Lasse Gustavsson is the president and CEO of Ocean Wise Conservation Association.

As COP26 has come to a close, a lot of big commitments have been made, including by Canada. The 1.5 C warming target is still alive, there’s a deal to end public fossil fuel financing by the end of 2022 and a pledge has been made to end and reverse deforestation by 2030 — among many other investments and plans.   

These are important commitments that will be game changers for the planet and economy if Canada and the world’s major carbon emitters can make good on them. But that is a major “if.”

In reality the world is on track for disastrous heating of more than 2.4 C and there is sadly a long history of missed climate targets and ambitions. So, while we hope it will be different this time, there is an urgent need to take practical actions that will reduce emissions.  

It’s hard to ignore that most climate actions — including at COP26 — are missing over 70 per cent of our planet: the oceans. A lot is being made of “nature-based solutions” like tree planting (e.g. Trillion Tree Campaign), but it’s time we embrace ocean-based solutions.  

One such solution some ocean-based NGOs are actively working on is to restore, cultivate and protect the world’s underwater forests. Kelp forests have been severely depleted but they offer massive potential to drawdown carbon from the atmosphere — a.k.a. carbon dioxide removal (CDR).      

In fact, as some of the fastest growing organisms on the planet kelp forests have the potential to sequester far more carbon per square kilometre than terrestrial forest ecosystems — up to a whopping 20 times more, according to studies. It is estimated that one square kilometre of properly managed seaweed forests could sequester over 1,000 tons of CO2 every year, the equivalent of heating over 600 homes. And, unlike trees on land, they aren’t at risk of burning and releasing that carbon back into the atmosphere.  

Planting more kelp  — aka Seaforestation — also has benefits for biodiversity, Indigenous-led coastal stewardship and economic potential — including using kelp for cattle feed that can reduce methane emissions as much as 98 per cent. With Canada joining over 80 other countries in a pledge to slash global methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030 at COP26, the relationship between seaforestation and methane reduction is a win-win prospect.   

Despite this potential, “blue carbon” — the natural capture of carbon in marine environments — remains a niche solution within the arsenal of climate actions. This is not to mention how many of the planet’s most important seaweed forests have already all but disappeared due to human-caused effects of climate change.  

Few groups are advancing the potential of seaweed to fight climate in the way forests on lands are protected and restored. The Canadian government has shown a willingness to engage in discussions with research-based organizations who, through initiatives like seaforestation, are restoring, planting, managing and caring for kelp forests.  

Unmatched climate fighting potential aside, seaweed forests also foster beautiful and diverse ecosystems that provide habitat, food and oxygen to thousands of species like herring, octopuses, sea otters and sea lions. Towering kelp canopies help shelter animals from the effects of ocean acidification by balancing the pH of the surrounding waters. 

But if COP26 has shown us anything, it’s that there’s more urgency than ever to use all of the tools in our tool-box. To step outside the proverbial box and make use of available yet underutilized solutions such as seaweed forests. These solutions are thankfully already well-known among scientists and researchers. Ocean Wise’s Carlos Drews was among the contributors of an important vision statement released at COP26 titled Seaweed as a Nature-Based Climate Solution. 

Our ocean is a huge carbon sink that needs protecting. Despite this, many scientists have already pointed out that the ocean seems to be on the backburner for decision-makers at COP26. Instead of adding to the pressures like pollution and overfishing on our ocean, we need to urgently ensure restoration of ocean health to support livelihoods, food security and carbon sequestration. So why are ocean-based climate solutions, like kelp forests being kept largely on the sidelines of important climate discussions like those at COP26? Why is the average person you meet on the street largely unaware of the game-changing potential of healthy seaweed forests? With global leaders stepping up in meaningful ways to tackle climate change there is a strong appetite for new and innovative solutions. The question now is when will our leaders take the opportunity before us and advance seaforestation at a global scale?

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Canada, along with more than 100 other countries, has committed at the UN climate conference in Glasgow (COP26) to halt deforestation by 2030, as a way to preserve the forests that are key to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing global warming.

Forests are the lungs of the planet. They take up vast quantities of carbon dioxide and lock it away in trees and soil. These processes have helped make this planet habitable and, more recently, mitigate the impacts of our reliance on fossil fuels.

