Canada’s energy abundance is a strategic inheritance. It’s time we started treating it like one.
Every time energy supply tightens in the Middle East, the same lesson reasserts itself: abundant, affordable energy is the bedrock upon which modern life is built. Transportation, food, heating, industrial production, all of it gets more expensive when energy prices rise, and it gets more expensive for everyone. Even countries like Canada, with extensive domestic reserves, cannot insulate themselves from a global market. Higher energy costs make nearly everyone poorer, a basic economic reality that gets relearned on schedule. For Canada, though, the lesson carries a particular edge. This country sits on extraordinary energy wealth, and has spent decades uncertain about what to do with it.
The foundation of everything
Affordable energy is the foundation of civilization, and Canada has it in abundance. Energy is the precondition for everything else: industrial capacity, sustainable population growth alongside rising per capita income, geopolitical leverage, northern development, and the kind of long-run institutional resilience that separates durable civilizations from brittle ones.
For too long, Canada treated that abundance as a liability to manage rather than an inheritance to develop. Other major actors, the United States, China, and the Gulf states, do not debate whether to develop their resources. They debate how fast. Canada has spent decades debating whether, and the cost of that hesitation has compounded.
The missed window and the new one
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Canada’s European allies found themselves in a position that should have been unthinkable: strategically dependent on energy from a country actively threatening their neighbours. Canada had an opening to help fill that gap with LNG exports. We largely missed it. The United States and Qatar moved faster.
The window has reopened, and the situation is more complicated now. Conflict in the Middle East has put Gulf production at risk again, and European and Asian allies are once more weighing bad options against worse ones. But the American option, long assumed to be the reliable alternative, has acquired conditions. After the Trump administration threatened to seize Greenland, a threat serious enough that Denmark began preparing a genuine military response, European nations found themselves being told to sign unfavourable trade terms in exchange for continued access to U.S. LNG. Energy, which the United States once offered on reasonable trade terms to allied democracies, has become a tool of leverage.
The result is that many of Canada’s closest allies now find themselves caught between dependence on Russia and dependence on an America that is not currently behaving like a reliable partner. That’s Canada’s opening and opportunity.
Canada’s opportunity
The strategic picture creates both an ethical and a financial opening. Our allies want a reliable supply from a country that is stable, democratic, and willing to trade on genuinely mutual terms. Canada is that country. By accelerating development and getting serious about export capacity (even if that requires government intervention to incentivize and secure private sector investment), we can help allied democracies reduce their dependence on hostile or unreliable suppliers, demonstrate what responsible resource partnership looks like, and generate the wealth needed to fund everything else on the national agenda. Seizing that opening requires pipeline approvals that do not drag across decades, LNG terminal construction that reaches completion, and a regulatory culture that treats energy development as a national priority. Every month of further hesitation is prosperity foregone and credibility lost.
The civilization argument
Canada has the potential to become something genuinely worth building toward: a pluralist democracy that proves abundance and good values are not opposites, that a country can be compassionate, institutionally serious, and ambitiously prosperous at the same time. That future rests on a foundation of affordable, abundant energy. Canada, more than almost any nation, has the resources to build that foundation. The inheritance is already here. The question is whether we will finally treat it like one.
Spencer Fernando
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