This was the week Canada stopped shooting its oil patch in the foot

Back in 2015, the United States was not even a minor producer of liquefied natural gas. The amount of LNG it exported was within a rounding error of zero. The infrastructure to move gas to tidewater, cool it into a liquid and ship it overseas simply didn’t exist.

But just seven years later, the U.S. had grown into the world’s largest exporter of LNG. It continues to hold that crown. Last year, exports were valued at US$43.6-billion – up more than 30,000 per cent from a decade earlier.

In contrast, Canadian exports of LNG over the same period went from zero to nil – until, on June 30, 2025, this country’s first-ever overseas shipment was loaded at the new LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, B.C.

Campbell Clark: Mark Carney moved his pipeline politics a long way in a short time

This week, LNG Canada, owned by a private consortium of global energy companies, announced that it is going forward with Phase 2 of the project. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government last year referred it to the Major Projects Office, designed to speed approvals. Private investment of $33-billion will double export capacity, which would make it one of the world’s largest facilities of its kind.

To supply the gas, TC Energy, owner of the Coastal GasLink pipeline between Dawson Creek, B.C., and Kitimat, will also invest in doubling that line’s capacity.

And on Thursday, Mr. Carney was in Fort McMurray, heart of the oil sands, to announce that a proposed, one million barrel a day oil pipeline, to be called Pacific Link, has been designated as a project of national interest under the Building Canada Act. It is expected to largely follow the route of the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline, reaching the Pacific at the Roberts Bank container terminal – a site that Ottawa has also fast-tracked for expansion.

Over the next 11 months, Pacific Link will go through consultation and condition-setting with stakeholders and Indigenous rightsholders. And then, as the federal press release succinctly puts it, the Major Projects Office “will work to finalise those conditions by September 1, 2027, clearing the way to get shovels in the ground.”

Pacific Link should be ready to move crude by 2033. And the certainty of an additional million barrels of pipeline capacity to the West Coast is expected to encourage more new investment in the oil patch, to produce more oil to fill the pipes. If all goes according to plan, Canada could be looking at a decade’s worth of supercharged investment and construction, like what we experienced before 2014.

Opinion: Is it really a good idea for the government to subsidize a pipeline?

So take a moment to celebrate. It turns out that Canada is capable of getting off the couch and getting stuff done. Maybe we don’t have to petition Parliament to designate the flightless Bureaucraticus paralysisus as our national bird.

But let’s not overdo the back patting.

This is not Canada doing the impossible at the speed of the inconceivable. It only seems so in comparison to the preceding years of slow-motion self-sabotage and learned helplessness.

What we are witnessing is our country finally acting with some sense of its own self-interest, and an interest in its own self-preservation. That, and showing a basic ability to count.

Like, you know, a normal country.

We fertilized a legal, political and regulatory environment that prioritized indecision, raised costs, sowed uncertainty and discouraged building. We dreamed that we could sideline a core national industry without undermining national unity or sapping our ability to fund social programs.

We can thank Donald Trump for the rude awakening. Nap time is over.

Opinion: Big Tech and Big Oil have fused into an entity we might think of as Fossil Tech

Oil and gas is one place where Canada has an enormous comparative advantage, because we’re sitting on so much of it. Japan and South Korea, to name just two countries, don’t produce oil and gas because they don’t have any. That’s why they import so much of the stuff.

These resources are going to be in demand for a long time to come, even as the world shifts to electric vehicles, and solar and wind power become cheaper. Try making cars, appliances, textiles or homes without plastics.

There is no reason Canada should not claim a growing share of the global oil and gas market. One of our models should be Norway – now there’s a country doing exceptional things. It has world-leading environmental standards, world-beating social programs and a multitrillion-dollar national piggy bank, funded by revenues from an oil and gas industry that progressive politicians there see no logic in undermining.

Canada doesn’t have to be smarter than the rest of the world to deliver head-of-the-class results. Our national endowments – vast natural resources, an educated population, a history of peace, order and (mostly) good government – put our starting line far ahead of most countries.

We simply have to stop shooting ourselves in the foot. This was a good week for that.