As ecosystem scientists, we think this pledge to end deforestation holds great potential. It is not, however, a new idea. At a UN climate summit in 2014, many of the same countries agreed to halt deforestation by 2030. It was a lofty goal, and it has been unsuccessful to date. Forest loss has increased by more than 40 per cent since the agreement.

The current COP26 commitment is less ambitious — countries aim only to end “net deforestation,” meaning harvesting and land clearing can continue so long as reforestation (replanting of trees) keeps pace. This falsely assumes that new forests serve the same function as old forests. That said, a major advance of the COP26 commitment is the focus on improving sustainability in the trades that have historically led to deforestation.

Still Canada has some work ahead if it is to make meaningful progress on this new pledge, and not find itself in an ongoing situation of continued forest — and carbon — loss. It must also find a way to protect its primary forests, those that have not yet been affected by logging, mining or other human activity, as these intact forests best provide critical ecosystem services, including carbon storage.

Forests slow down climate change

Forests take up carbon dioxide (photosynthesis) and release it (respiration). The balance between this uptake and release determines the strength of the forest’s “carbon sink,” or how much carbon is stored within it. While taking up carbon dioxide, forests lose water through their leaves (transpiration). Deforestation affects these processes and can produce strong feedbacks to the climate system.

Deforestation impacts the global carbon cycle — the exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and the Earth and back — by removing large quantities of carbon stored in the trees and increasing losses of stored carbon from the soil. If deforested areas do not recover, future uptake of carbon dioxide is also reduced.

The loss of large tracts of intact forest can have important effects on water at the local and regional levels. Deforestation can reduce cloud formation and rainfall, increasing the risk or duration of drought in places that are already experiencing the effects of climate warming.

Interpreting Canada’s commitment

Canada has some of the most carbon-rich forests in the world. Boreal forests hold on average more carbon than their tropical counterparts. Yet the scale of forestry and other extractive activities in Canada’s boreal forests is vast. Remote sensing indicates that forestry activities impacted 650,000 hectares (1.6 million acres) of forests annually between 1985-2010.

This means that changes in land management decisions and the associated reforestation of disturbed landscapes in Canada’s boreal region can play an important role in the country’s climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. But three central challenges must be considered in the planning, implementation and accounting for Canada to meet or ideally exceed the ambitions of its COP26 commitment to end net deforestation.

1. Forest loss in Canada is complicated

Human-caused climate warming is profoundly altering the frequency and extent of natural disturbances, such as fire or insects, in Canada. Specifically, boreal forest loss due to wildfire, permafrost thaw, drought and pest outbreaks is increasing. These forest losses are occurring in addition to forest harvesting and land clearing, and will continue to intensify as climate warming progresses.

According to a recent report by Nature Canada, an organization that advocates for habitat and species protection, these natural disturbances are largely ignored in Canada’s forestry carbon accounting, potentially underestimating Canada’s forest carbon emissions by an order of magnitude.

Many of these disturbed forest lands may recover naturally, but this is not guaranteed. There is increasing evidence that the boreal forest is becoming less resilient in the face of climate warming and associated disturbances.

We may not be able to rely on the full recovery of forests and their functions as we have in the past. We need to account for these human-caused, climate-associated changes in addition to forest harvesting and land clearing in an honest and transparent way.

2. Underground storage is a slow process

In boreal forests, 80-90 per cent of carbon is stored below ground, in contrast to most other forest ecosystems, where carbon is stored in the trees. Carbon recovery in boreal forests is not fast, nor is it as straightforward as replanting trees where deforestation and/or land degradation has occurred.

Instead it requires the rather slow recovery of the processes that support peat accumulation and the large below-ground carbon stocks that characterize boreal landscapes. These remediation tools are under active development, and there have been some successes.

The targeted protection of regions with deep peat deposits is of great importance and urgency. Some of the most carbon rich places in Canada include the Mackenzie River Basin and the Hudson Bay Lowlands, regions that are also rich in natural resources.

3. Deforestation is linked to extractive industries

Mining, forestry, hydroelectricity and oil and gas are central to Canada’s economy. The COP26 commitment by the Trudeau government will not stop these activities, nor will it protect Canada’s old-growth forests.

