For 30 years, Gérald Chouinard visited Quebec orchards every week of the growing season, helping apple growers use fewer pesticides. Today, his right hand trembles as he speaks. Medication controls perhaps half of it, the former agronomist and researcher says. Some days, even cooking or walking is hard.

Chouinard was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2019, at 56. In 2022, Quebec’s administrative labour tribunal ruled that his illness was directly linked to his job, which for 20 years exposed him to more than 40 pesticides sprayed in orchards. His employer, Quebec’s Agriculture Ministry, did not contest the claim. The province’s workplace safety board told him he was the first such case.

Now he is challenging Ottawa. A House of Commons petition he launched closed last week with 21,410 signatures. It targets two federal budget bills: C-30, passed in June, which lets cabinet approve pesticides Health Canada has found too risky for the environment, and C-31, still before Parliament, which would end the requirement that every pesticide be fully re-evaluated at least once every 15 years.

“It’s a complete change of direction,” Chouinard told The Narwhal in French. “For decades, we’ve been going in one direction to reduce the risks, reduce the use of these products. … Now, suddenly, two bills that go the other way.”

These bills arrived as recent studies have documented a link between some pesticides and the risk of health issues like Parkinson’s and cancer, and as the federal government’s own data shows how much is still unresolved about pesticides in Canadian water.

In late October, the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development — part of the auditor general’s office — released an audit of Health Canada’s water monitoring program for pesticides. It was largely positive: the program, launched in 2024, works as intended, and its data is already shaping regulatory decisions. But the auditors also found the department “took limited action on higher-risk pesticides.”

In 2024, sampling partners collected nearly 4,000 water samples. Thirty of the 233 pesticides analyzed exceeded levels Health Canada considers safe for aquatic life. Four landed in the highest-risk group, the audit found. Two of the four pesticides Health Canada identified to The Narwhal are what are known as neonicotinoids — insecticides long linked to harm to bees and aquatic insects.

Yet for half of these highest-risk pesticides, the auditors found, Health Canada had not started looking at whether action was needed. The department spokesperson said it is waiting for quality-checked 2025 data, though preliminary results “showed some exceedance patterns.” The audit also found Health Canada has no thresholds for action when pesticides exceed levels that may pose a risk to human health. The department agreed to draft them by June 2027, then consult the public.

The auditors point to an insecticide called clothianidin as an example of the monitoring program doing its job. A neonicotinoid used on corn, potatoes and other field crops, it is known to be harmful to pollinators. In 2024, the report found the clothianidin limit was exceeded 360 times, more than any other pesticide, at sites in Prince Edward Island and Ontario. Health Canada used that data to widen a re-evaluation of the insecticide, under way since 2016, to include its effects on aquatic invertebrates.

“Without the sampling results from the program, Health Canada would not have had the data on clothianidin to support these actions,” the auditors wrote. And even those actions are less drastic than those taken by the European Union, which now bars imported food containing detectable residues of clothianidin — which could impact everything from oranges and potatoes to beans, oil and coffee —  after a three-year transition that ends this year.

That kind of review is exactly what Chouinard fears is now at risk.

The feds and industry say changing pesticide rules helps food security

In June, Parliament passed Bill C-30, which implemented the government’s spring economic update. Tucked inside were amendments to the Pest Control Products Act, the law that governs pesticides in Canada.

The amendments let cabinet authorize a pesticide even after Health Canada concludes its environmental risks are unacceptable, if ministers decide it is needed for economic or food security.

The government fast-tracked the bill, limiting House debate and wrapping up committee study in two hours. The Senate committee that studied the bill concluded changes of this significance “should have warranted a separate study rather than being included in an omnibus bill.”

So far, cabinet has not used its new power to approve a pesticide, the health minister’s press secretary Alexandre Bergeron told The Narwhal.

The government frames the changes as part of a wider push on food security. In June, Ottawa unveiled a $3.2-billion national food security strategy it says was aimed at lowering grocery bills.

Industry welcomed the shift. “Food security is, ultimately, national security,” Darren Anderson, CEO of Canadian pesticide maker Vive Crop Protection, told the Senate agriculture committee in June. He said he had long asked the regulator to consider economic factors in pesticide decisions, and called C-31’s review changes “much more of an efficiency play.”

Most major farm groups agreed. Stéphanie Levasseur of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture told the Senate finance committee the organization would “welcome and support the recognition of economic and food security,” as long as implementation doesn’t add bureaucracy or delays. The Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada “strongly supports” the changes, Chris Duyvelshoff, chair of crop protection, said, while insisting food security must not weaken health or environmental protection.

But not all farmers are on the same page. In June, the National Farmers Union asked members of Parliament to scrap the pesticide changes altogether. Cabinet deliberations stay confidential for 20 years, the union noted, so the public would not learn why a pesticide was approved until any effects were irreversible. The union also raised concerns about well-resourced companies lobbying for Health Canada exemptions.

Chouinard doesn’t blame farmers. Climate change has brought warmer temperatures, which in turn bring more insects and more disease, he said, which makes it harder for growers to limit chemical use. “They’re the first victims” of both climate change and pesticide exposure, he said.

Feds will also drop required re-evaluations of pesticides

A second bill, C-31, still before Parliament, would go further. Today, Health Canada must re-evaluate every registered pesticide at least once every 15 years. A re-evaluation can require new studies from the manufacturer or consult the public. C-31 would replace that with an “assessment” of information already available. A full re-evaluation would be required only if the health or environmental risks have “increased significantly.”

A transitional provision would also let the minister end re-evaluations already underway on the same basis.

“The 15-year checkpoint remains in place,” Alexandre Bergeron, press secretary to Health Minister Marjorie Michel, said in an email. “These changes will help reduce backlogs and ensure regulatory resources are focused on higher-risk products and emerging concerns, rather than automatically reviewing products simply because 15 years have passed.”

Backlogs are real: the clothianidin re-evaluation has now run for a decade. Health Canada said it has “no plans” to end it, but did not say how many other ongoing reviews could be affected.

Chouinard saw the effect of re-evaluation in the orchards himself. As part of his work, he tracked the toxicity of all the products applied there, compiling what he calls a “risk index” for the pesticides used. “We could see that the risk index, over the years, was going down,” he said, explaining that “products with high risk indices tend to disappear during re-evaluations. And new products that come on the market tend to have lower risk indices. … So, year after year, the record improves.”

He now fears dangerous products “could stay on the market much longer.” The new criteria, he said, are vague and “subject to outside pressure rather than based on science.”

Other critics say the government’s economic argument is weak. Pesticides can’t ensure food security, they say, when Canada is the world’s fourth-largest pesticide importer. It imported $3.02 billion worth between September 2025 and August 2026, about 72 per cent of it from the U.S., according to data compiled by the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

With that dependence, loosening the rules won’t protect Canada’s crops or food supply, according to Pascal Priori, who coordinates a support network for pesticide victims run by the Quebec Public Health Association. “Deregulating does not strengthen our sovereignty or our agricultural competitiveness,” he told the House finance committee on Oct. 8. “On the contrary, it weakens it.”

Trade is also at stake. The European Union’s rules on pesticide residues cover more than one neonicotinoid, which the coalition opposing Canada’s changes warns could put up to $1.4 billion in exports at risk — just as Ottawa tries to diversify trade away from the U.S.

Pushback on pesticide bills spans the country

The pushback isn’t limited to Quebec. In Saanich, B.C., on Vancouver Island, Alena Gavrilenko, a fourth-year political science student at the University of Victoria, runs volunteer workshops on growing and canning organic food. Her neighbourhood recently built a seed library.

When the pesticide changes came up at a workshop this summer, she launched her own House of Commons petition. It has about 2,700 signatures, more than 1,000 of them from Ontario.

The consensus in her community, she said, is that “science should decide whether a pesticide is safe, not cabinet.” She also questions the government’s affordability argument. 

“Nobody has shown that this power will even lower grocery prices,” she said. “Food prices are high, farmers need the tools, but I don’t think this is the way to go about it.”

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Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. Yet it imported about 500,000 barrels of crude a day in 2025, three-quarters of it from the U.S., according to the Canada Energy Regulator. And much of the western Canadian oil that reaches Ontario and Quebec travels through pipelines that cross the U.S. before coming back north. As diesel prices have skyrocketed, politicians across the spectrum have pointed to a solution they say is simple: build more Canadian refineries.

Case in point: in September, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pushed Prime Minister Mark Carney to invest in new refineries, saying, “Canadian workers should be turning Canadian oil into Canadian fuel.” In July, Ontario Minister of Energy and Mines Stephen Lecce said Canada needs to “expand domestic refinery capacity.” Departing B.C. premier David Eby said in January that if governments have “tens of billions of dollars to spend,” they should spend it on a refinery rather than a pipeline.

Why now? “Energy security” has become a powerful political argument as the trade war with Washington has made relying on the U.S. feel riskier, and war in Iran and attacks on Russian refineries squeeze global diesel supplies. As Poilievre put it, “the current diesel price crisis will … expose our overreliance on the U.S. to refine our own oil.”

But despite current geopolitics, the idea isn’t new. “It’s like the seasons,” said Pierre-Olivier Pineau, an energy economist at HEC Montréal who has watched refinery fervour come and go for years.

The idea returns just as, in Pineau’s words, “there has never been a better time in human history to run a refinery,” profit-wise. Imperial Oil’s refining division, for example, earned $787 million in the second quarter of 2026, more than double a year earlier. The industry, meanwhile, has been busy bending the ear of the federal government. The Canadian Fuels Association, a lobby group for refineries, reported 51 communications with federal officials in the first nine months of 2026 — more than in any full calendar year since at least 2021. Most of those contacts came in the spring, when diesel prices soared.

In the face of all that, seemingly simple solutions can look like a silver bullet. The thing is, everyone The Narwhal interviewed, from the refiners’ lobby group to its critics, agreed on one thing: Canada isn’t short of refineries. 

Here’s what you need to know.

What exactly is a refinery, and what does it produce?

A refinery is an industrial plant that turns crude oil into products people can use. In Canada, more than 80 per cent of what refineries produce is gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, according to a 2024 analysis by oil market analyst Rory Johnston.

The rest includes heating oil, asphalt, propane and the base oils used to make lubricants for engines. Refineries are different from Alberta’s upgraders, which turn thick bitumen from the oilsands into lighter “synthetic” crude that refineries can then process.

How many refineries does Canada have?

Canada has 16 oil refineries, including two that make asphalt. They have room to process about two million barrels of crude a day. In 2025, Canadian refineries ran, on average, at 90 per cent of that capacity, according to the Canada Energy Regulator.

That’s enough for the country’s needs. “The Canadian market is essentially in balance,” said Carol Montreuil, vice-president for Eastern Canada at the Canadian Fuels Association. Pineau, a frequent critic of the industry, agrees. So does Ottawa. “Canada does not need more refining capacity to meet current domestic needs,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement to The Narwhal. In 2025, Canada exported a net 200,000 barrels a day of refined products, it added.

The real issue is that Canadian refineries don’t process much of the oil this country is best known for: thick, heavy bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands. Heavy crude is only about a quarter of what Canadian refineries process, according to Johnston’s 2024 analysis.

For that reason, most of Canada’s heavy oil goes south, via pipelines, to refineries in the U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast that can handle heavy crude.

How do refineries affect the people next door?

Refineries support more than 18,000 jobs in Canada, according to the industry. For their neighbours, they can be both a paycheque and a burden.

Near Edmonton, the Imperial and Suncor refineries release benzene and sulphur dioxide, among other pollutants. Limited monitoring makes it hard to pin down how much of the region’s air pollution they are responsible for, The Narwhal has reported.

Sarnia, Ont., is home to Chemical Valley, a cluster of roughly 60 industrial facilities, including three oil refineries. Residents of neighbouring Aamjiwnaang First Nation are exposed to about 30 times more benzene than people in Toronto and Ottawa. Sarnia would be the destination if Ontario and Alberta are able to make Northern Shield happen: that proposed pipeline would carry Alberta crude north of the Great Lakes.

And when the industry leaves, the impact isn’t over. Montréal-Est was a hub of refining activity by companies such as Imperial Oil, which opened the island of Montreal’s first refinery in 1916, and Shell, which closed its last in 2010. Decades after most refineries closed in the 1980s, the area has about 270 hectares of industrial brownfields, roughly the size of 330 football fields, awaiting cleanup and redevelopment.

What are the arguments in favour of a new Canadian refinery?

Gasoline and diesel prices are high, but experts say a new Canadian refinery wouldn’t necessarily ease prices at the pump. Even Montreuil concedes that local refineries offer consumers limited protection from price spikes, since fuel prices are set on global markets.

For Montreuil, it’s more about fuel supply security, which the industry has also raised in recent months, according to the federal lobbyist registry.

