Mitchell Beer
Photos by Policy Exchange, TVA Nouvelles/wikimedia commons
Duelling plans for cross-Canada development corridors, dire mutterings about western secession, and the response to Donald Trump’s tariff wars took up much of the oxygen on the campaign trail as Canada’s federal election neared its midpoint this week.
With Mark Carney’s Liberal party showing signs of forming a majority government after the April 28 vote, but their lead over Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives narrowing in some opinion polls, Canadians heard outright threats from former Reform Party leader Preston Manning that “a vote for the Carney Liberals is a vote for Western secession—a vote for the breakup of Canada as we know it.” Manning’s widely-criticized missive prompted former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow and former Alberta MP and federal cabinet minister Anne McLellan to pen a response for the Globe and Mail, declaring their “unconditional” belief in Canada.
“As two people who have served their respective Western provinces for many years, we know that we are not alone in disagreeing with Mr. Manning’s attempt to threaten voters in ‘central and Atlantic Canada’ and foment division across our great country,” Romanow and McLellan wrote. “The suggestion that Westerners’ commitment to Canada is in any way conditional is offensive. The idea that Westerners would simply quit being Canadian because of policy disagreements with the federal government of the day gives us far too little credit.”
On Monday evening, April 7, the 338Canada poll aggregator projected the Liberals winning 192 seats in Parliament if an election were held today, with 172 needed to form a majority government. The Conservatives were on track to take 125, the Bloc Québécois 16, the New Democratic party 9, and the Green Party 1.
Trade Corridor vs. ‘Energy’ Corridor
Through the first two weeks of the campaign, both leading parties touted cross-country corridors with provisions for accelerated project development as a starting point for diversifying the economy in response to Trump’s economic assault on Canada (and most of the rest of the world). In late March, Carney announced a plan to “invest in trade enabling infrastructure”, supported by a C$5-billion Trade Diversification Corridor Fund to “help diversify our trade partners, create good jobs, and drive economic growth.”
The Liberal leader listed ports, railroads, inland terminals, airports, highways, and critical mineral mining—but not, as many observers noted, oil and gas pipelines—as examples of the “nation-building projects” the fund would support. A week earlier, Carney called for faster development of “projects such as pipelines and energy corridors,” The Canadian Press reported, declaring that Trump’s trade war would require Canada to “do things that had not been imagined or thought possible, at a speed we haven’t seen before.”
This week, he cited a medium-term plan to move western Canadian oil to eastern provinces to replace 500,000 barrels per day of imports.
In an email to The Energy Mix, Liberal campaign spokesperson Carolyn Svonkin said Carney was proposing a “national trade corridor that connects the country from coast to coast to coast—to transport and export energy, agricultural products, electricity, critical minerals, and other commodities.” She added that “the growth of clean electricity and energy in Canada strengthens an existing competitive advantage for the country. It is a priority for this government, many provincial and territorial governments, and is essential to support Canadian sovereignty and economic well-being.”
On a campaign stop in St. John’s April 1, Poilievre endorsed a letter from 14 fossil fuel executives the previous week, in which they demanded that the next federal government declare a “Canadian energy crisis” and “use all its available emergency powers” to fast-track fossil fuel export projects while gutting federal regulation. The Conservatives pledged to repeal the federal Impact Assessment Act and the West Coast tanker ban, set a six-month approval deadline for major megaprojects along a pre-approved energy corridor, walk away from the federal emissions cap on oil and gas, and eliminate an industrial carbon tax that has been praised as one of the country’s most effective emission reduction measures.
The release said a Conservative government would “approve new pipelines to the Atlantic and the Pacific, and green light and expedite LNG [liquefied natural gas] projects, in alignment with Indigenous peoples, including Phase 2 of the LNG Canada project, to significantly increase Canada’s oil and gas exports.”
Pre-Approval Without Naming the Project
After the fossil CEOs first released their letter March 20, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson responded that Ottawa had worked to support Canada’s oil and gas sector, adding that he didn’t see regulation impeding growth. “Last year we saw record production of Canadian oil and gas, record profits being made by your firms, and extremely healthy paycheques being earned by your and other executives in the sector,” he wrote.
Wilkinson also rejected any move to weaken environmental oversight, warning that “gutting the assessment process” and overriding constitutionally protected Indigenous rights “would only take us backwards to the Harper years, where good projects were held up in court and nothing got built.”
Any retreat from tackling pollution would also drag down the sector’s competitiveness in a world “that inevitably must reduce the use of unabated hydrocarbons,” he added.
Last week, Savanna McGregor, Grand Chief of the Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation Tribal Council, warned that Poilievre’s pre-approved corridor would “nearly paralyse” project development rather than speeding it up.
“Surely he knows Canada’s constitution requires Indigenous consultation, accommodation, and ultimately consent to build major infrastructure inside his National Energy Corridor?” she wrote. “How can there be consultation (to say nothing of accommodation and consent) if the corridor is ‘pre-approved’ before anyone has the blueprints for what infrastructure will be built and where?”
McGregor said city dwellers wouldn’t likely agree to a “pre-approved” major development in their own back yard, with no indication of whether it’s a school, a shopping mall, or a radioactive waste dump—yet that’s what Poilievre is proposing for Indigenous communities. “Obviously, pushing a development decision without identifying the development would never fly in a city where the residents have no constitutional right to be consulted—so it definitely will not fly for Indigenous people having that right.”
Campaigning Through a Financial Crisis
The last week of campaigning took place against the backdrop of Trump’s punishing global tariffs, and the three-day stock market crash the White House’s ChatGPT-generated strategy had produced as of Monday. Carney repeatedly took time off from the election to respond to the crisis in his role as prime minister, declaring a 25% tariff on U.S. auto imports that don’t comply with the existing trade agreement between Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
But not before Alberta Premier Danielle Smith handed the federal Liberals a PR bonanza and sowed alarm among Conservatives by declaring a tariff victory, despite Trump triggering thousands of job losses in other parts of Canada while leaving the Alberta fossil industry largely unscathed, at least temporarily.
“It appears the worst of this tariff dispute is behind us (although there is still work to be done),” Smith wrote on social media. “Today was an important win for Canada and Alberta.”
Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney and Stephen Harper-era cabinet minister James Moore were quick to push back. “With respect, premier, this is not a good day for Canada or the world,” he wrote. “When Alberta is economically attacked, it is bad for Canada. Thousands of Canadians in the auto, steel, aluminum, and other industries may be losing their jobs,” and “this is not a BIG WIN. Canadians stand together.”
The public tiff prompted fossil-friendly Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid to suggest that Smith “go into the witness protection program for the next month” to help out Poilievre’s campaign.
On Monday, Poilievre declared the tariffs “wrongheaded, unnecessary,” and a “massive distraction”, adding that “we are all watching the stock market with interest today.” But that position was just a starting point for reiterating is national energy corridor plan—which might equally be called a distraction, given that no investor has stepped forward to back the megaprojects, none of them would be completed during Trump’s term of office, and demand for the oil and gas any new pipeline might carry would be declining by the time it went into service.