This commitment only requires that net forest cover remain constant, and the replanting of harvested forests is already common practice in much of Canada. There is, however, ample evidence of the impact of these extractive activities on the benefits and services provided by forests in Canada. For example, roads and seismic lines associated with forestry and oil and gas increase carbon loss and fragment the landscape leading to declines in species such as boreal caribou.

For this commitment to have a meaningful impact, Canada must continue with reforestation and prioritize protection of its intact, primary forests. We can hope the Trudeau government will use this commitment as a push to rapidly transition away from extractive practices toward more sustainable economic activities, and dovetail these efforts with the goals of conservation and reconciliation.

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Nuskmata wants to combat myths about mining in Canada.

This is one of her goals at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow.

Nuskmata, mining spokesperson for Nuxalk Nation, spoke to The Narwhal from her home in British Columbia prior to leaving for the summit, also known as the 26th annual meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

She said she wants to centre solutions around Indigenous governance and emphasize how Indigenous Peoples are bearing the burden of climate policies, even well-intentioned ones like switching to electrification and renewable energy — that still requires mining precious metals, she said. 

“You can’t be sacrificing Indigenous Peoples and clean water in order to get solar panels,” she said.

“It’s not just swapping out oil and gas. It’s about changing the system so that it’s sustainable for everybody.”

Nuskmata is one of many Indigenous delegates at COP26 determined to pursue Indigenous solutions, along with debunking myths and adding context to Canada’s global commitments.

She said she also hopes to deliver a message that mining “is not a green solution” to the climate crisis.

At COP26, the more than 100 countries in attendance will update their 2015 Paris Agreement commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, intended to meet the urgent need to limit global warming to 1.5 C. This will require profound changes, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a sobering report in August which found Earth could exceed the 1.5 C warming limit by the early 2030s if we don’t curb emissions. To stay below 2 C warming, countries have to meet net-zero emissions around 2050, the report found.

Already in Scotland, nearly all countries have signed a deal committing to end deforestation by 2030, including Canada — though logging here is seen as renewable and therefore not affected by the deal. Delegates have pledged $1.7 billion in funding to Indigenous Peoples, recognizing the critical role they play in forest conservation.

On Monday Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to cap and then cut emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector, repeating one of his 2021 campaign promises. But according to a new report from Environmental Defence Canada and Oil Change International, oil and gas producers only have vague commitments that rely on carbon-capture technology. 

Some critics say COP26 is excluding Indigenous leaders from key parts of the international discussions. Regional Chief of the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations Terry Teegee said in a public statement “there is a noticeable failure to include First Nations while negotiating the collective future of our planet internationally and locally.”

In further critique, Indigenous people held a memorial at COP26 for 1,005 Indigenous land defenders killed since the Paris Agreement. Indigenous land defender Ita Mendoza, from the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, told The Guardian that COP is “a big business, a continuation of colonialism.”

Despite these concerns, Indigenous leaders are at COP26 pushing for Indigenous Peoples to be at decision-making tables to prevent climate catastrophe.

“We have to shift perspectives by sharing who we are, how we live, what our values are, and what our solutions are,” Nuskmata said.

She is one of three Indigenous women at COP26 who spoke to the Narwhal about what they hope to accomplish at the summit. 

Here is what they said.

‘I want to hear those love stories [with the land] from all around the world’

“My name, Nuskmata, is ancient. It’s older than our forests here,” Nuskmata said, explaining her name is an inheritance from her Nuxalk village and bloodline.

The ancestor and namesake Nuskmata cleared a path from the coast to the interior of what’s now known as British Columbia, Nuskmata said. It makes her think about her responsibility to clear a path in her own way as a spokesperson and advocate. 

“We may or may not see all the benefits of the work that we’re doing, but we have to believe that we are clearing a path for future generations,” she said.

Nuskmata said she wants to hear about other people’s fights to protect their lands at COP26, so she can remember and be inspired by them after she returns home.

Taking care of their territory is Nuxalk’s “love story with the land,” Nuskmata said.

“I’m a Nuxalk woman with an ancient name. I still live in the place where my ancestors have been for thousands of years. That’s really powerful. That’s a beautiful thing. And that’s part of my love story.”