Canada’s refineries ensure the country has enough fuel, and without them, we’d be rationing fuel right now, according to Montreuil, who pointed to recent examples around the world. Indonesia and Russia both rationed fuel this year. While some argue refining more oil at home would mean independence from an increasingly unpredictable neighbour, Montreuil and Johnston say that isn’t our only exposure.

Another vulnerability is pipelines that carry Canadian oil back and forth across the border, such as Enbridge’s Line 5. Political skirmishes with Michigan over that pipeline are one reason Ontario Premier Doug Ford is pushing the Northern Shield Energy Corridor. Much of Atlantic Canada relies on crude, much of it American, delivered by tanker to the country’s largest refinery, Irving’s in Saint John. No pipeline exists to bring Alberta oil to the Atlantic provinces, meaning a U.S. export restriction would leave them scrambling for other fuel sources.

Heather Exner-Pirot, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, said federal clean fuel rules are another weakness, because in order to meet emissions reduction targets, suppliers blend in biofuels largely imported from the U.S. “We are artificially making ourselves dependent on an American product,” she said. She argues the rules should be redesigned, and they’ve been a constant topic in the industry’s communications with federal officials, according to the lobbyists registry.

Carney’s government announced tweaks to the clean fuel rules last week, saying it would “make it easier and cheaper for companies to comply.” Transportation is one of Canadian households’ biggest costs, according to Statistics Canada, but Pineau thinks that addressing that by scrapping clean fuel rules would “chain Canadians even more tightly to an extremely expensive way of life,” one built around the car.

On its own, experts say, a new refinery fixes none of that.

How much would it cost to build a new refinery, and who would pay?

Companies are not lining up to build a refinery in Canada, and Ottawa isn’t offering to pay for one. In a statement, the Prime Minister’s Office said the government supports “additional refining capacity where supported by market conditions.”

A large new refinery would cost $10 to $15 billion, take at least five years to build and need 20 to 25 years to pay off, according to Montreuil and Exner-Pirot. Alberta’s last attempt, the Sturgeon refinery near Edmonton, saw its original projected cost double to about $10 billion, with much of the risk carried by taxpayers, though high diesel prices have since improved its profitability.

A new refinery would also struggle to compete on a global market. India’s newest are so big that two of them could supply all of Canada, from gasoline to jet fuel and more, Montreuil said.

With the domestic market already balanced, the purpose of a new plant would mostly be exports. But there is no real export route for refined products to Europe, Ian Sanderson, a senior oil and gas analyst at the Pembina Institute, said in an interview, adding the biggest markets are in Asia and “have substantial refinery capacity to refine Canadian [crude] at a lower price.”

There’s also the issue of decreased global demand for fossil fuels. Global demand for refined oil products could peak as early as 2027, according to the International Energy Agency. “It really is an act of faith,” Montreuil said, to bet that export markets will still want Canadian fuel by 2030 or 2035.

Sanderson points to the coal phase-out in Alberta, which hit mining towns very hard. The lesson, he said, is to “get ahead of the transition” and support oil workers into new jobs.

So far, though, Canadians aren’t using less fuel.

What part of Canada faces the highest risk when it comes to U.S. energy threats?

The most immediate risk is to Ontario, whose refineries run mostly on western crude carried by Line 5 through Wisconsin and Michigan.

Michigan’s governor has tried for years to shut it down over environmental concerns. In late August, the line was offline for more than two weeks after being struck by a truck at a work site in Wisconsin. The episode offered a glimpse of the crisis Canada would face if the Americans shut Line 5 down for good, Montreuil said.

Northern Shield would carry Alberta crude to Sarnia north of the Great Lakes, bypassing Line 5. It wouldn’t add any refining capacity, though: “Same refinery, same oil, just a different route to get it there,” Exner-Pirot said. The open question is how much this new pipeline would cost, and who would pay.

Quebec has more options, but not more independence. The Valero refinery in Lévis gets its oil by tanker through the St. Lawrence River, though much of what Quebec imports comes from the U.S. And Suncor’s Montreal-East refinery gets much of its western crude through Line 9, which runs from Sarnia, so it too depends on oil that crosses the U.S. to reach Sarnia.

What would make Canada’s fuel supply more secure?

Without building a new refinery, there are other ways to shore up supply.

Canada is the only G7 country without a strategic petroleum reserve. Despite being a member of the International Energy Agency, we’re formally exempt from its mandate to hold emergency oil stocks equivalent to at least 90 days of the previous year’s net imports because we produce more oil than we import.

Consequently, when the G7 agreed in early October to release 100 million barrels of oil from emergency stocks to lower prices at the pump, Ottawa’s contribution was to stagger maintenance at its refineries so as not to affect supply. Poilievre has proposed a reserve of refined fuels, though someone would have to pay to fill and maintain it.

Another option is to expand what already exists. Adding 10 to 20 per cent to an existing refinery may be more realistic than building a new one, Montreuil said.

But “the solution isn’t necessarily to cut taxes or to produce more,” Pineau said, noting that new oil and gas infrastructure would run counter to Canada’s climate targets. Unlike past oil shocks, “there are a lot of options to move away from oil,” Sanderson added.

Whichever path Canada takes, the big decisions will largely belong to companies, as HF Sinclair showed this summer by announcing it will stop making base oils in Mississauga, Ont., at Canada’s only such plant. Base oils, used to make motor oil, were already at the centre of a global shortage.

While politicians may bring up building new refineries as an easy solution to a very complicated problem, right now at least, even the industry itself isn’t pushing for it.

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Iconic. Sexy. Yellow. Just a few words used to describe the Canadian-made water bomber, built specifically for fighting fires. This legendary aircraft, which was invented in Canada and transformed the way wildfires are attacked around the world, has been used since the 1960s. But while wildfires have increased in intensity and frequency, the country hasn’t added any new water bombers in over a decade. 

For months, Calgary-based aerospace company De Havilland Aircraft of Canada Limited has been pushing for a national fleet of 50 new planes, lobbying the federal government and urging Canadians to write to their members of Parliament. The newest model has a wingspan wider than six cars from hood to trunk. In 12 seconds, it can scoop up more than 6,000 litres of water, then fly over a wildfire and open its belly to release a waterfall from the sky. The company says it is the best firefighting tool in the world.

“Forest fires won’t wait,” reads a full-page newspaper ad bordered with flames. “It’s time for a national water bomber fleet.”

“We don’t have enough aircraft for the fires of today. We certainly don’t have enough aircraft for the fires of tomorrow,” Neil Sweeney, De Havilland’s vice president of corporate affairs, told The Narwhal. With increasing drought and extreme weather, Sweeney said, “it’s time to invest today for the problems of tomorrow.”

De Havilland’s lobbying efforts may have paid off. Leaked documents obtained by American journalism organization Politico suggest Canada has a new deal with the European Investment Bank to jointly purchase 50 water bombers. The announcement is expected this week at the European Union-Canada summit in Montreal.  

So far, there are no details and plenty of unanswered questions of how this joint fleet could work; both continents have experienced simultaneous, record-setting wildfire seasons. And as wildfire response is provincial, not federal, it’s unclear who would take ownership of such a fleet. A national fleet is a multibillion-dollar project: if Canada were to purchase 50, it could be in the range of $3 billion to $4 billion. The newest model is still in production and it will be years before any new planes take flight. 

The Narwhal talked to aviation and wildfire experts, read through Senate hearing transcripts, studies and media releases to try and understand if a national fleet could be part of the solution to Canada’s growing wildfires. 

Many experts we spoke with hedged the idea with concerns or questions about how many planes Canada really needs, their effectiveness, wait times and costs. Some said dollars should be better spent on a variety of aircraft or, better yet, wildfire prevention.

Stretched for wildfire resources 

There were 23 days in the 2026 wildfire season when fires were so significant that firefighters and equipment in every jurisdiction across Canada were maxed out. International help had to be requested.

When possible, wildfire resources are shared across jurisdictions in Canada. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, a not-for-profit corporation owned and operated by federal, provincial and territorial wildland fire management agencies, acts as a resource broker. It coordinates sharing everything from hoses to personnel to aircrafts. As fossil fuel emissions drive climate change, Canada’s wildfire seasons are becoming longer and more severe. Water bombers can be a powerful tool to make fires more manageable and help crews on the ground. 

Across Canada right now, there are about 50 water bombers owned by some provinces or private contractors. These planes were first manufactured in the 1960s by Canadair and then Bombardier. Over the years there have been some modifications and upgrades until orders slowed and production stopped in 2015. The average age of the current fleet is around 32 to 35 years.

“That was sufficient, you know, until the world started to catch on fire,” John Gradek, a lecturer at McGill University in aviation and supply chain management, told The Narwhal. He has worked in aviation for more than 30 years. Designed from scratch to be an amphibious, firefighting water bomber, Gradek said this built-in-Canada plane has a place in global aviation history.

Now, De Havilland is restarting production with a newer model. When The Narwhal spoke to Sweeney, he said they can currently build about 10 water bombers a year. There are several orders already queued up. The first 22 planes will go to Europe. Manitoba will be the first Canadian province to obtain a new water bomber, which is expected to be ready by 2031. He estimated the wait time for a plane ordered now as six to seven years. 

“Obviously, that’s a long time to wait for an aircraft,” Sweeney said. “We’ve never produced [this aircraft] before. We’re bringing a supply chain back into production. We’re making small but important changes to the aircraft. So there’s a lot of engineering that goes into all of that.”

The federal government spends about $1 billion a year on wildfire suppression and response, according to Natural Resources Canada. Sweeney couldn’t confirm the cost of a new plane but news releases from European and Canadian orders put the price tag from $60 to $80 million.

Water bombers not the ‘silver bullet’ to Canada’s wildfires 

Whether or not 50 is the number of water bombers Canada will need for the wildfires of the future is a question experts couldn’t answer, telling The Narwhal more information was required. Namely, a better understanding of a national wildfire strategy and if there would be investments in other supports like a mix of aircraft, more crews or training.  

The federal government didn’t give any details on who would manage the fleet or where the planes would be stationed. There are several federal agencies, like Public Safety Canada and Natural Resources Canada, which support provinces and territories to manage wildfires and emergencies. But wildfire management is ultimately the responsibility of each province or territory. While the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre acts as a clearing house for resources, the country doesn’t have an integrated, national plan on how to best deploy a fleet of 50 planes, Gradek said.

“I don’t know if 50 is the right number. It may be too little. It may be too much,” Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, told The Narwhal. “It’s part of the toolbox, absolutely. But to me, it’s not the most frequently used tool or the most important tool.” Flannigan is also the B.C. Innovation Research Chair in predictive services, emergency management and fire science. For Flannigan, firefighters and helicopters are more crucial as is a national wildfire strategy.

While water bombers are a tool, “they’re not always the most appropriate tool, depending on the landscape or the fire,” Alexandria Jones, a communications and engagement advisor with the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, said. They are most effective when they don’t have to travel far from a large body of water to a fire. In swampy or mountainous terrains, water bombers have a more challenging time filling up. In those scenarios, Jones said it’s better to rely on smaller aircraft or helicopter bucketing. 

Water bombers do not extinguish flames, experts said many times over; firefighters do. Aircraft are used to make intense fires more manageable, buy time for crews to get established or help them put the fire out. Water bombers are “really not the silver bullet to the national fire situation that we’re seeing year after year,” Jones said.

Ahead of this year’s wildfire season, the federal government invested $316.7 million over the next five years to increase Canada’s aerial wildfire firefighting capacity. Water bombers were considered, but because there is a shortage and significant wait, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, which received the funds, decided to hire a mix of other aircraft.  

Sweeney acknowledged there should be investment into a variety of firefighting aircraft but sees the water bomber as the “backbone of most fleets.”

Fundamental questions unanswered, experts say

De Havilland has been actively lobbying the federal government to “buy Canadian” and is pursuing several projects. Sweeney told The Narwhal that if the government did agree to buy 50 planes, they “could be in Canada by 2029” as the company would set up a second production line and employ Canadian workers. 

Representatives for De Havilland have been busy this year meeting with several departments, including Innovation, Science and Economic Development, National Defence, Global Affairs, Public Services and Procurement and the Prime Minister’s Office, according to data summarized by the Investigative Journalism Foundation. About three-quarters of De Havilland’s government contracts since 2009 were awarded without a bidding process.

The Narwhal reached out to several federal departments to ask how aerial firefighting procurement decisions are made, what research is considered and if water bombers are being considered. Our interview request was declined. An emailed statement from the office of Eleanor Olszewski, minister of emergency management and community resilience, said emergency management is a shared responsibility between several levels of governments, and pointed to recent public engagement on natural disasters and funding for aerial suppression that went to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.  

“The federal government continues to strengthen our national emergency preparedness and response capacity, including through significant investments in wildfire response and resilience in recent years. For example, Budget 2025 included funding to lease firefighting aircraft to create new federal surge capacity.”

