The Facts

Canada’s oil and gas industry is among the best in the world when it comes to reducing air emissions from flaring, according to a new analysis by the Canadian Energy Centre.

BC pipelines, First Nations and local prosperity

As the lockdown from the Coronavirus pandemic ends, provincial and federal governments will still face the reality that arrived in its wake: a recession, and one made worse by a domestic energy sector that never really recovered from multiple previous injuries already in play. They included: The Saudi-directed oil price crash in 2014 (and now one in 2020); and the domestic and foreign rhetorical attacks on Canada’s oil sands, supported only by a minority of Canadians, but which helped prevent multiple projects and pipelines from getting built.   

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.