Trudeau’s done! And the oilpatch rejoices!

The Canadian oilpatch, whom Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made clear he wanted to phase out, collectively let out cries of rejoicing as the announcement came from Ottawa that Trudeau the Younger was resigning.

Standing on the steps of Rideau Cottage, where he once led daily press conferences during the COVID-19 pandemic, Trudeau announced on Jan. 6 he would be resigning, but staying on as prime minister until a new Liberal leader was chosen. In the meantime, parliament would be prorogued until March 24.

His “sunny ways” turned into a decade of darkness for the Canadian energy industry.

One of his earliest acts as prime minister was to shut down the Northern Gateway pipeline project, proclaiming that the Great Bear Rain Forest was no place for a pipeline. Yet the Coastal GasLink pipeline, transporting natural gas instead of oil, was built in later years to the same destination, Kitimat.

The tanker ban off the northern British Columbia coast effectively killed the idea of additional oil exports from that coast.

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Teck, one of Canada’s oldest and largest mining companies, walked away from its $20 billion Frontier oilsands mine project in 2020, taking a billion dollar hit in doing so. At the time, Teck President and CEO Don Lindsay wrote a scathing open letter to federal Minister of Natural Resources, Jonathan Wilkinson. In it, he said, “The promise of Canada’s potential will not be realized until governments can reach agreement around how climate policy considerations will be addressed in the context of future responsible energy sector development. Without clarity on this critical question, the situation that has faced Frontier will be faced by future projects and it will be very difficult to attract future investment, either domestic or foreign.”

This was indeed a common thread throughout Trudeau’s tenure, with energy project after project dying, while the federal governments’ focus on climate change over everything trumped all.

His government’s movement of the the environmental goalposts resulted in the Energy East Pipeline being cancelled by proponent Trans Canada. It’s original planned in-service date was December, 2018. If that had happened, Canada would have had East Coast oil export capacity well in place by 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and Canada’s European allies were crying for help.

Those same allies, particularly Germany, and then Japan and Greece, came to Canada, asking for liquefied natural gas. Instead, Trudeau told them there was “no business case,” in particular for Germany. Instead, he took German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Newfoundland to sign an agreement. The hare-brained scheme would involve building on-shore wind turbines on the southwest corner of Newfoundland. They would then electrolyze fresh water captured from an old mine into hydrogen. But since there was only one ship on the entire planet at the time capable of transporting liquid hydrogen (and it was smaller than a World War 2 Liberty Ship), that hydrogen would then have to be converted to anhydrous ammonia for transport to Germany. This was the deal Trudeau offered Scholz, while in the same visit saying there was no business case for LNG. In the meantime, Germany built an LNG import terminal in less than 200 days.

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In his home province of Quebec, Energie Saguenay had major LNG project in the works, with no less than Warren Buffet as a principal investor. But the federal Liberal government and Quebec government both killed the project.

And Pieridae quietly walked away from its Goldboro LNG project in Nova Scotia, yet another export project that did not happen under the Trudeau government.

When President Joe Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline literally within minutes of being inaugurated in January, 2021, Trudeau’s government offered hardly a whimper in protest.

His government did build the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion (TMX), but only after it essentially scared away the original proponent, Kinder Morgan. The project ended up costing in the range of 6x original estimates.

Many times over the last nine years Pipeline Online was told how investors were reluctant to put money into Canadian and Saskatchewan oil and gas because of their concerns over the federal Liberal government.

From the “No More Pipelines Act,” Bill C-69, to the “No More Saying Nice Things About What Your Company Does For The Environment Act,” Bill C-59, the legislative agenda was chock full of ways to make life difficult for the oilpatch.

By 2019, protests were being held in nearly every oil town across the country, with truck convoys protesting Trudeau’s energy policies. The convoy that rolled through Estevan just before Christmas, 2018, was 14 kilometres long.

By 2022, a trucker’s convoy protesting COVID measures stripped Canadians of their rights, and saw bank accounts frozen.

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As time went on it became clear that the Trudeau administration’s singular focus on anthropogenic climate change dominated everything. While the federal carbon tax was the most obvious initiative, it was just one of a list as long as your arm. As of October, 2022, they included:

• Federal Carbon Tax
• Oil and Gas Methane Mandate
• Oil and Gas Emissions Cap Mandate
• Fertilizer Use Mandate
• Clean Fuel Regulations
• Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate
• Federal Output Based Pricing System (another form of carbon tax)
• Agricultural Methane Initiatives
• Landfill Methane Mandate

The government of Saskatchewan calculated that if all those were fully implemented, the cost to this province would $111 billion between 2023 and 2035. And that list didn’t include the mammoth Clean Electricity Regulations, meant to eliminate coal and natural gas from power generation. In Saskatchewan, on any given day up to 88 per cent of power comes from coal and natural gas, and in Alberta, the number is as high as 96 per cent for natural gas.

Indeed, since Trudeau took power in late 2015, the Saskatchewan government has largely been at war with the federal government over those climate change policies. This lead to the Saskatchewan First Act, and the economic impact assessment tribunals it spawned.

For everyone who put a “F— Trudeau” sticker on the back of their truck, Monday was a day of celebration.

 

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