But several experts told The Narwhal that investments should be preceded by more clarity on Canada’s wildfire strategy, including where the fleet would be stationed and which agency would manage it. What’s more, Gradek said, there’s still questions around how many planes Canada really needs, and whether water bombers are the most effective tool for the money. 

“Those are the fundamental questions that we have to ask ourselves before we start throwing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars into a firefighting fleet aircraft,” Gradek said.

‘The decisions we make today are really, really crucial’

Preparing for, responding to and recovering from worsening wildfires is mostly the responsibility of provinces and territories. To coordinate efforts more, the 2026 Senate report, Canada on fire, called on the Canadian government to create a national “office for wildfires and emergency response” and fund “a national fleet of modern firefighting aircraft.” Exactly how that would work is still unclear.  

Olszewski’s office told The Narwhal in an email there could be the creation of a “federal emergency management agency,” based on input they heard from a national engagement on natural disasters. 

Robert Gray was among the dozens of witnesses who shared expertise at the Senate hearings. A wildland fire ecologist, he believes water bombers perform an important role in fire suppression, and “we could probably use more,” but if we choose to spend billions on them, “it damn well better work.” 

The water bomber question gets at a core tension to Canada’s wildfire strategy. “Do we double down on suppression or do we shift to trying to get ahead of the problem?” Gray asked. He sees a political culture willing to spend on visible solutions, like water bombers, versus mitigation and prevention efforts.  

Studies show that mitigation and prevention efforts have high cost-benefit ratios. Clearing underbrush and prescribed burns, strategies that Indigenous communities have been using for centuries, have an estimated return of almost $4 to every $1 spent. In one study, restoration of fire-prone forests returned $7 for every $1 spent. Some nature-based solutions have an estimated return of $100 for every $1 spent. 

“Those water bombers are really like the sexy part of firefighting, the prevention and mitigation aspect is less so, but equally, if not more important,” Jones said. 

A year ago this month, Gradek spoke at the Senate hearings telling the committee the country could probably use 100 water bombers. 

“What was the science behind that? Nothing,” Gradek told The Narwhal. 

He’s since reflected on that answer and has stepped back, saying we need more research and clarity around what the country really needs and how these planes would be used most effectively.  

A number helps us write a cheque but it doesn’t solve the wildfire problem, he said. 

“The decisions we make today are really, really crucial,” Gray said. “If we spend $4 billion on air tankers, will we see a return on investment? We’re at a tipping point where we’re going to have to make a significant decision either way.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

When Senator Michèle Audette questioned the Canadian government over its latest plan to fast-track industrial projects, she started by speaking in Innu-Aimun.

For the senator, an Indigenous women’s rights advocate who was a commissioner in the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, speaking the language was a way to centre her Innu community’s past, as Canada tries to shape its future.

“It was to remind, in that important space, that there was a moment when the government had tried to erase us through legislation and policies,” Sen. Audette, who comes from the First Nation of Innu Takuaikan Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam in eastern Quebec, told The Narwhal in an interview.

The people she was reminding were a trio of federal ministers who had appeared at a special Senate hearing on Oct. 6 to answer questions about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Bill C-39, the Building Canada Strong Act.

The 243-page omnibus bill is the latest step in the government’s controversial reshaping of how major projects are scrutinized and approved in Canada. Major projects are things like mines, ports or pipelines, and can affect everything from watersheds to wildlife and can lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions and public health.

Among other changes, the bill would centralize many Indigenous consultations under a new hub within the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, limit environmental assessments of all projects subject to federal reviews to a maximum of one year, and consolidate all required permits into a single decision issued by a single minister after consulting with colleagues.

It would also let projects inside designated zones, deemed “regions of national interest,” bypass normal approval processes, allowing some to start before the assessment is complete and empowering the government to change or remove conditions that have already been imposed on a project. 

Carney’s government has said the bill is a response to complaints from workers, investors, communities and Indigenous groups that approval processes are too slow. It said new legislation is needed to get federal authorities to work together more effectively, so big projects are built faster.

“This in no way reduces our responsibility to assess projects against environmental standards or to fulfill our obligations to Indigenous Peoples,” Privy Council president Dominic LeBlanc, who is responsible for the government’s major projects and free trade push, told the senators.

But a wide swath of Indigenous leadership across the country has united in opposition to what they perceive as the bill’s infringement on the constitutional rights that guarantee an ability to influence decisions that affect their territories.

Many have also recoiled at the majority government’s hurry to transform its bill into law before the end of the year. Special committees in the House of Commons and Senate have been set up to examine the bill simultaneously, instead of the standard procedure where committees at each level take up a bill in succession.

“Prime Minister Carney is weaponizing the parliamentary process and his majority to force the bill through Parliament [and] override the inherent, Treaty and constitutionally protected rights of First Nations,” a joint statement from the Chiefs of Ontario, the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations, the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador and the Nishnawbe Aski Nation of northern Ontario said on Oct. 8.

“This extraordinary maneuver has one purpose: to push the most consequential economic legislation in a generation through Parliament before First Nations, or anyone else, can meaningfully scrutinize it. It is fundamentally antidemocratic.”

Senator questions Bill C-39’s introduction of ‘regions of national interest’

The Carney government has given itself broad discretion to determine what exactly is in the “national interest.”

Last year’s Building Canada Act, which first established this special designation for projects, laid out different elements the government “may consider” when determining “national interest” status.

These are: Canada’s autonomy, resilience and security; the economic or other benefits to the country, the likelihood of the project’s success, how it advances Indigenous interests and how it contributes to clean growth or tackling climate change. But the government also allowed itself to consider “any factor” it deemed relevant, and these elements are not required to all be met as a prerequisite to projects being given the “national interest” designation.

In fact, the first project the Carney government listed was the West Coast Oil pipeline, now named Pacific Link, which the Canadian Climate Institute expects will usher in 20 million tonnes per year of new greenhouse gas emissions — not exactly the type of project that tackles climate change. Meanwhile, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has said the economics of the pipeline are also debatable.

The new bill extends the same set of broad parameters and discretion to determining “regions of national interest.”

As she questioned the federal ministers who had come to answer questions on Bill C-39, Sen. Audette asked if their examination of these regions would include “not only the Indigenous Peoples who are directly affected by the projects but also those upstream and downstream who will feel the environmental, social and economic impacts.”

She told The Narwhal she is concerned the bill may frame Indigenous consultations over these zones as primarily being related to development. Some First Nations’ traditional territories cover vast areas and may overlap with the zones, for instance, even if their actual reserves may not.

“They’ll say, ‘Oh, there’s no First Nation, there’s no reserve on that road,’ but go back before it became Canada, we were there,” she said. “We are still there. We never surrendered.”

The government has said “national interest” regions could be anything from an industrial area to one earmarked for “energy production” or a telecommunications network. The label could even be applied without a specific project in mind, but for “future development needs.”

It said it would first carry out a regional assessment to consider cumulative impacts of development in the area, which would include Indigenous consultations, before designating a zone.

“We don’t want to be a third party or a stakeholder,” Sen. Audette said. “Even if you don’t see a reserve, we are involved, and we want to make sure that what you do, we are at the same level, on the same page.”

In his response to the senator on Oct. 6, Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon, who is also the bill’s sponsor, said First Nations would be involved “at the very beginning of the process, from the conception stage onwards.” He also said he and LeBlanc have already “experienced a lot of very positive feedback from rights holders” about the government’s new approval process for projects.

Canada’s environmental standards and shortened timelines for project approvals questioned by senators

Senator Suze Youance, a civil engineer, told the federal ministers she felt Bill C-39’s shortening of approval timelines was “causing a lot of concern among environmental groups and for certain communities.”

She asked whether the government had considered changing its proposed process “in order to find an acceptable middle ground between economic haste and environmental prudence.”

LeBlanc responded, “The way we reconcile those priorities is reflected in our commitment to act rigorously and in the fact that environmental standards have not changed, nor have our responsibilities toward Indigenous Rights holders.”

Senator Rosa Galvez, an expert on pollution and health who introduced legislation to align the financial sector with climate objectives, said that while Canada has been slow at building some projects, the reason “was not always because of environmental concerns or Indigenous Peoples’ rights. It was also due to a lack of investment.”

She said, during some previous nation-building moments in Canada’s history, reforms that were meant to simplify the regulatory process actually “brought new forms of fragmentation.”

“How will scientific independence be maintained when a specialized regulator assumes greater responsibility for environmental reviews?” she asked.

LeBlanc said the responsibility around oversight evaluation was not being diminished and that the regulators that are responsible will still work with other federal, provincial and independent agencies, and include public consultations.

“The public participation process under any of these agencies doing these reviews has not been changed,” LeBlanc said. “Public participation remains.”

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There was a brief, telling moment when Prime Minister Mark Carney was onstage at a Calgary Chamber of Commerce event last year, following the announcement of a memorandum of understanding with the Alberta government for a new “private sector constructed and financed pipeline” to the West Coast. 

Deborah Yedlin, the CEO of the chamber, mentioned the agreement’s stipulation: the project needed a private proponent rather than public funding. Then she said the project required “derisking.”“Are you saying there’s no room for the government to derisk something for a period of time in order to attract private capital that’s needed for a project like that?” she asked Carney. In other words, how far was Carney willing to go to protect industry from losses?Carney listed off moves his government was making, including regulatory clarity, tax incentives and loan guarantees to move the project forward. And then he said: “In essence, the Asian pipeline will be a private sector project …”

That one word, essence, bore considerable weight. 

So too did the timing of the Oct. 1 announcement that the pipeline — now known as Pacific Link — would be the first project of national interest listed under the federal government’s sweeping Building Canada Act. It comes just over two weeks before Alberta holds a referendum on whether to hold an independence referendum, as well as a slew of questions aimed mostly at immigrants. 

From the beginning, the pipeline plan was a political one, based on a calculus that can be hard to understand outside of Alberta, where decades of government and industry messaging has succeeded in tightly weaving oil and gas into the province’s culture. 

Never has that narrative been pushed harder than by the United Conservative Party government, first under former premier Jason Kenney and now amplified even more under Premier Danielle Smith. 

Having directly linked the future of the country with deregulation for the oil and gas sector, Smith now faces the headwinds of that rhetoric in the form of a burgeoning separatist movement. It’s one she has aided to protect herself from an influential secessionist base in her party. 

It’s a situation Carney has recognized and attempted to shape, acquiescing to Alberta’s demands in an effort to shore up a united front as threats from the United States grow more stark. 

The prime minister might have promised Canadians a “private sector constructed and financed pipeline” in last fall’s memorandum. But it was clear from the beginning he was willing to pay a premium to achieve peace. 

How Alberta’s politics of wealth and alienation fuelled the Pacific Link promise

After their first meeting in March of last year, Smith threatened Carney with an “unprecedented national unity crisis” if he did not respond to a list of demands almost entirely focused on boosting the oil and gas sector. 

It was part and parcel of a wider campaign to link Alberta’s political and economic fortunes more tightly with fossil fuels, including moves to designate emissions data as critical infrastructure to prevent the federal government from accessing it and put up regulatory and economic hurdles to block renewable energy development. 

Smith’s actions are part of a long history of resentment that stretches back as far as the creation of the province, when the federal government denied Alberta control over its natural resources, a move that was later reversed. 

There’s an entire mythology of eastern Canadian domination built up around the National Energy Program introduced by Pierre Elliot Trudeau in the early 1980s, which still resonates with separatists and mainstream conservatives alike. In this century, the climate actions of his son Justin Trudeau inflamed a new sense of subjugation in the oil patch. 

Those resentments and mythologies have been curated by successive Alberta governments as an easy way to rally Albertans to their cause and help cover up internal failures, particularly when it comes to budget crashes. And now it has reached a fever pitch. 

Carney, a veteran of Brexit and big brain amidst big brain money makers, recognized the weight of Smith’s threat and an especially restless Alberta, particularly as the geopolitical landscape shifted under his feet. He wasted no time in wooing her, and her province. 

He has proven willing to deregulate and slash emissions programs and targets to help industry. Now, he’s opening the federal government’s hefty purse to buy peace. The pipeline will cost billions, without any promise that price will be enough to please Smith’s government and the powers it has unleashed. 

Pacific Link pipeline promise is rushing to meet a very specific moment

Pacific Link is moving fast, because it’s meant to meet this specific moment: oil prices are high, Alberta separation is occupying vital political real estate, and a trade war with the U.S. is both threatening Canadian well-being and galvanizing political will for big risks and fast action. 

In this rush, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that many important details still aren’t finalized — such as the route, financing and oilsands companies meeting requirements for a massive carbon capture and storage project.

All of this makes meeting this specific moment difficult, to say the least. It will be years before the pipeline is online. 