“I want to hear those love stories from all around the world.”

She will be sharing climate solutions the Nuxalk Nation wants to pursue, including scaling down mining and clearcut logging. In August, the nation issued an eviction notice to Vancouver-based mining company Juggernaut Exploration, which received two permits for exploration from the province without the nation’s consent. The nation has not consented to any of the mining on its territory. Many critics have denounced B.C.’s mining laws for being lax on regulation and not requiring Indigenous consent.

Juggernaut Exploration missed the eviction deadline.

Nuskmata, who is also Secwepemc, has seen first hand the potential dangers of mining, witnessing the 2014 Mount Polley mine disaster on Secwepemc territory, when the tailings pond spilled 24 million cubic metres of contaminated waste into Quesnel Lake. According to critics, B.C.’s mining regulations still fall short on preventing a similar disaster in the future. Nuskmata wants to build more public awareness.

“One of the things I learned from Mount Polley is you can never waste a disaster,” Nuskmata said. “Within that crisis there are cracks in the system.”

Nuskmata also plans to hold B.C. and Canada accountable for their commitments to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Both levels of government have introduced legislation to adopt UNDRIP. But even though the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called on Canada to halt the Coastal GasLink pipeline, the Trans Mountain pipeline and the Site C dam until obtaining free, prior and informed consent — a central principle of UNDRIP — construction carries on while land defenders continue to fight the projects.

“One of the things I learned from Mount Polley is you can never waste a disaster. Within that crisis there are cracks in the system.”

Nuskmata

“They don’t follow their own laws, they adopt stuff and don’t implement it,” Nuskmata said. “Meanwhile, money keeps flowing out of our territories in the form of trees, minerals, foods and medicines while they keep our communities in stable poverty with their colonial institutions.”

Her biggest goal for COP26 is to expand her nation’s network to share solutions grounded in the principle of reciprocity.

“This is a global event, I doubt I will be in any way centre stage. But that’s not my goal, it’s not about me. It’s about sharing the work.”

‘It’s young people that are going to change the world’

Kukpi7 Judy Wilson of the Neskonlith Indian Band tried to hail a cab in Vancouver between meetings as we did our interview over the phone, calling her crammed schedule a “typical” day. 

The prominent Indigenous rights advocate, and secretary-treasurer for the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, celebrated her 60th birthday in October. She has been in politics her whole life, and attended her first United Nations conference sometime in her 40s, though she can’t remember what year. For Wilson, advocating for Indigenous Peoples isn’t an option.

“As an Indigenous person, especially being a woman, we’re born into this,” she said, standing in the rain with an umbrella as sirens wailed in the background.

Indigenous people hold value systems in which “everybody is taken care of,” and those values are essential to address global issues of hunger, poverty and climate change, she said.

In her experiences attending international events, Wilson noticed Indigenous people have to “carve out their own space” since these events still prioritize state governments. Like Nuskmata, she wants to see more room for Indigenous people to provide solutions. 

She also wants to bring more international awareness of ongoing Indigenous Rights issues in Canada and their intersections with climate change.

“There’s a lot happening in our own country with Trans Mountain, Fairy Creek, Site C dam, with Wet’suwet’en,” Wilson said. “The real issue is climate change and global warming, but [the government] tries to reduce them to other issues, and our people are criminalized.”

She wants to spend more time mentoring young people to pick up the fight.

“We need to instill climate leadership. I see young people like Autumn Peltier and Greta Thunberg, and I’m so inspired by them,” she said.

“That’s the climate leadership that we need, and I’m not seeing it anywhere else right now … It’s young people that are going to change the world.”

Another one of Wilson’s priorities at COP26 is to emphasize cumulative effects. Hunting, harvesting, fishing and collecting medicines is becoming harder in her territory. Less fish are returning in the rivers. This summer, during an extreme heatwave, some Neskonlith families were under an evacuation alert or order due to the White Rock Lake wildfire that burned about 833 square kilometres — an area nearly the size of the City of Calgary.

“[Decision-makers] are trying to make it look like there are substantive changes, when it’s not enough to reduce emissions to address global warming,” she said. “We need to act now.”

“We have to ensure that these changes are made for the survival of all of our people.”

