The Facts

This CEC Research Brief (which can be downloaded here as a pdf) highlights natural gas trends worldwide from 2000 to 2017 (the latest year for which comprehensive annual data are available from the US Energy Administration). It does so by:

One of the more bizarre reactions to bare facts showed up recently after a colleague and I analyzed oil and gas-producing countries and their degree of freedom — the Tyranny Index, as we labeled it. In response, some argued such tracking is irrelevant because all that matters is the price per barrel.  

In the ongoing debate over whether Canada’s oil and natural gas industry will or should survive — see recent comments from the Green Party’s Elizabeth May and Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-François Blanchet that “oil is dead”— one supporting justification often advanced is the notion that oil and gas activity in Canada survives only due to massive subsidies from taxpayers. 

Oil, natural gas, and freedom rankings

Norway’s investments in autocracies and dictatorships are twice its investments in Canada

Environmental spending in Canada

This Fact Sheet (which can be downloaded here as a pdf) compares Canada and the United States on pipelines built from 2014 to 2020 and offers an international comparison on pipelines under construction as of early 2020. In both comparisons, the data are clear: development in Canada has stagnated while the rest of the world expands.

In 1897, while in London in the midst of a worldwide speaking tour, the American author Mark Twain became the subject of rumours back home that he was dead. To get at the truth, a reporter from the New York Journal wrote to Twain to ask if he was indeed dead or gravely ill.  

Parsing through subsidy claims

Canadian employment stalls for a decade