There are also serious questions about investing billions of taxpayer dollars into a project for a sector facing possible reductions in demand and a global shift away from the uncertainty of oil markets. Not to mention concerns over the impacts of increased emissions and the reduced ambitions for carbon capture. 

Despite this announcement, the referendum will still take place. The provincial government is spending millions to tell Albertans to send Ottawa a message and stand up for a more sovereign province. Its list of demands remains, even if Smith is playing nice with Carney for the time being.

The willingness of the Alberta government to act in good faith is also questionable. Only days after it signed last fall’s memorandum with the federal government, it went ahead with changes which undermined its industrial carbon price that it promised to strengthen in the agreement. 

That’s the same memorandum containing the broken promise of a “private sector constructed and financed pipeline.” It all suggests Donald Trump isn’t the only Western leader who signs agreements in pencil. 

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“Premature, ill-advised and respectfully should be reconsidered.” 

That’s how Pictou Landing First Nation Chief Tamara Young described Canada’s decision not to require a federal environmental review of two proposed 300-megawatt gas-fired power plants near her community. The comments came in a letter Young sent to the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada in July, two months after the agency declined to study the impacts of the Marshdale and Salt Springs natural gas power plants in Pictou County, N.S., an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of Halifax. 

The letter, shared with The Narwhal by the Mi’kmaw rights organization Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn, detailed “widespread Mi’kmaq and public opposition” to the proposed projects due to concerns about climate change, water use, public health, wildlife and other “cumulative effects associated with two large fossil-fuel facilities located approximately 20 kilometres apart.” These concerns, Young wrote, “require careful assessment in relation to Mi’kmaw Rights and the lands, waters and resources upon which those rights depend.” 

But according to Janiece Walsh, a spokesperson for the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, these concerns don’t meet their threshold for a review. According to a statement she emailed The Narwhal, they fall outside “the potential adverse effects within federal jurisdiction.” 

The impacts on Indigenous Rights that Young called “significant constitutional, procedural and substantive concerns” are just one of the many issues raised in public comments about the two proposed plants. Dozens of comments submitted between Jan. 5 and Feb. 9, 2026, raised questions about public health, climate change, energy access and which level of government would monitor threats to endangered species like Atlantic salmon, mainland moose and black ash.

Then there are the concerns about speed. Unlike most big industrial projects, Marshdale and Salt Springs weren’t proposed by a company. Instead, they were floated by Nova Scotia’s Independent Energy Systems Operator, an agency created by the province in 2024 to manage the province’s electrical grid. According to Chris Milligan, vice president of planning and procurement for the operator, plants like these are necessary stopgaps for Nova Scotia to meet its goal of ending coal-fired electricity use by 2030. 

“Fast-acting natural gas-fired generators are the resource that can provide the firm capacity the province needs to meet demand when wind and batteries can’t,” he told The Narwhal. 

But comments to the federal review questioned this conclusion, including one from the Sipekne’katik First Nation, a Mi’kmaw community located south of the proposed plants. 

“Although the project may help reduce coal use specifically, it represents an additional investment in alternative fossil-fuel-based infrastructure,” it explained, calling that inconsistent with long-term climate commitments made by both the provincial and federal governments.

This all worries Anna Johnston, a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law and member of the federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change’s advisory council on impact assessment. Johnston told The Narwhal she sees the Nova Scotia power plants issue not just as one isolated decision, but part of a broader “build baby build mentality” spreading across the country that is fast-tracking project approvals without adequately considering environmental and social impacts. 

“You’re effectively giving the green light to the project before you’ve done any of the studies on what the effects are going to be,” she said. “Before you’ve had any opportunities for meaningful consultation or engagement or participation. It’s a rubber stamp.” 

Nova Scotia claims power plants “not likely” to affect Mi’kmaq rights, despite dozens of impacts flagged by federal agencies, communities

In December 2025, the Nova Scotia government posted a project summary claiming the power plants would have a limited impact on “traditional Mi’kmaq land use.” 

“Overall, impacts on Mi’kmaq hunting, fishing, plant gathering or other traditional activities are anticipated to be low and confined to the project footprint,” it said. 

Around the same time, Young’s letter to the agency stated, the provincial government sent letters to Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn advising “the nature of this project is not likely to lead to appreciable adverse impacts to credibly asserted or established Mi’kmaq Aboriginal or Treaty Rights.” As such, the province asserted, the duty to consult was not triggered.

The same line alarmed Twila Gaudet, director of consultation for Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn, an association that advocates for Treaty Rights on behalf of the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw Chiefs. She quoted it in a letter she sent to a provincial environmental assessment officer in February 2026, in which she argued that assertion runs counter to what’s written in the actual project descriptions for the two plants. The section on Mi’kmaw community impacts states that “the Crown has a duty to consult with the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia” before moving forwards. 

“The government has neglected their duty to consult,” Gaudet told The Narwhal.

Comments submitted to the federal review that were acquired by The Narwhal through an access to information request also raise questions about the assertion that these projects would have a marginal impact on Mi’kmaq communities. 

According to these documents, Mi’kmaw organizations and federal agencies, including Indigenous Services Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Health Canada, submitted dozens of statements about the impacts these projects would have on Indigenous communities.

They included concerns about how water use and chemical pollution from the plants would impact threatened Atlantic salmon populations in local rivers, an important food source and cultural species for the Mi’kmaq. Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn shared similar worries about impacts on mainland moose. 

Some statements raised red flags about how air and water pollution could impact the health of downstream and nearby communities, a particularly important subject for Pictou Landing First Nation, which has already dealt with decades of industrial pollution in nearby Boat Harbour.Once a pristine tidal estuary known as A’se’k, or “the other living space,” Boat Harbour’s waters were used by Pictou Landing for generations. Then, in the late 1960s, a pulp mill was granted permission to discharge wastewater from a treatment facility into the area. It quickly became a toxic soup, and the community started dealing with a range of health impacts. The mills only stopped dumping waste into the estuary in 2020. 

This “dark history of large-scale industrial developments” is why “it is imperative that the local Mi’kmaq communities are adequately informed well in advance of large-scale projects such as the power plants,” Gaudet explained in her February 2026 letter to the province.

The federal agency grouped concerns from the review into five broad subject areas in its summary of issues: fisheries impacts, health conditions, land use and resources, cultural heritage and Indigenous and Treaty Rights. 

The agency also acknowledged that Mi’kmaq communities “raised concerns about inadequate consultation by governments” but said those concerns were considered in making its decision. 

“In determining whether further assessment is required, [the Impact Assessment Agency] considers several factors, including any adverse impacts the designated project may have on the rights of Indigenous Peoples of Canada,” Walsh said.

She added that provincial environmental assessment approvals require proponents to develop “a Mi’kmaq communication plan. This must include … seeking input from the Mi’kmaq on the development and implementation of project mitigation and monitoring plans.”But, Gaudet said, a communication plan isn’t the same as a consultation process that would address the nation’s “Section 35 constitutionally-protected rights and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

“The blatant disregard for the Mi’kmaq Nation and the impacts these power plants will have on our Mi’kmaw rights is disappointing and unacceptable,” she added.

Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment and Climate Change declined to comment for this story, citing an ongoing judicial review related to the two power plants that has been brought by Living Ecosystems and Power, a Pictou County community organization that launched in April 2026 to oppose the plants. 

Concerns that impact assessment agency ignores emissions 

One big question is which level of government — if any — will monitor or demand mitigation of the plants’ greenhouse gases. Because they’re going to be significant: the initial project plans estimated that each plant will produce 325,594 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually each, the equivalent of adding nearly 75,000 cars to the road. And those emissions are based on the plants only running for 2,190 hours, about one-quarter of their actual capacity. 

The federal government’s climate plan doesn’t track or apply to individual projects. 

When asked to comment on the projects’ potential climate impacts, Environment and Climate Change Canada recommended “greenhouse gas and climate change impacts be assessed and mitigated consistent with guidance in the Strategic Assessment of Climate Change.” 

But in 2024, the federal government amended Canada’s Impact Assessment Act, removing greenhouse gas emissions from federal jurisdiction, following a Supreme Court ruling that found this to be an overreach of constitutional authority.  

At the same time, Anna Johnston explained, impact assessments “do consider whether projects would hinder or contribute to Canada’s ability to meet its climate change commitments.” If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is. 

Basically, the agency can’t assess greenhouse gases as its own issue. But if greenhouse gases harm something within federal jurisdiction — “like fisheries, migratory birds and Indigenous peoples,” she explained — then the agency can trigger an assessment, and recommend ways to reduce or eliminate that harm.

Lori Skaine, executive director of the climate change division within Nova Scotia’s Department of Environment and Climate Change, responded to comments focused on emissions concerns that were sent in to the province’s project review. “The project’s overall [greenhouse gas] impact will depend a lot on how many hours the facility runs each year,” Skaine wrote, also noting the amount could vary depending on the fuel used, noting that these plants could run on diesel if natural gas isn’t available. 

Burning diesel produces up to 40 per cent more carbon emissions than natural gas. It also releases more fine particulate matter and increases local health risks. On-site diesel storage adds increased spill risk to the local ecosystem. 

Karen McKendry, senior wilderness outreach coordinator with the Ecology Action Centre, called potential changes to capacity or fuel type “scope creep.” Something, she said, there is no current remedy for. 

“Everything can change about the project, even after it was approved,” she says. “The environmental assessment process is a one-and-done.” 

A “material change” in the projects’ water use

When they were first proposed, the Marshdale and Salt Springs power plants planned to draw tens of thousands of litres of water from local watersheds each day to cool down turbines, clean equipment and mitigate emissions. But there’s a problem. According to Milligan, when the energy systems operator assessed the region, they determined there is not enough groundwater available on site to proceed with this plan. 

Instead, the operator pivoted to use dry technology systems that employ chemicals instead of water. The type and amount of chemicals have yet to be disclosed, and Milligan says that there are “several commercially available technologies routinely used at power generation facilities that can accomplish this.”

Young thinks this change should reopen the federal decision.

“These changes may materially affect the scope, effects, mitigation requirements and cumulative impacts of the projects,” she says.

They also heighten concerns about impacts on Atlantic salmon, which spawn in Eight Mile Brook, a tributary of the West River Pictou located about 300 metres from the proposed Salt Springs facility. 

It’s one of only a handful of rivers in Nova Scotia with Atlantic salmon populations robust enough that the province allows catch-and-release fishing. In their comments to the federal review, Kwilmu’kw Maw-Klusuaqn described Atlantic salmon as “a foundational food source across Mi’kma’ki.” 

“Loss of access to salmon threatens Mi’kmaq food security, self-determination and rights-based harvesting practice,” it added.

The salmon in the West River could soon be listed as a federally protected population after the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada determined that they were “endangered” in late 2025. Other threatened species impacted by this project include mainland moose, which has been listed under Nova Scotia’s Endangered Species Act since 2003, and black ash, which has been federally protected since 2018. Both were flagged as “culturally significant species for the Mi’kmaq” in the federal review. 

In her response to The Narwhal’s questions, Walsh of the federal assessment agency said it “was aware of this recommendation when it issued its determinations,” and that “the proponent is still required to follow the federal requirements of the Fisheries Act and the Species At Risk Act, as well as conditions issued by the province.” 

The federal government says impacts to these species can be managed without a federal impact assessment. But the provincial system has challenges. In 2020, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court found that the province had “a chronic systemic failure to implement action required” to enforce its Endangered Species Act. In February 2026, the provincial natural resources department eliminated its dedicated wildlife division.

In a statement, the department told The Narwhal “all wildlife-related functions are continuing as before” and that the move is simply a restructuring.“No scientists, biologists, forest technicians or wildlife staff were laid off, and no wildlife programs or services have been reduced, eliminated or transferred outside government,” the statement explained.But conservation groups disagreed, arguing that positions dedicated to biodiversity, ecosystems and habitat protection had been all but eliminated. They were backed up by sources within the department, who told the Halifax Examiner the changes were “absolutely gutting” the wildlife department. One source described them as something done “to punish the scientists working on behalf of wildlife and ecosystems.”

A worrying precedent for expedited project processes

On Sept. 9, the federal government announced plans to further expedite project reviews by shifting reviews for things like pipelines, power plants and oilsands mines from the impact assessment agency to the Canada Energy Regulator. These changes won’t apply to the Salt Springs or Marshdale power plants, but to Anna Johnston, they’re part of the same trend. One that she worries will “essentially eradicate federal environmental impact assessment, the best tool we had for avoiding the environmental harms of risky projects and often the only way for the public to have a say.” 

These most recent changes follow previous federal actions, including Bill C-5, which allowed the government to exempt projects from some stages of federal impact assessments, and agreements between Ottawa and the provinces to streamline joint reviews. Prime Minister Mark Carney and Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston signed one of these co-operation agreements back in March. And Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and Alberta all have similar agreements, while Quebec is in the process of finalizing one. 

