An East-West Oil Pipeline Would be a Failure of National Imagination

An East-West oil pipeline, positioned as an answer to the Trump-imposed trade war, is neither an answer to trade diversification nor a cost-effective response to improving Canada’s national productivity. An expansion of oil pipelines would be a failure of our collective imagination that simply perpetuates past inefficiencies and no roadmap to a cleaner energy future.

A Moment to Reimagine Canadian Energy Infrastructure

Approximately 3.5 million barrels of Alberta oil are delivered daily to the US market at a discount of $30 per barrel, which is a subsidy of $40 billion per year to the US producers and consumers. Other than extraction royalties, no value is added to the Alberta economy.

Absent any proposal for refining or value-added production of chemicals, it remains an astounding act of willful silence that none of our political leaders has challenged the premise of oil pipelines with but one purpose: to burn the product as gasoline in cars.

The challenge to Canada’s sovereignty and an unprovoked trade war allows us to reimagine and reinvent Canada’s energy infrastructure as part of a nation-building exercise. An East-West electricity-transmission corridor, co-located along existing railroad rights-of-way, offers a unique Made-in-Canada solution. The enabling investment in the next-generation infrastructure would pave the way to stimulate trade, creating small and medium enterprises across the country through the application of digital technologies in all sectors of the economy.

Clean Electricity as the Backbone of a National Identity

Just as 19th-century railways helped create a national identity, electrified transport, AI and information and communication technologies can now exploit the ready availability of electrons in every corner of the country. Clean electricity and its seamless transfer across the continent have a lower environmental footprint per unit of energy used or income generated from productive assets.

The transition from a tangible to an intangible economy yields much higher value and creates a pathway away from dirty solid and liquid fuels to electrons moving at the speed of light. Additional investment in the expansion of oil pipelines, driven by desperation, is a misdiagnosis of Canada’s economic challenges. Betting on oil is a fool’s errand: a gamble on an unsustainable future.

The dominance of the internal combustion engine is on the wane, setting up a competition for residual oil demand only from low-cost producers. Canada is not a producer of low-cost barrels of oil. This global shift to more efficient and sustainable transportation methods is irreversible. Although the exact timing of the end of oil remains uncertain, the eventual disruption will render both oil extraction and its transportation infrastructure as stranded assets. The toll of tailpipe emissions compounds an economic and an environmental folly that we cannot ignore.

Canada’s Clean Electricity Advantage

Canada’s clean electricity system is well-positioned for this transformation. With the capacity to plan, develop, and deliver new electricity supply, the nation can meet a forecasted doubling or tripling of demand by 2050. This shift reflects exponential growth trends rather than linear extrapolations. Globally, the momentum favours electricity displacing fossil fuels. From heat pumps replacing natural gas for heating and cooling to electric mobility across cars, fleets, trucks, e-bikes, mass transit, and freight transport, electricity use is poised to dominate. It is also driving industrial processes, AI, data centres, robotics, and digital-service platforms.

The availability, affordability, and accessibility of electricity can turbocharge economic productivity. A high-capacity East-West transmission corridor, utilizing DC and AC technology along existing railway rights-of-way, becomes a vital national infrastructure. Drawing on diverse regional resources—new hydro (BC), large-scale wind, solar, and geothermal (Alberta), nuclear (Saskatchewan), hydro (Manitoba), hydro, nuclear, wind and solar (Ontario), hydro (Quebec), hydro, wind tidal, nuclear (Atlantic provinces)—each province can contribute to balancing demand and supply and support robust electricity trade along the East-West corridor. In the future, under better circumstances, trade with the US can be fostered as we have done so to date.

A National Grid for Sovereignty and Independence

An integrated national grid, serving as the backbone of a modern energy infrastructure, safeguards Canadian sovereignty and trading independence. Key caveat: to achieve this vision requires a root-and-branch overhaul of the existing planning and approvals processes for building significant projects and harmonization of the provincial electricity sector regulations. We have had our wake-up call, and the certainties of the past no longer provide a guide for the future. The convergence of national and provincial leaders around the vision of One Strong Canada presents a unique opportunity to rapidly approve strategic projects in the national interest and help us decouple from US dependency.