The Facts

Despite Canada’s position as one of the world’s top oil producers, with the third-largest oil reserves, crude oil imports into Canada have become a significant part of the country’s energy mix, particularly since 2000.

Dans cette fiche d’information (une version PDF peut être téléchargée ici), nous avons utilisé les renseignements de la Base de données sur le commerce international canadien de Statistique Canada pour suivre les flux d’importation de pétrole (c.-à-d. l’huile de pétrole, les huiles obtenues à partir des matériaux bitumineux, le pétrole brut) au Canada entre 1988 et 2019. Ensuite, nous avons analysé la source de ces importations par pays avant de faire une ventilation des importations de pétrole par province et une ventilation des chiffres de 2010 à 2019. Puis, nous avons comparé la valeur des importations de pétrole brut à d’autres importations pour donner un sens aux quantités importantes de pétrole brut¹.

Over the past decade, one oft-heard claim is that oil and gas is a ‘sunset’ industry, where investment in Canada can be expected to decline given a worldwide flight from oil and investment.

In this CEC Fact Sheet (which can be downloaded here as a pdf), we examine trends in oil and gas investment in Canada and other regions around the world.¹ We do so for two reasons. The first is to discover if investment in Canadian oil and gas has followed worldwide trends or departed from them, and if so, where and in what magnitudes. The second reason to examine oil and gas investment trends is that one oft-heard claim is that oil and gas is a “sunset” industry, where investment in Canada can be expected to decline given worldwide secular trends, i.e., a flight from oil and gas to other forms of investment.

Many people would have us believe Indigenous North Americans are unanimous in their opposition to oil and gas development. Thus Canada has seen protesters from the United States who cite “helping protect Indigenous lands” as their motivation for interfering with oil and gas development projects in this country. Yet Indigenous people in Canada are far from homogeneous. In Canada there fully 633 First Nations, plus the Métis people and the Inuit. In the U.S., there are another 574 Native American groups. Nowhere else on the planet would such a diverse group of peoples be expected to be unanimous on anything.

Canadian Energy Centre Executive Director of Research Mark Milke joined the Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors’ podcast to discuss two recent research papers.

Canadian Energy Centre director of research Mark Milke was on the Danielle Smith show to talk about how workers from other provinces benefit from Alberta’s oil and gas industry.

While there has been considerable discussion about the absolute greenhouse gas emissions arising from the activities of Canada’s oil sector, much less attention has been paid to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions intensity that have occurred within the sector since the turn of the 21st century.

There has been considerable debate about the absolute greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions arising from the activities of Canada’s oil and gas sector, but little attention paid to the reductions in GHG emissions intensity that have occurred within the sector over the past two decades.

A new analysis by the Canadian Energy Centre has found the vast majority of oil and gas firms in Canada are small businesses (fewer than 100 employees), and Canada’s oil and gas industry has a higher proportion of small and medium-sized enterprises than the United States, Norway and the European Union.