The agreement with Nova Scotia states that the province can decide when the federal government should rely on provincially “applicable environmental assessment and regulatory processes” in reviewing and regulating major projects, as the Nova Scotia agreement puts it. The agreement also directs Canada’s impact assessment agency to “[avoid] duplicative decision-making processes related to assessments by relying on provincial processes.” 

Johnston worried this slew of agreements undermine the basic goals of impact assessments. 

“[There is] a risk that we’ve been flagging for a while that the federal government says, ‘Oh no, we don’t need to look at that, the province is going to do it,’ ” she explains. “Meanwhile, the province is saying ‘we don’t have a role here, or we’re going to fast-track,’ or for whatever reason, it’s not going to look at the issue.” 

That, she said, means no one is looking at the bigger picture, that “you’re getting an authorization under the Fisheries Act, you’re really only looking at the fisheries impacts, [and] if you’re getting a navigable waters permit, you’re only looking at impacts on navigation and navigability.”“Environmental impact assessment is meant to take a look at all of those effects under one umbrella, so that decision makers have a more comprehensive understanding of what the full-picture effects are and how they interact,” she said.  

With all of these questions about the process, opposition to the two power plants has been growing, with petitions and two rallies through the summer in New Glasgow, one outside of a speech directly targeting Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston. On Sept. 3, he weighed in on the plants, saying that he would like to see the energy system operator consider other technologies than natural gas. In a press conference, he said that the energy regulator had been “too focused on [natural] gas” and should consider “a proper and more fulsome assessment of different technologies.” 

The energy systems operator responded a week later with a press release announcing that it would open up the door to project proposals that could meet the same power generation needs of these two plants with “energy storage and other on-demand electricity generation technologies.” 

In the meantime, a legal challenge filed by Living Ecosystems and Power is moving through the Nova Scotia courts. And Twila Gaudet says that Mi’kmaw leadership is considering their next move, “which may include meetings with provincial and federal ministers, legal options [and] peaceful protest.” 

Johnston thinks these responses could multiply across the country as governments continue to try to fast-track project reviews. 

“I think that we’re going to see a much bigger wave of lawsuits,” she says. “That’s not good for taxpayers. Litigation is expensive, and Canadians end up paying for it.”

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Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has introduced legislation to expand its “national interest” regime meant to speed up major projects, overhaul federal environmental scrutiny of industrial activity and consolidate Indigenous consultations.

In doing so, the government is largely moving ahead with sweeping proposals it made in May, and making them permanent, despite spending the summer hearing from a public concerned about exactly this: that the Liberals’ plan could sideline scientific expertise and concentrate political power.

Transport Minister and Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon introduced Bill C-39, the Building Canada Strong Act, in Parliament on Sept. 21. The nearly 250-page omnibus bill will entrench new powers to bypass normal government approval processes for projects like pipelines, highways and nuclear facilities, by removing a five-year time limit that was built into last year’s Building Canada Act.

The Building Canada Act first introduced a special designation to allow projects to skirt regular rules if the government deems them in the “national interest,” coming in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and threats to annex Canada. 

Asked by reporters on Wednesday to justify why the government was making its temporary powers permanent, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said Canadians “understand what we’re facing is unprecedented in Canada’s history.” 

“We need to make sure that we have the proper tools in the toolbox to favour economic security in our country,” he said.

The government claims the bill will “bring greater speed, certainty and predictability to infrastructure project reviews” while maintaining “strong environmental safeguards” and upholding Indigenous Rights. 

One of the key changes in the bill is to force all projects subject to federal reviews through a one-year timeframe for approval or rejection, compressing the time to examine things like environmental impacts into a matter of months.

“If you’re going to say no — decide it within a year,” is how Carney put it on Tuesday, addressing criticism of the bill on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

But this shortened timeline is one of many proposals Canadians have been cautioning Ottawa against since it was first made last May, warning that such fast-tracking could create conditions incompatible with the time and space necessary to properly assess big projects. 

The government received more than 26,000 emails and over 40 written submissions on its spring proposals from provinces, territories, Indigenous groups, industry representatives, environmental organizations, academics and think-tanks, according to a summary report published earlier this month.

While much of the feedback was broadly supportive of the effort to speed up approval of major projects and cut down on inefficient government processes, there was also “widespread agreement that reform should not come at the expense of environmental protection or Indigenous Rights,” the report noted.

In particular, Canadians expressed a “recurring concern” around the concentration of decision-making authority in a single minister, or in a small group of powerful people. 

“Many cautioned that increased ministerial or Cabinet discretion could weaken accountability, increase politicization, reduce predictability, and diminish the role of independent scientific, technical, environmental, and Indigenous expertise,” the report stated.

Meanwhile, Indigenous groups worried the changes could undermine reconciliation and limit their ability to assert their constitutional rights within their territories, warning of potential lawsuits.

After tabling its bill, the government received praise from business groups for taking steps to attract investment and boost the economy. 

Business Council of Canada president and CEO Goldy Hyder urged Parliament to “pass the legislation quickly to safeguard the interests of Canadians and rebuild the country’s reputation as a reliable trading partner.” The Western Business Coalition welcomed the one-year timeline for reviews, among other changes.

The changes also come after months of intense lobbying from the oil and gas industry to “simplify” project reviews and commit to much shorter deadlines for approvals.

Starting in 2025, oil and gas executives and lobby groups launched a public campaign pressuring Carney to “unwind the past decade” of environmental and energy policy, complaining that the current system was “impeding” fossil fuel growth.

The bill also follows regulatory changes Carney’s government made early in September to remove certain oilsands facilities and fossil fuel power plants from federal assessments.

Other groups have expressed dismay that the government was moving ahead despite public concerns of overreach. 

The environmental advocacy group Centre québécois du droit de l’environnement said a one-year timeline is “incompatible with the assessment of complex, large-scale projects” that often involve big risks to watersheds, wildlife habitat and communities. 

Such projects generally require long-term studies and analysis of cumulative impacts — not to mention meaningful public input and Indigenous consultations.

Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak warned Carney against “abusing” his powers to speed the bill through Parliament without adequate debate and consultations. 

The national chief said the government should be open to incorporating amendments to the bill offered by First Nations leaders.

So what else is in Bill C-39? Here’s what you need to know.

Moving pipeline and nuclear reviews away from an environment agency

The legislation takes federal reviews of pipelines, nuclear facilities and power lines out of the hands of the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, a federal body that reports to the environment minister and is meant to ensure project designs protect Indigenous Rights and the environment.

Instead, pipeline projects will be reviewed by the Canada Energy Regulator, an agency of the Crown that reports to the energy minister and oversees construction and operation of certain pipelines and power lines.

For nuclear projects, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which also reports to the energy minister, will carry out assessments.

The government said “diverse stakeholders” had expressed support for the move and that environmental, health and Indigenous considerations would continue to be “addressed with rigour.”

Yet making the energy regulator the sole assessor of pipeline projects was one proposal where the public, through “advocacy campaigns distributed through civic engagement platforms and petitions,” had “consistently emphasized concern,” according to the feedback report.

Indigenous representatives also asked the government to hold the energy and nuclear regulators “to the same standard” as the Impact Assessment Agency.

They asked that Indigenous Peoples be involved in updating the laws that govern these agencies, so they’re consistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is meant to uphold their “free, prior and informed consent.” 

In 2021 Canada passed a law to embed that declaration at the federal level.

Taking ‘national interest’ projects a step further

Another idea that elicited major unease from the public was the creation of federal “economic zones” where certain projects could be “pre-approved.” 

Carney’s new legislation rebrands these as “regions of national interest.” Once designated, certain projects inside the region would benefit from the ability to bypass normal approval processes, just like “national interest” projects.

The type of “regions” the government is considering are wide-reaching: a telecommunications network, an industrial area or an “energy production” area are all in play, it said. The region doesn’t even have to be currently used — it could be picked for “future development needs.” 

The first step would be to conduct a regional assessment through the Impact Assessment Agency, which the government said would measure the “cumulative effects of current and foreseeable activities in the area” and involve Indigenous consultations over things like impacts, boundaries and “culturally sensitive areas.”

Then a federal minister will recommend whether to list the region as in the “national interest.” If it does, projects will be “considered pre-approved” and be given a list of conditions.

Kerrie Blaise, founder and lawyer at the nonprofit Legal Advocates for Nature’s Defence, warned in a statement that the Ring of Fire mining and development region on Treaty 9 territory in northern Ontario could be designated as a “region of national interest.”

A group made up of representatives from 15 First Nations and the Impact Assessment Agency are in the midst of a regional assessment of development in the Ring of Fire area.

“Effectively ‘pre-approving’ mining projects within the Hudson-James Bay Lowlands — where the Ring of Fire is proposed — risks irreparable harm to pristine rivers, globally significant carbon stores, refuges for wildlife and species at risk and the Indigenous Peoples who call this region home,” Blaise said.

The regional designation follows a similar process for designating individual projects in the “national interest” that was established in last year’s Building Canada Act.

That process allows the government to automatically grant all federal approvals at the same time, following consultations.

Since passing the law, the government has moved to formally designate four projects as in the “national interest” — a new oil pipeline to the west coast, a nuclear waste depot in Ignace, Ont., the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 in Vancouver and the Mackenzie Valley Highway in the Northwest Territories. 

Many more projects are being considered for the designation by the Major Projects Office, a body run out of the central government agency that supports the prime minister and Cabinet.

A streamlined impact assessment process and the option of earlier project starts

Currently, the Impact Assessment Agency produces a project review to be considered by the environment minister, who then issues a decision on whether it should move forward. 

Other ministers who oversee departments with expertise in different fields, such as fisheries, still have to issue permits for the project after that decision is made, as part of separate processes, which the government says has made the overall project approval process take five years or more.

The new bill would empower the environment minister to issue a decision statement that comes with all required permits issued concurrently from different departments — and all of this happening within a year. 

As well, the environment minister can authorize some work to begin on a project before its Impact Assessment Agency review is completed, if this is deemed in the public interest.

Consolidating Indigenous consultations, making climate one consideration among many

The bill mentions “climate” five times, but vaguely: it’s one of many considerations officials must weigh when deciding on projects like pipelines, power lines or regions of “national interest.” 

The project’s effects on the government’s climate change commitments are among them, but there are no specific dealbreakers, such as an amount of heat-trapping emissions that might trigger a rejection, for example.

Others include “the interests and concerns of the Indigenous Peoples of Canada,” Indigenous Knowledge, scientific information, environmental effects, safety and security, health, social and economic effects, “the existence of actual or potential markets” for pipelines and their “economic feasibility,” and the financial resources of the applicant.

The bill also moves to centralize federal consultations with Indigenous groups by establishing a new “Crown Consultation Hub” within the Impact Assessment Agency, though the energy and nuclear regulators will still oversee their own.

Changes to transportation, navigable waters and fisheries laws

The bill would create a new “National Trade Corridors Council” that would monitor the movement of goods and provide advice to the transport minister on “disruptions.” 

It gives the transport minister new powers to authorize exemptions to the Canadian Navigable Waters Act for dumping materials into waterways. Materials that are currently banned from dumping include sawdust, wood scraps and waste.

As well, some companies would be allowed to harm fish and fish habitat by paying a fee to an environmental damages fund to “offset” it.

The bill also allows the labour minister to end a work stoppage if the government believes that to be in the “national interest.” Labour leaders say that infringes upon Canadians’ right to strike.

Greenpeace Canada dubbed Bill C-39 the “Bulldoze Nature Bill.” 

In a statement, nature and biodiversity campaigner Salomé Sané said, “Carney’s government is locking us into a short-sighted strategy in which decisions about workers’ health and rights, living ecosystems — from rivers, forests to grasslands and communities — are subordinated to a logic of speed and profit, not care and protection.”

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Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government says keeping the federal gas tax off at the pumps will create indirect savings felt all through the economy. But critics argue it could drive up Canada’s emissions while benefiting wealthy households the most.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced last week Canada would be extending its suspension of the federal fuel excise tax until February 2027 and then phasing it back in at half its regular rate through the end of next March.

Government MPs are now fanning out across the country to promote the tax cut.

Excise taxes are imposed on specific goods like fuel or tobacco, as opposed to other taxes that are applied more broadly. Canada charges an excise tax of 10 cents per litre on gasoline and four cents per litre on diesel and aviation fuel.

The government originally cut the tax on April 20 after the Iran war pushed up global oil prices, with the price of gasoline climbing to an average of $1.90 per litre across Canada in early May, according to the Canadian Automobile Association.

The tax break was supposed to last until Labour Day, but at a press conference held at a Canadian Tire store in Ottawa on Sept. 2, Champagne said “Middle East disruptions” continue to drive up the cost of energy and put “additional pressure on families, workers and businesses here at home.”

