource export economy.
Energy and climate policy have been among the most contentious issues of the past decade, and politicians across the spectrum share responsibility. The Left’s ideological overemphasis on solving global climate problems, which Canada cannot do single-handedly, has come at the expense of our prosperity and our global influence. The Right has failed to articulate how Canada can succeed in a world demanding lower emissions.
As Canada faces an existential moment, it is long past time for both sides to stop being half right – and half wrong. In this new spirit of consensus Mr. Carney and Mr. Poilievre seem to be displaying on consumer carbon pricing, one hopes there are far more things they can agree on to secure Canada’s future as a resource-exporting country.
First, it should be a consensus that we urgently need new trading partners. Second, after nearly 30 years of international effort and trillions of global public dollars spent, the world has not yet made a dent in global emissions with increasing climate disasters on the horizon. The current global climate plan has failed. We need a Plan B. Third, Canada’s politicized and overregulated, complicated approval process for big infrastructure projects is a major hindrance to building the future all of us Canadians deserve.
Once the problem is made clear to all, the solutions can follow under a new Canadian consensus. If we want to export our resources beyond the United States, oil and gas remain our best, fastest and most profitable option. Fixing the crippling overregulation that energy projects in Canada face – not the least of which is the oil and gas emissions cap – need to promptly be remedied to ensure our resource competitiveness in a global market.
While some of our most promising new resource export markets, such as Europe, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and the Philippines, have been quietly scaling back their own climate ambitions, long term they see the value in lower carbon resources. Abandoning climate policy altogether should be off the table; a smarter strategy should be embraced
Realistically, Canada is nowhere near meeting its 2030 climate commitments without serious economic consequences. Canada should embrace its ability to export LNG that can displace the coal being used in developing countries. While this would temporarily increase national emissions, it would significantly lower global emissions and position Canada as a leader in a desperately needed new global climate paradigm.
Our ability to deliver this future of energy and climate hinges on our ability to innovate. No smart resource and climate strategy can work without a fundamental rethink of Canada’s broken innovation strategy. Despite the highest per capita government R&D spending among G7 countries, we rank the second-lowest on the innovation index.
Finding solutions may be harder than identifying the problem, but let’s hope the two capable leaders competing in the next federal election have a thoughtful, honest debate about what it will take for Canada to succeed in a world where old assumptions no longer hold true.
About Avatar Innovations
Avatar is Canada’s first corporate venture studio focused on decarbonization. Avatar fills a critical gap in the energy innovation ecosystem by working with large industrial firms to champion solutions from within by engaging their staff. It creates a safe “third space” for energy companies and academia to collaborate and unlock new business opportunities.
For more information about Avatar’s unique model, please visit www.avatarinnovations.energy.