‘The ice is so unpredictable’

In October, Crystal Martin-Lapenskie was in her home near Ottawa Facetiming with her sister in Sanirajak, Nunavut. She asked her how the weather was.

To Martin-Lapenskie’s shock, her friend stepped outside to show her it was raining.

“It shouldn’t be raining. It should be snowing,” Martin-Lapenskie told The Narwhal on a video call from Glasgow.

“As a child, around August there would be snow on the ground. Twenty years later, we’re seeing less and less snow. There was no snow in August. You used to be lucky if there’s snow in September. Now you’re lucky if you see snow in October.”

“It’s really frightening in a short 20-year span that our climate has changed so drastically.”

Martin-Lapenskie is a former president of the National Inuit Youth Council and a consultant with the Inuit Circumpolar Council. This is her second time at the UN climate summit. She described climate change as a spider web: a series of interwoven issues, and together “it captures all of the necessities in life that you need to survive.”

Climate change is an urgent issue for Inuit. Their home in the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Country foods are harder to hunt and harvest. Inuit have even fallen through ice and died when ice typically would have been thick, Martin-Lapenskie said. She also pointed to Nuugaatsiaq, Greenland, which was hit by a tsunami in 2017 caused by a landslide. Residents still aren’t able to return home because the area is unstable. Tsunamis are one of the extreme weather events that scientists say will be made more common by climate change.

Martin-Lapenskie wants to bring more of these human-centred stories from the Arctic to policy-making at COP26. She wants to amplify Inuit knowledge through the two events the Inuit Circumpolar Council is hosting  — one about marine governance and the other about youth and infrastructure. 

The council is also celebrating International Inuit Day on Nov. 7 in Glasgow with film screenings, Inuit panels and Inuit drum-dancing and throat-singing.

Her primary goal is to get Inuit at decision-making tables.

“This week is all about amplifying the need to ensure any policies or decisions that are taking place in the Arctic are being conducted with Inuit,” she said.

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For years, governments and oil executives could count on the International Energy Agency to provide ammunition for continued fossil fuel investments, but with the recent release of its latest World Energy Outlook, that ammunition appears to have run out. 

The annual report, released earlier this year in advance of the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) summit in Glasgow, signals a monumental shift. The era of prolonged growth in demand for oil, gas and coal seems to be coming to an end, according to the report, co-authored by energy experts from governments and industry around the world.

It describes a world that limits warming to within 1.5 C by shifting rapidly away from fossil fuels with no development of new oil and gas fields, no new or expanded coal mines and slim prospects of profits for new LNG projects.

The report follows the release of a net-zero emissions roadmap by the agency in the spring and is a sharp contrast to the messaging from industry groups like the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), and that of the Alberta government, which insist demand will continue to grow for decades and that Canada is well suited to fill the need. The report also includes some ominous projections about the economic future for Canadian fossil fuel producers. 

“I think it’s the first time that the IEA scenarios that they put forward don’t include a scenario, for example, where oil growth continues out to 2050,” said Sara Hastings-Simon, a professor and director of the sustainable energy development program at the University of Calgary. 

“So it’s a real shift. I think it kind of reflects an understanding of the ways that the global energy system is really changing.”

The report examines three scenarios: one that assesses the impact of current policies, a second that analyzes the impact of current pledges for new action and a third scenario that projects what would happen if the world achieves net-zero emissions by 2050 and avoids some of the worst impacts of an unstable climate. 

The first scenario is the only one that projects an increase in demand for oil and gas, although even then, current policies will see demand for oil plateau after 2030. Globally, coal demand will fall, while natural gas continues to climb to 2050, according to the report. 

In Canada, even with policies already pledged by the government, but not yet enacted, the report’s second scenario projects the country’s contribution to global supply could dry up between now and 2030.

The report also says that, under this scenario, Canada would see “no or very limited investment into new projects from the mid-2020s.” 

Any new investments would have to focus on current fields and projects in order to reduce the intensity of emissions.

In the net-zero scenario, in which humanity has the best chance of staving off a climate disaster, the agency projects a significant drop in demand for the three fossil fuels by 2030, including a 10 per cent drop in demand for natural gas, a 20 per cent drop in oil demand and a whopping 55 per cent drop in demand for coal.