“This is real relief, right now, relief for families commuting to work … driving their children to activities, or managing the costs of everyday life,” the minister said. “Lower fuel costs help to bring down costs across the country.”

The government said it will forego $5.3 billion in revenue in total from the two tax suspensions.

Crude oil prices are still much higher than before the Iran war and the price of gas in Canada remains high too, with the national average for gasoline sitting at $1.80 per litre as of Sept. 8, or 60 cents higher than it was at Christmas.

But the high oil prices have also translated into billions of dollars in windfall profits this summer for Canada’s major oil companies. As gas prices remain stubbornly high, NDP Leader Avi Lewis has called for an additional tax on those profits, beyond the existing royalties oil companies pay. Lewis argued sharing the proceeds is a better way of delivering cost relief to individuals and families — with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives finding a windfall tax could net between $18 billion and $46 billion over the next year.

“People are getting gouged at the pumps, but another costly handout of public money to oil and gas companies is no solution,” Lewis said in a statement after Champagne’s announcement.

“Instead of more corporate welfare, it’s time for a windfall tax on the big oil giants that are set to make $100 billion in profits this year because of Trump’s illegal war in Iran. Doing so will generate billions in new revenue that we can use to give Canadians real relief at gas stations and grocery checkouts.”

Gas tax breaks are most beneficial to wealthy households

When the government first announced the fuel tax suspension, the Winnipeg-based think-tank International Institute for Sustainable Development called it a “fossil fuel subsidy” because the only way Canadians receive it is by consuming fuel.

Nichole Dusyk, Canada energy transition lead at the institute, said she recognizes there’s an affordability crisis and that a tax break on fuel can distribute a little bit of money to a lot of people.

But she said the relief isn’t targeting the people who need it most. Wealthy households tend to buy more gas and drive more often, she said, so they see the greatest benefits from gas tax breaks compared to lower-income households.

When the tax was first suspended, the parliamentary budget officer estimated that households with the lowest incomes would save only $59 between April 20 and Labour Day, while the highest incomes would see $211 in savings.

For those families who don’t own a car at all, they have no way of directly accessing this relief, Dusyk said.

Asked about these criticisms, Champagne’s press secretary John Fragos argued the measure “promises to not only bring down costs at the pump but across the board too.”

“Canadians will benefit, just as truckers and businesses in the food, agriculture, housing, construction and delivery sectors will similarly save, and because fuel is so omnipresent, a reduction in one area, drives savings through others altogether,” Fragos wrote in an emailed response.

The Narwhal asked the minister’s office if it had any estimates on hand for what kind of indirect cost savings the government was expecting to see.

Fragos said there were “too many variables at play” to offer any firm estimates. But nevertheless he expected to see around 30 cents on the litre in total savings, as the cut reduces production and transportation costs for a wide range of goods.

The federal government has no requirement that manufacturers or transportation companies pass gas tax savings on to consumers.

Experts offer cost-savings alternatives to Canada’s gas tax break

Removing the gas tax also encourages more fossil fuel consumption, Dusyk said. That may mean Canada’s emissions will rise, leading to increased costs on society and more difficulty implementing the country’s official goal of net-zero emissions.

Climate change is leading to more frequent and intense wildfires, which generate toxic smoke that drives up hospital emergency visits, costing the health-care system, while air pollution creates more burdens through increased heart disease, stroke, cancer and premature death. Emergency response and evacuations are also expensive for governments and individuals.

A federal climate science report released on Sept. 3 said this extreme weather will continue to get worse with climate change, and that the question of whether global warming can stabilize after 2050 “will be determined by the level of global greenhouse gas emissions.”

“On both fronts, it’s not really working,” Dusyk said of the tax break. “It’s not an effective policy to really tackle affordability, but it’s also making the climate crisis worse.”

She said a better approach could be to take the billions of dollars in revenue associated with the tax and use it to boost the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, which is the new name for the federal GST/HST credit.

That could allow households in lower income brackets to decide whether the money should go towards fuel, if they do drive a lot, or for covering other essentials.

Another approach could be to reduce Canadians’ exposure to fossil fuel price volatility by supporting the electrification of heating or transportation, or improved public transit, she said.

While the Carney government has recently committed billions to transit and clean energy, the amounts are dwarfed by its multibillion-dollar commitments to fossil fuel projects, including part ownership of a new oil pipeline to the West Coast and financing for a carbon capture project that will address only a small fraction of oilsands emissions.

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Wildfires are raging in every province and territory across Canada, leaving entire First Nations communities burnt, upending the lives of thousands of evacuees and creating plumes of toxic smoke dirtying the air in major cities like Toronto and New York. 

While some politicians claim the out-of-control wildfires are being primarily caused by improper forest management, scientists agree that climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, is the main culprit.

To stop contributing to the problem, the Canadian government could be implementing strict limits on the oil and gas industry for their carbon dioxide emissions. But Prime Minister Mark Carney has rejected that idea, opting instead for an unproven technological fix. 

In doing so, The Narwhal reported this week, the prime minister has become the latest in a long line of politicians to make big promises about carbon capture and storage to cut industrial emissions, despite the technology’s meager track record in Canada.

Read on to learn more.

1. Climate change from fossil fuels is making wildfires more severe and more frequent

Climate change is altering rainfall and storm patterns, creating hotter and drier conditions and more lighting strikes, causing fire seasons to start earlier and last longer and making those fires burn hotter, grow bigger and spread quicker. The result: Canada’s most recent fire seasons have been among the worst on record.

There’s only one real way to slow this escalating problem, scientists say: stop using so much coal, oil and natural gas, the fossil fuels that generate the emissions that are trapping heat in the atmosphere, changing the climate and leading to more extreme weather.

In Canada, the oil and gas industry is the country’s largest source of emissions. That’s partly because the type of petroleum in Alberta’s oilsands, the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserve, requires extra electricity, steam, fuel and machines to turn it into usable products like gasoline compared to some other oil deposits. Oilsands emissions have grown from 41 million tonnes in 2007 to 92 million tonnes in 2024.

2. Carney expects Canada will soon generate more, not less, emissions

As Ontario faces what’s now estimated to be its worst wildfire season on record and other provinces and territories have been similarly devastated in recent years, Carney is focused on coordinating an emergency response with those jurisdictions, including managing the thousands of firefighting personnel and hundreds of aircraft involved. The prime minister says he’s committed to deploying “every resource needed to keep Canadians safe.” 

He also signed a deal with Alberta meant to increase oil production. The deal, which includes a commitment to build a new oil pipeline, is expected to result in more carbon pollution. Carney has admitted his government’s actions will raise emissions. More Canadian emissions means Canada is contributing more to the global problem of climate change that’s making wildfires worse.

Environmental advocate Catherine Abreu, a former member of Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body, told MPs in June that Carney’s government has “repealed or weakened virtually every climate policy and regulation that Canada had developed in the last decade.”

3. Instead of capping emissions, Carney is betting on carbon capture technology

Carney’s deal with Alberta promises not to follow through with a proposal, first made during the government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau, to implement an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector. 

A cap is a government mandate to prevent emissions from rising beyond a certain point. It’s something the industry itself previously said was achievable: in 2022 a group of oilsands producers came out with a plan they said could cut 22 million tonnes of annual emissions by 2030. That plan involved carbon capture, a technology that filters out carbon dioxide from industrial exhaust streams and stores it so it doesn’t get released into the air. 

But even though the Trudeau government proposed the emissions cap as a way to ensure the industry followed through with that plan, oil companies fought the cap proposal and Carney eventually agreed not to implement it.

Now, Carney’s deal with Alberta includes an agreement to build a carbon capture and storage network in the province, but the ambition has been dialed back considerably. Five oilsands companies agreed in July to use carbon capture technology to remove just six million tonnes of emissions per year by 2035, and a “range of technologies” to eventually capture 16 million tonnes per year by 2045. 

Compare that with an average of 20 million tonnes a year in new emissions from the oilsands that the Canadian Climate Institute has estimated will result from higher production levels to feed the new oil pipeline in the deal.

4. The track record for carbon capture of industrial emissions in Canada is bleak

Carbon capture and storage is real, and in use at nine commercial operations in Canada. But the technology is expensive and requires lots of new construction to scale up, while globally it has underperformed, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

The results speak for themselves. Over a 24-year period, 68.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide was captured across Canada, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. That means the oilsands added more to the atmosphere in one year than carbon capture technology has ever stopped from industrial sources over more than two decades.

While oilsands emissions more than doubled from 2007 to 2024, the cumulative amount of carbon being captured from industrial sources is still “on the order of several [million] tonnes per year,” a Natural Resources Canada spokesperson told The Narwhal.

But that’s relatively tiny, compared to the eye-popping figure of 600 million tonnes a year that a government report had once claimed Canada could theoretically capture.

5. Carney’s support for carbon capture makes him the latest in a long line of politicians to tout its benefits

Despite this underperformance, both Liberal and Conservative federal governments in Canada keep projecting optimism about carbon capture’s prospects, dating back to former prime minister Stephen Harper, who gave a speech in Edmonton in 2007 that sounds strangely familiar now. This week, The Narwhal peered into the historical public record — and the national archives — to show just how real the enthusiasm has been.

In Edmonton, Harper talked about “the exciting new technology called carbon capture and storage.” He told Canadians that, “instead of pumping tonnes of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, we may be able to collect it from our oilsands … and pump it deep underground where it will remain for eternity.” He projected confidence, saying he felt “the era of empty rhetoric on the environment is over” and “we’re taking real action that will produce real, tangible results.”

In 2011, his then-natural resources minister Joe Oliver called Canada “a world leader in carbon capture and storage” and “in an excellent position to use this technology on a wide scale.” (Oliver recently wrote an op-ed opposing the latest carbon capture proposal in the oilsands, in part because of the technology’s spotty track record.)

After Trudeau won power in 2015, his first natural resources minister, Jim Carr, told a ballroom full of people in New York in 2016 that carbon capture is one of “the most pressing issues of the day.” One of Carr’s successors, Seamus O’Regan, would go on to describe carbon capture as “an integral part of lowering emissions” that was part of “how we get to net zero.” In 2021, he said Canada was “on the cusp of doing a lot of these things.”

Last year, Carney’s minister of energy and natural resources, Tim Hodgson, a former oilsands company board member, told a Calgary business crowd that the government, as much as private industry, should be pulling for the carbon capture project in the oilsands. In a faint echo of Harper, he said this government “will not be a government of talk, but a government of action.”

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Summary

• Two decades of records show Canadian politicians making big promises about carbon capture technology.
• In 2008, one government report claimed Canada could capture as much as 600 million tonnes of carbon a year — and carbon capture technology could be “implemented quickly.”
• From 2000 to 2024, a total of just 68.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide was captured across Canada and experts say the technology has yet to be proven at scale.

It was March 2007. Apple had just debuted the iPhone. The Iraq War was raging. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had won two Oscars. And the prime minister of Canada was talking about “the exciting new technology called carbon capture and storage.”

“Instead of pumping tonnes of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, we may be able to collect it from our oilsands, our coal-fired electrical plants and other industrial emitters, and pump it deep underground where it will remain for eternity,” Stephen Harper told a crowd of journalists at an event in Edmonton that year.

“If we can perfect this technology, we can use it not only to curb Canada’s contribution to greenhouse gas production, but we could also export it around the world.”

It was the beginning of a long line of claims from political leaders in Canada about how carbon capture could slash planet-warming industrial emissions, including in the oilsands, the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserve, where 159 billion barrels lie buried under Albertan sand and clay.

For close to 20 years, both Liberal and Conservative governments have talked about using carbon capture and storage technology to filter out carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from exhaust streams and store it so it doesn’t get released into the atmosphere, where it traps heat and causes climate change. Yet, while oilsands carbon pollution more than doubled from 2007 to 2024 to 92 million tonnes, the ability of facilities in Canada to capture carbon from industrial sources hasn’t yet grown beyond a few million tonnes of emissions per year.

Meanwhile, the consequences of fossil fuels and climate change are being felt today. Life is more expensive, cities have dirtier air from wildfires, deadly heat waves and other extreme weather are more common, First Nations are disproportionately threatened with disasters and Canadians are more at risk of poverty, heart disease, cancer and premature death.

Around the time Harper spoke in Edmonton, mining the oilsands was thought to be generating 26 million tonnes of emissions. Since then, the federal national inventory report has recalculated historical emissions using updated methodologies and new data to find it was closer to 41 million tonnes. The petroleum in the oilsands starts as a viscous goo called bitumen, and takes large amounts of electricity, steam, fuel and heavy machinery to mine and transform into usable products. This extra activity means oilsands production has been associated with more emissions than some other oil deposits, adding to its climate impact when its end products like gasoline are eventually burned for energy.

