Canada’s energy wealth is bleeding south

Without infrastructure, Canada is losing billions while the U.S. cashes in on our oil and gas

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Canada’s energy wealth is stuck in traffic, and our American neighbours are cashing in. It’s worse than that. Canada is bleeding millions of dollars daily because it lacks the infrastructure to export its natural resources efficiently.

While our oil and gas continue to flow—mainly to the United States—provinces like Alberta and British Columbia are forced to sell at steep discounts. This isn’t just an economic inefficiency; it’s a structural failure of national policy. The beneficiaries? American businesses and their governments which pocket the profits and tax revenues that should be circulating through the Canadian economy. This is no way to achieve economic sovereignty for Canada.

With U.S. interests reaping the rewards, this should have been a central talking point when Prime Minister Carney met with President Trump earlier this month.

Ottawa often offers the recent completion of the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) pipeline as an example of federal support for the energy sector. But such claims are misleading. Kinder Morgan, a private enterprise, had initially planned to build the extension without a penny from taxpayers. It withdrew only after being crippled by federal regulatory delays and political uncertainty.

Ottawa stepped in not as a benevolent saviour to help Albertans, but to prevent lawsuits and save face—ultimately overpaying for the pipeline and watching construction costs balloon to nearly six times the original estimate.

To now declare this bungled project a “gift” to Alberta, as a recent op-ed in the Toronto Star did, is not only tone-deaf: it’s an insult. It ignores the fact that Alberta’s taxpayers helped finance the very project Ottawa botched. It also reveals an astonishing lack of understanding of the historical, economic and political dynamics at play between Ottawa and Western Canada.

The tragedy is that TMX, despite its importance, is insufficient. Our infrastructure bottlenecks remain. With each passing day, Canada forfeits wealth that could fund essential improvements in health care, education and national defence.

According to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, which has developed a real-time tracker to monitor these losses, the price differential between what we could earn on global markets versus what we settle for domestically adds up to $26.5 billion annually.

Ottawa’s reluctance to greenlight new infrastructure is a primary cause of this problem. Ironically, the losses from this reluctance in a single year would be enough to pay for another TMX, mismanaged or not. The solution lies in a national commitment to building utility corridors: designated routes that facilitate the movement of energy, goods and services unhindered across provincial boundaries.

Carney’s recent promise to remove all interprovincial trade barriers by July 1 is a nice soundbite. But unless it includes meaningful infrastructure commitments, it is bound to fail like every other rhetorical flourish before it.

Canadians should be rightly skeptical. After all, what Ottawa has failed to achieve in the 157 years since Confederation is unlikely to be accomplished in the next 60 days.

The political math doesn’t help either. The Bloc Québécois holds the balance of power in the 45th Parliament, and its obstructionist stance on national pipeline development ensures the advent of more gridlock, not less. The federal government continues to uphold Bill C-69—dubbed the “no-pipelines bill”—further entrenching the status quo.

Meanwhile, Canada remains in the absurd position of relying on U.S. infrastructure to transport oil from the West to Ontario and Quebec. This undermines our economic independence, energy security and national sovereignty. No amount of “elbows up” will correct this enormous gap.

If the prime minister is serious about transforming Canada’s economic landscape and making the country strong, he must bypass the Bloc by cooperating with the Official Opposition. A grand bargain focused on utility corridors, interprovincial infrastructure and national trade efficiency would serve Alberta, Saskatchewan, and every Canadian who depends on a strong and self-reliant economy.

The stakes are high. We need a more productive country to face challenges within Canada and from abroad. Billions in lost revenue could fund new hospitals, more schools and better military readiness.

Instead, along with the limited exports of oil and gas, we’re exporting great opportunities to middlemen—and greater economic strength—south of the border.

The path forward is clear. A strong, self-reliant Canada needs infrastructure. It needs corridors. It needs leadership.

Marco Navarro-Genie is the vice president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He is coauthor, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).