The price of oil would fall to US$35 per barrel by 2030, under this net-zero scenario, which is less than half of the estimated price of US$77 per barrel under the first scenario, according to the agency’s report. That sort of price reduction would further erode investment in oil and gas, particularly in high cost areas like Canada.

The effects of a commitment to net-zero emissions would also mean LNG projects currently being built on Canada’s West Coast would likely never see a return on investment. The IEA predicts US$75 billion invested in LNG projects around the world would be stranded. 

But Canada’s oil and gas industry lobby group is sidestepping these scenarios in its recent public messages, saying little about what will happen if government officials keep their climate commitments. 

When asked to comment on this or on whether it disagreed with the IEA’s assertion that a net-zero scenario was critical to keeping warming to 1.5 C, CAPP explained it believes the scenarios which assume no changes in government policies have proven to be more accurate over the years.

The lobby group also defended the industry’s environmental record.

“Canada’s natural gas and oil industry is the country’s leading investor in emissions reduction and clean-technology,” CAPP President Tim McMillan said in an emailed statement. 

“Investment in Canada’s natural gas and oil industry will support hundreds of thousands of jobs for Canadians and provide the foundation for our economic recovery while generating billions in government revenues to help fund emissions-reducing technologies for use in other industries and around the world.”

Hastings-Simon said CAPP’s assumption that no new climate change policies will be implemented in Canada “flies in the face of two decades of increasing policy stringency on climate,” and ignores likely changes, including electric vehicle targets. 

She says the point of the IEA scenarios is so that countries can shape plans and policies against any of the future scenarios, rather than simply choosing one.

Simon Dyer, the deputy executive director of green energy think tank The Pembina Institute, says Canada, and Alberta in particular, has to start having a serious discussion about the impacts of declining demand. 

“A lot of Alberta’s sort of narrative around this stuff, whether you’re talking about the war room, or the [anti-Alberta energy campaigns] inquiry, seems to suggest that this is a sort of Alberta-specific issue,” he said.

“There is actually a global conversation that’s underway that Alberta and Canada are really not actively engaged in, currently.”

The IEA report says countries need to massively ramp up investments in efficiency and renewables while doubling down on efforts that will shift consumer demands, including adoption of electric vehicles. 

It also calls for focusing on electrification, carbon capture and storage and the use of hydrogen — all of which Canada has started focusing on in recent years. Alberta’s investment in petrochemicals — used in everyday goods from cosmetics to building supplies — could also provide a glimmer of hope for industry, as the only sector that sees increased demand for oil under the net-zero scenario.

The massive increase in global investment would need to go toward everything from electricity generation, to building efficiencies, to transportation and energy infrastructure, according to the IEA. 

Current investments of around US$2 trillion annually need to grow to about US$5 trillion per year by 2030.

“If the world gets on track for net zero emissions by 2050, then the cumulative market opportunity for manufacturers of wind turbines, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, electrolysers and fuel cells amounts to USD 27 trillion,” reads the report. 

“These five elements alone in 2050 would be larger than today’s oil industry and its associated revenues.”

That sort of investment in new, clean technologies and efficiencies is also critical as investment in new projects dwindles and energy demands increase. But the IEA is careful to point out that recent shortages are the result of weather-related factors, planned and unplanned shutdowns and a post-recession surge in demand, rather than an energy transition.

Jennifer Henshaw, a spokesperson for Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage, said the IEA projections all show the need for continued fossil fuel use for decades and the province expects to continue selling its resources.

“Significant investments also continue to be made in Alberta’s energy sector, both to reduce emissions from existing energy sources for a lower-carbon future, and to promote growth in emerging areas including hydrogen, geothermal, renewable electricity, and rare earth minerals,” Henshaw said by email. 

Hastings-Simon said Canadian companies have been working hard to reduce their emissions, but they have to work harder than other regions because they are starting from a higher carbon intensity. 

She also said financial returns to governments and the benefits for workers from the oil and gas industry will diminish going forward, as companies focus on paying down debt and returning money to investors rather than spending on new capital projects. 

“I think it can both be true that the world will continue to use oil for some time to come and that some of that oil will continue to come from Canada,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that that will result in jobs and significant money flowing into the province of Alberta and to the public and to the government.”

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