There was also a boom happening when Harper made his remarks. Investment in the oilsands had tripled from 2003 to 2007, leap-frogging manufacturing, while oil and gas operating profits had doubled. Office space in Calgary, where many oil companies are headquartered, had dried up as the province rode a wave of record-low unemployment. By 2009, production levels from the oilsands would muscle out other forms of oil production in Canada.

Scientists agree the way to slow the chaos unleashed by climate change is to stop using so much oil, gas and coal. But Harper wasn’t about to impose strict government limits on oilsands emissions that day in 2007. Instead, he would talk about using carbon capture as a possible environmental and economic solution.

“This is a dream that could truly change the world,” he said.

“Friends, the era of empty rhetoric on the environment is over. We’re taking real action that will produce real, tangible results.”

Nineteen years later, that dream is still waiting to be realized.

From 2000 to 2024, 68.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide was captured in the country, Environment and Climate Change Canada confirmed to The Narwhal. That means the oilsands added more emissions to the atmosphere in one year, 2024, than carbon capture equipment has ever stopped from industrial sources over roughly a quarter-century.

It’s also a small fraction of the capture amounts once thought possible. A 2008 report that came out of Harper’s announcement said Canada could theoretically capture as much as 600 million tonnes a year, and that carbon capture could be “implemented quickly, within a decade, using existing technology.”

Carbon capture and storage “is a viable way to achieve significant domestic greenhouse gas reductions,” the report stated, and is a “must-have for western Canada which relies on fossil energy.”

Instead, after tremendous attention and investment, this year Canada will be able to capture “on the order of several [million] tonnes per year,” a Natural Resources Canada spokesperson told The Narwhal. (The department declined to offer a precise figure when asked.)

Capturing this amount when the oil industry is sending so much more into the air is equivalent to taking a million cars off the highway while 30 million more drive up the on-ramp.

“Carbon capture has never, ever been proven at scale, or price. That’s just a fact,” Catherine McKenna, a former environment minister under the Justin Trudeau government, said in an interview.

“The oil and gas companies talked to me about carbon capture and storage, and made promises, for like a decade. We have yet to see anything.”

Now, like Harper before him, Prime Minister Mark Carney is putting his faith in carbon capture technology to do the heavy lifting, while he advocates for more oil production.

Carney struck a deal with Alberta that promises not to follow through with a Trudeau-era proposal for an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector.

Instead, the deal, meant to grow oil production and get a new oil pipeline to the West Coast built, includes an agreement to build a carbon capture and storage network in the province.

In July, five oilsands companies agreed to terms that envision using carbon capture to suck out six million tonnes of oilsands emissions per year by 2035. The project, dubbed Pathways, is supposed to use a “range of technologies” to eventually capture 16 million tonnes per year by 2045.

“The Alberta [deal] will build carbon capture and storage,” Carney said in Parliament in January. “It will build our future.” The deal, he told reporters in June, is about “working together, getting results for the citizens.”

His minister of energy and natural resources, Tim Hodgson, a former oilsands company board member, told a Calgary business crowd last year that the government, as much as private industry, should be pulling to get Pathways off the ground.

“All of us — governments and industry — need to get the Pathways project done. This government will not be a government of talk, but a government of action,” Hodgson said.

The federal government was boasting about being ‘a world leader in carbon capture’ in 2011

Harper’s full remarks from that day in 2007 are held at the national archives in Ottawa, where The Narwhal listened to a recording of them in June.

But plenty of other comments exist online in the public record of others talking optimistically about carbon capture to lower emissions.

In 2011, for example, Harper’s then-natural resources minister Joe Oliver said Canada was “a world leader in carbon capture and storage” and was “in an excellent position to use this technology on a wide scale.”

The next year he repeated this message: “Canada is in an excellent position to lead the world in the development, implementation and deployment of carbon capture and storage technology.”

In 2013, he said the government was “devoting significant amounts of money to carbon capture and storage, and we are doing that in co-operation with companies.”

Oliver now opposes the latest carbon capture proposal in the oilsands, in part because of the technology’s spotty track record and uncertain impact.

The trend continued after Trudeau’s Liberal government won power in 2015. Trudeau’s first natural resources minister, Jim Carr, told a ballroom full of energy analysts in New York in 2016 that carbon capture is one of “the most pressing issues of the day.”

The next year, he said carbon capture improves Canada’s “environmental performance.”

One of Carr’s successors, Seamus O’Regan, would describe carbon capture as “an integral part of lowering emissions” and said it was part of “how we get to net zero.” In 2021, he told CBC News Canada was “on the cusp of doing a lot of these things.”

François-Philippe Champagne, who in 2024 was Trudeau’s industry minister and is now finance minister, described Canadian companies then as “world leaders in carbon capture” and portrayed it as one of the “clean-tech solutions for the net-zero economy.”

(Story continues below.)

Two decades of political support for carbon capture

• Jan. 23, 2006: Harper Conservatives win minority government
• May 11, 2006 “Canada is already on the right track, particularly in research on energy efficiency, alternative energy sources and carbon capture and storage technologies. These technological advances will help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions and will enable Canada to capitalize on its huge energy potential for the benefit of all Canadians.”— Christian Paradis, parliamentary secretary to the minister of natural resources, in Parliament
• March 8, 2007 “Instead of pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, we may be able to collect it from our oilsands, our coal-fired electrical plants and other industrial emitters, and pump it deep underground where it will remain for eternity. … Friends, the era of empty rhetoric on the environment is over.”— Stephen Harper, prime minister, Library and Archives Canada
• April 4, 2008 “Our government is ensuring that Canada is at the leading edge of clean technologies to reduce emissions and adapt to environmental change. That is why in Budget 2008, we announced $5 million … [to] address outstanding issues in the deployment of carbon capture and storage technologies.”— Gary Lunn, natural resources minister, press release
• Oct. 14, 2008: Harper Conservatives win minority government
• Oct. 18, 2009 “Carbon capture and storage is the most viable technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Our government’s recent investment in large-scale demonstration projects further advances Canada’s leadership in this technology, while building a knowledge base to share this expertise with our global partners.”— Lisa Raitt, natural resources minister, press release
• March 16, 2010 “The $1-billion fund relating to green technology investments, including carbon capture and storage, which was set up in the 2009 budget, is not a research investment. These are demonstration projects investments. … The only known technology to abate carbon emissions from thermal coal plants is carbon capture and storage. It is the only technology that has ever been discovered that can actually abate emissions.”— Jim Prentice, environment minister, at committee
• May 2, 2011: Harper Conservatives win majority government
• June 24, 2011 “Canada is a world leader in carbon capture and storage and we are in an excellent position to use this technology on a wide scale.”— Joe Oliver, natural resources minister, press release
• March 27, 2012 “Canada is in an excellent position to lead the world in the development, implementation and deployment of carbon capture and storage technology.”— Joe Oliver, natural resources minister, at committee
• May 21, 2013 “We are devoting significant amounts of money to carbon capture and storage, and we are doing that in co-operation with companies, because that is the way to do it. Our government is a world leader in carbon capture and storage.”— Joe Oliver, natural resources minister, in Parliament
• Oct. 6, 2014 “We were proud to support the research and development of carbon capture and sequestration, and see the technology developed through commercialization at the Boundary Dam project, a technology that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions at that facility by 90 per cent. We remain committed to growing the economy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions with world-leading technologies.”—Greg Rickford, natural resources minister, in Parliament
• Feb. 19, 2015 “Since 2006, our government has made investments of over $10 billion to transition Canada toward a clean energy economy and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the long term. … These funds have helped establish Canada as a global leader in the research, development and demonstration of carbon capture and storage technologies.”— Colin Carrie, parliamentary secretary to the minister of the environment, in Parliament
• Oct. 19, 2015: Trudeau Liberals win majority government
• April 4, 2016 On a North American memorandum of understanding on climate and energy: “It’s an aspirational agreement that focuses our three countries on the most pressing issues of the day … [including] advancing the competitiveness of carbon capture, use and storage.”— Jim Carr, natural resources minister, prepared remarks for a speech
• Sep. 14, 2017 “Carbon capture and utilization technology creates new products and business revenue stream opportunities while improving our environmental performance, creating jobs and driving clean growth in the process.”— Jim Carr, natural resources minister, press release
• Nov. 9, 2018 About a $2-million investment in a carbon capture project: “This project leverages today’s traditional resources to deliver tomorrow’s clean energy solutions. Developing and adopting clean technologies will help Canada meet its domestic and international climate change commitments and help maintain our natural resource advantage for years to come.”— Amarjeet Sohi, natural resources minister, press release
• June 17, 2019 On signing two memorandums of understanding: “The second commits Natural Resources Canada and the Japan Coal Energy Center to work together on clean energy, including carbon capture utilization and storage technologies.”“Canada is taking a leadership role in the clean growth century by balancing the environment and economy both domestically and internationally.”— Paul Lefebvre, parliamentary secretary to the minister of natural resources, press release
• Oct. 21, 2019: Trudeau Liberals win minority government 
• June 15, 2020 “We see carbon capture and sequestration as an integral part of lowering emissions and making emissions more competitive, making our oil and gas industry more competitive.”— Seamus O’Regan, natural resources minister, at committee
• March 9, 2021 “Carbon capture technology creates jobs, lowers emissions and increases our competitiveness. This is how we get to net zero.”— Seamus O’Regan, natural resources minister, press release
• April 21, 2021 “I lead a department of scientists who are looking at things like carbon capture and storage, both onshore and offshore. … We are on the cusp of doing a lot of these things.”— Seamus O’Regan, natural resources minister, interview
• Sept. 20, 2021: Trudeau Liberals win minority government
• March 28, 2022 “We are taking bold action on climate change. … We see carbon capture and underground storage as part of the solution.”— Terry Duguid, parliamentary secretary to the minister of environment and climate change, in Parliament
• Feb. 7, 2023 “We are investing billions of dollars in climate action and into the new economy. We have eliminated six fossil fuel subsidies and are on our way to eliminating nine. We need to use every tool in the toolbox to reduce our emissions, including carbon capture.”— Terry Duguid, parliamentary secretary to the minister of environment and climate change, in Parliament
• May 8, 2024 “My colleagues are well aware that Canadian companies are world leaders in carbon capture and hydrogen fuel cell technology. That’s why we will continue to support the adoption of made-in-Canada clean-tech solutions for the net-zero economy.”— François-Philippe Champagne, industry minister, at committee
• April 28, 2025: Carney Liberals win minority government
• May 23, 2025 “We will invest in carbon capture, methane reduction and other technologies to ensure Canadian oil and gas is not only produced responsibly, but is the most competitive in the world. All of us — governments and industry — need to get the Pathways project done.”— Tim Hodgson, natural resources minister, prepared remarks for a speech
• April 13, 2026: Carney Liberals achieve majority government
• June 25, 2026 “We will deepen co-operative federalism with initiatives [like] Alberta’s proposed carbon capture and pipeline to the West Coast. … With the implementation agreement around carbon capture, [the government is] working together, getting results for the citizens.”— Mark Carney, prime minister, news conference (not online)

The Trudeau government’s emissions cap proposal came together after the Oil Sands Alliance, a group of major producers formerly known as the Pathways Alliance, had publicized a project they originally claimed could cut 22 million tonnes of oilsands emissions by 2030, with carbon capture being a central element of their plans.

The natural resources minister at the time, Jonathan Wilkinson, portrayed the emissions cap as a way to ensure the industry did what it said it could do.

Oilsands companies fought the proposal. A group of them pushed the government to delay and weaken the emissions cap’s rules, saying they needed “flexible and cost-effective” rules and a “long lead time” to prepare. By 2024, the boss of one of the country’s largest oil and gas companies was openly calling for the idea to be abandoned. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith also came out against the proposal.

Last year, after Carney won power, Canadian oil and gas executives and lobby groups called on him to “unwind the past decade” of Trudeau-era policy altogether, killing not only the emissions cap but also other environmental rules. The prime minister has ticked off several boxes on their wishlist.

The Narwhal reached out to more than a dozen current and former government officials to ask them if they stood behind their comments about carbon capture today, knowing what they know now.

Minister Hodgson’s spokesperson forwarded the questions to Natural Resources Canada. A spokesperson for his department responded that technologies like carbon capture are “important tools in Canada’s broader climate toolbox of measures to reduce or remove emissions, while strengthening growth and security.”

Carbon capture and storage “holds great opportunity to advance climate competitiveness, and is an area where Canada can lead internationally and sell components and expertise in global markets,” they said in an email to The Narwhal. It offers a “practical path to reduce emissions, protect and create jobs, sustain economic growth and keep Canadian industries globally competitive.”

A spokesperson for Champagne declined to comment. The others did not respond.

The Narwhal also sent separate questions to Natural Resources Canada directly. Another spokesperson claimed Canada’s industrial carbon capture rates will rise in the coming years.

“While Canada has already captured and stored or used significant volumes of [carbon dioxide] the sector is growing, with new projects and infrastructure expected to come online as technology improves and evolves,” the spokesperson said in an email.

There’s a “growing list of potential projects across multiple industrial sectors” today, they said, and “these projects are expected to increase capture volumes over time.”

Canada doesn’t publish an official forward-looking estimate of carbon capture potential, the department said. And the spokesperson pointed to a number of challenges with carbon capture adoption. For one, the projects are “large, capital‑intensive and technically complex.”

Carbon capture is expensive. The Pathways proposal was initially estimated at $16.5 billion and is now pegged at between $20 billion and $30 billion, despite lowering the amount of emissions it is intended to capture. At times it has seemed like it could struggle to break even, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

The government is offering federal financial incentives for carbon capture, and Carney reversed a Trudeau-era ban on companies from accessing that incentive when they pump the captured carbon into wells to loosen up more oil for extraction.

Despite hitting record profits in recent years, oil companies have in the past largely resisted spending the billions of dollars necessary to build out carbon capture equipment across their large properties. Instead the industry spent years lobbying the government for lucrative public subsidies to install and run carbon capture systems.

Scaling up carbon capture and storage also requires building new pipelines and storage hubs. A Natural Resources Canada spokesperson said the technology continues to “evolve” and investors are looking for enough “market demand for low‑carbon products,” which the government believes has been bolstered with the Alberta deal.

Globally, the technology has underperformed, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development. One of Canada’s own flagship projects captured less carbon than initially thought. In 2022, more than 400 academics wrote an open letter to Canada saying carbon capture was “neither economically sound nor proven at scale,” despite decades of research.

Carbon capture used to secure social licence for pumping more oil

When it comes to techniques for keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, using carbon capture technology on industrial sources is only one approach.

Other types of technologies, collectively called carbon removal, can draw existing emissions from the atmosphere or store carbon permanently in other forms like rock.

There are 11 million tonnes worth of annual permanent carbon removal capacity in the planning stages in the country, according to Carbon Removal Canada, an independent non-profit. Those plans are for new projects such as direct air capture or carbon mineralization, but not industrial carbon capture.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that provides governments with climate science, has said carbon capture and carbon removal technologies will have to be part of the mix of techniques that countries use to slow the rise in planetary temperatures causing climate change.

It’s a point Steven Guilbeault, who served as another environment minister under Trudeau and helped develop the emissions cap proposal with Wilkinson, raised several times in Parliament. Canada needed to look at every possible technology that could help reduce emissions, he argued.

But the United Nations panel was also clear these kinds of technologies are not a substitute for a “substantial reduction in fossil fuel use,” rather something to be used alongside those efforts.

In an interview with The Narwhal, Guilbeault said Canadian politicians have often misunderstood the difference, seeing carbon capture as “a way to continue pumping oil and gas in Canada.”

“It’s a technology we will need, but it’s not in lieu of reducing emissions, and unfortunately it seems that a lot of people haven’t understood that,” he said.

The technology “is a very convenient, theoretical, technical fix to a larger problem,” Guilbeault said. “We humans tend to look for easy fixes, sometimes, to complex problems.”

Evidence also suggests carbon capture has been popularized by the oil and gas industry to shield itself from criticism. In 2022, a U.S. Congressional probe found oil companies were talking about carbon capture publicly as a way to mitigate their climate impact, but internally were discussing it as a way to secure “social licence” to continue producing fossil fuels.

In June, the investigative outlets ProPublica and Drilled published evidence the oil company BP helped shape an academic paper that oversold carbon capture’s readiness, while the oil and gas industry funded research at universities that boosted the technology.

Guilbeault said he has “always been skeptical” of the oil industry’s carbon capture proposal in Alberta.

His skepticism is shared by former oilsands executive and former member of Parliament Martha Hall Findlay, who helped develop the industry’s initial Pathways carbon capture proposal. She now argues Canada should “postpone” the project and focus on other priorities.

Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is also skeptical of Carney’s plan.

A former Harper government minister of democratic reform, and employment and social development, Poilievre has supported subsidizing carbon capture in the oil and gas industry in the past. In 2022, shortly after becoming leader, he said the Canadian energy industry was “leading in the world” on carbon capture, and accused the Trudeau government of being “slow to support it and insufficient in that support.”

In 2023 he asked, “Why do we not use technology instead of taxes to fight climate change? Why do we not support our energy sector in pumping the carbon back into the ground through carbon capture and storage?”

More recently, Poilievre has criticized Carney’s deal with Alberta for committing billions of dollars to a “money-losing carbon capture project that has never been proven anywhere.”

Asked by The Narwhal why he’s soured on support for carbon capture, Poilievre said he only sees value if it’s used to extract more oil.

“When you pump carbon back in the ground and pressurize the geology, and you can bring up more oil, they can then go out and make the world a better place,” he said.

“The other is just pumping air into the ground and getting nothing in return. … How’s it going to make money?”

Updated on July 22, 2026, at 11:48 a.m. ET: This story was updated to include the latest figure for 2007 oilsands emissions from the national inventory report. While a report from Alberta published in 2008 put the figure at 26 million tonnes, the national inventory report has recalculated historical emissions figures with updated methodology and additional data, putting it at 41 million tonnes of emissions.

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What a week. Amidst the blur of World Cup shenanigans and Canada Day festivities, politicians dropped not one, not two, but three massive pipeline announcements. 

First, there was the multibillion-dollar federal commitment for infrastructure projects in B.C. What does this have to do with pipelines, you ask? Well, the agreement also included a promise to maintain the federal oil tanker ban off B.C.’s North Coast and $10 billion to upgrade the Roberts Bank export terminal (that’s the huge shipping terminal you can see from BC Ferries as you approach Tsawwassen, FYI). 

That brings us to the second announcement, which came just a few hours later when Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced a plan for a southern route for a new oil pipeline to the West Coast that would largely follow the right-of-way for the Trans Mountain pipeline, except — surprise, surprise! — it would end at Roberts Bank. This theoretical pipeline would be planned and built by the federally owned Trans Mountain Corp., with Pembina Pipeline Corp. taking a 10 per cent stake in construction. Oh, and it would cost between $35 billion and $44 billion (mostly in taxpayer money).

As if that wasn’t enough to process, on Monday Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Smith proposed another pipeline called Northern Shield, which would take oilsands bitumen to refineries in Sarnia, Ont. There’s also no private backer for this pipeline and, notably, no formal federal support. The chief of Aamjiwnaang First Nation, meanwhile, says the nation hasn’t been consulted on the proposal thus far and notes it’s still in the midst of a benzene crisis and dealing with the fallout of a March 2026 pipeline spill.

The headlines have been coming so fast and furious, it’s been tough to keep up. I spent the week scouring the internet, trying to get my head around it all. Some of the most insightful commentary I came across was from Amy Janzwood, an assistant professor in political science and environment at McGill University — so I called her up to pick her brain on, well, all of it. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

What have you noticed about the pipeline discussion in the media over the last week? 

All the media coverage I saw has been stenography, basically. Just regurgitating all of the talking points of [Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Tim] Hodgson, Carney and Smith. It’s been extremely uncritical coverage. The kind of making of a pipeline out of literally nothing other than taxpayer dollars has been quite dizzying and shocking to see. 

The questions I was asked a year ago about pipeline politics are very different than the questions I get now. Before I’d get asked: “What’s the prospect of another major oil pipeline? Is this a political fantasy?” But now there’s a slippage into engaging on the terms of the Smith government. The lack of context I’ve seen in the reporting on this is in part because of the firehose of announcements, and media outlets are just not able to keep up.

You have noted before that legacy media often uncritically repeat the narratives of the oil industry. It sounds like you’re still seeing that? Are any particular examples coming to mind? 

Hodgson has basically become the voice of the industry and I see that repeated verbatim, without any kind of interrogation. One very clear example I see over and over again is the profitability narrative around the Trans Mountain pipeline when we know this is actually not a profitable pipeline. You could argue there are good reasons to have it and we can have that debate, but [federal politicians] like to say that this is a profitable pipeline, which is straight up not true, so that’s one example of things that I see kind of repeated very uncritically.

Given that it’s not a profitable pipeline, what are the real reasons you think we’re seeing such broad political support for it in this moment?

There has been incredibly powerful messaging from the Carney government that we can have it all. We’ve seen this misconstrual of economic anxiety, sort of pinned on the hopes of another pipeline, which couldn’t be further from the reality. 

Pipelines have become kind of a stand-in for the future of oil and gas. It’s become a stand-in for a lot of really difficult conversations.

Canadians are still broadly supportive of climate action and renewable energy, but they’re also more supportive of pipelines now than they have been for at least the last decade. What do you make of that contradiction? 

As political scientists, we’ve long known that public opinion can largely be shaped by our political elites. I’m not surprised when I hear things from our prime minister and minister of natural resources around the need to build more pipelines, that there is this slippage or confusion that this is going to reduce our reliance in any way on the U.S. If you’re not following this closely, then that sounds great, if you’re being told this is what we need to keep Canada prosperous and strong. 

But as someone who has studied pipelines for over 10 years, those are promises new pipelines will not be able to deliver on. I think the public has largely forgotten the cost and divisiveness about Energy East, about Northern Gateway, about Trans Mountain. Unless you’re directly affected and witnessing and experiencing the impacts of these projects, those costs to you, those environmental risks are not salient. It has long been difficult for folks to make that connection when we’re told this is necessary for our economy, and when the economic benefits are as overstated as they often are.

Canadians are repeatedly told that pipelines are what’s needed to keep Canada prosperous and strong. What are political leaders misrepresenting when they say that? 

Fundamentally when we’re talking about major new pipelines, you’re going to need significant greenfield oilsands expansion to fill it. [A greenfield project is a new project built on undeveloped land.] We’ve seen the economics of the oilsands have not been trending towards that for the last several years to decades. Investors in the oilsands were really pressuring companies to deliver on their dividends. There was not an appetite for massive new expansions; it was not economic and it still is not. It would actually harm the industry if they can’t fill the pipeline. 

If we’re now talking about a hypothetical West Coast pipeline, the volatility and the reliance on global oil prices and very uncertain demand … there is not a long-term case to be made for increasing oil expansion to the degree that would be required for a major new pipeline.

This is not economic for the industry, so this will be taxpayer-funded. And there’s no certainty about demand for this hypothetical oil that the industry does not seem willing to produce, although Smith has alluded to doing whatever she can to stimulate further oilsands production with additional provincial support. 

It’s quite misleading to suggest we would need a new pipeline to diversify away from the U.S. I do think we do need to have important conversations about how to become more resilient in light of having the Trump administration. But spending billions of dollars for a pipeline that we don’t think the industry can fill is not the way to do it. 

Politicians also increasingly claim that Canada can indefinitely expand oil and gas production while meeting our climate commitments. Is that actually possible?

The short answer is no. This myth was alive and well under the Trudeau government. The Trudeau government really pioneered this narrative that we can have Trans Mountain and the oil expansion that comes with it and meet our climate targets and use the money from Trans Mountain to pay for the clean energy transition.

The latest iteration of this argument is this promise of carbon capture and storage. My take is that this is something the industry has never really been serious about doing.

Since Pathways Alliance [now called Oil Sands Alliance] announced its carbon capture and storage project in 2022, we’ve seen absolutely no significant investment of any kind in this project. And we know that they’ve just quietly stepped back from the amount of emissions reductions they’re promising.

It’s been quite troubling to see the Carney government so unquestioningly provide this narrative that we can have decarbonized oil — which is, of course, a contradiction.

You have described expanding fossil fuel exports as like saving for retirement by doubling down at the casino. Can you explain why that is?

Let’s not forget that oil and gas is a relatively small part of Canada’s GDP … but looking at the media coverage, you would not know that. 

The conversation we’re having right now is a federal government that has continuously found new and ever-creative ways to subsidize fossil fuel expansions, whether that’s LNG [liquefied natural gas], oilsands or carbon capture and storage, and telling the public that this is necessary. 

Let’s set aside LNG for now (the economics of LNG are a bit different), but about oil specifically, this is an industry that’s had record profits that’s been unwilling to pay for its own pollution — it is a cost the industry has very successfully avoided, whether that’s orphan wells and cleanup or carbon. 

We’re told we need to double down and it’s necessary for economic prosperity. But what we’re seeing is the bill that’s racking up that taxpayers are on the hook for — when there’s an industry that can very well pay for it, and is unwilling to because they know they have a government that will backstop it. They now have a government that will buy a pipeline and that now has a state-owned pipeline company that is promising to be a backer for another new pipeline, which honestly, if you had told me that even 12 months ago, I would not believe you. It is absolutely mind-boggling. 

The Narwhal is going to be following all of these issues closely. If you have thoughts or a story tip email editor@thenarwhal.ca

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