Summary

• In briefing notes, officials with Canada’s natural resources department compared a federal office to a White House council tasked with stewarding energy projects forward.
• Canada’s Major Projects Office is meant to speed up developments including natural gas and mining.
• A First Nations leader noted Canada’s different constitutional framework, while environmental experts and advocates cautioned against following Trump’s push for “energy dominance.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s special office for speeding up major projects “operates similarly” to U.S. President Donald Trump’s energy “tiger team,” according to internal Canadian government records.

The comparison between Carney’s Major Projects Office and the president’s National Energy Dominance Council, or NEDC, are contained in a briefing note for Canadian Energy Minister Tim Hodgson that was obtained by The Narwhal through an access to information request.

“The NEDC operates similarly to the Major Projects Office,” the briefing note from Natural Resources Canada reads, “providing support to advance projects efficiently and address issues that may impede progress. It is a small group of officials working at the centre of government to facilitate decision-making.”

According to a description by one of its senior advisers, the U.S. council, which was created within the Executive Office of the president, is conceived as a “tiger team,” or a group of specialists hired to solve a specific problem. It offers “concierge, white glove service” to get mining and fossil fuel projects approved fast, the advisor said.

It’s chaired by U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who has close ties to oil and gas producers, and the team has been involved in promoting mining, natural gas and a pipeline in Alaska. The briefing note shows Hodgson was scheduled to meet with Burgum last October.

Six months after Trump’s council was formed, Carney launched the Major Projects Office with a mandate to “streamline and accelerate” regulatory approvals for “nation-building” projects. The office is backed by the Privy Council Office, the department that supports the prime minister and cabinet.

So far, the prime minister has referred five mining projects and two natural gas projects to the office, as well as others in nuclear, electricity, ports and roads. He put Dawn Farrell, the former CEO of the oil pipeline company Trans Mountain, in charge.

During a visit to an energy conference in Houston in March, Hodgson remarked on the closeness of his office’s relationship with Burgum, and said, “the U.S. wants to achieve energy dominance. We support you in that view.”

The Narwhal approached Hodgson after he gave a speech at a First Nations Major Projects Coalition conference in Toronto on April 30, to ask about the comparison his department made with Trump’s team. The minister, while walking through the conference and chatting with an attendee, twice avoided taking questions, saying he was too busy. Another official suggested contacting his office.

A spokesperson for Natural Resources Canada said the comparison between the Major Projects Office and the U.S. council “was intended as a high-level description of function — not a statement of equivalence in mandate, governance or approach.”

The department also noted Canada’s “distinct constitutional, legal and policy framework that reflects our values and obligations” and said Canada’s office is “not limited to a single industry or sector.”

Treaty 8 Grand Chief says comparisons between Canada and U.S. approaches to development should be ‘treated very carefully’

Carney has pitched the Major Projects Office as working “in partnership” with Indigenous Peoples. He held summits last year with First Nations, Inuit and Métis rights holders. The office’s Indigenous Advisory Council is meant to help guide its work.

Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi, of Treaty 8 First Nations of Alberta, sits on the Major Projects Office’s Indigenous Advisory Council. He reacted to the comparison by noting that Canada’s different constitutional framework, including the Crown’s obligations to First Nations, means “speed cannot come at the expense of Treaty Rights.”

“What I can say is that any comparison between the Major Projects Office and a U.S. energy permitting model has to be treated very carefully. Canada operates within a different constitutional framework,” Mercredi said, including Treaty Rights, land claims and the duty to consult. “The Crown’s obligations to First Nations cannot be treated as permitting issues or obstacles to be managed around.”

He said there is value in the Major Projects Office if it improves government transparency and coordination and ensures First Nations are meaningfully involved in decisions that affect their lands, waters and Treaty Rights.

“But if the purpose is to simply move projects faster by narrowing, bypassing or compressing Crown obligations, that would be a serious concern,” he said.

Mercredi said his role on the Indigenous Advisory Council does not replace direct consultation with rights-holding nations and doesn’t satisfy the Crown’s legal obligations.

For Treaty 8 nations, he said, the issue isn’t whether Canada can build major projects — it’s whether Canada will honour treaties, respect First Nations jurisdiction and ensure decisions are made with “proper consultation, accommodation, environmental protection and real participation by the nations whose territories are affected.”

Canada’s Bill C-5 faces strong opposition, and a lawsuit

The government passed the Building Canada Act, part of Bill C-5, in June 2025, cementing a process in law to name projects in the “national interest.”

It has seen strong opposition from some Indigenous communities, as well as public interest groups, who argue it paves the way for the government to circumvent oversight that’s meant to protect the environment, public health and scientific integrity.

The Quebec Environmental Law Centre has launched a legal action asking the courts to strike down the law. The group announced April 27 it had gathered 11 other organizations who seek to intervene in the lawsuit.

The law centre’s executive director Geneviève Paul, reacting to the documents from the natural resources department, said decisions made behind closed doors are not in the interest of Canadians.

“The government of Canada needs to act responsibly and defend our institutions, not follow authoritarian trends and copy the jurisdictions which are dismantling the protections we need to move forward safely,” she said.

Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist at Greenpeace Canada, said it was “telling” that the federal department itself was comparing the two offices.

“I think many Canadians who voted for an ‘elbows up’ agenda would be surprised to learn that our natural resources minister went to Houston [in March] to tell Americans that he wants to help the Trump administration achieve energy dominance, which is code for expanding fossil fuels at any cost,” Stewart said.

Updated on May 5, 2026, at 11:30 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to include a statement from Natural Resources Canada that was sent after the given deadline.

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Again and again last year, Canadian oil and gas executives and lobby groups made public overtures to Prime Minister Mark Carney to “unwind the past decade” of environmental and energy policy in order to “unlock” fossil fuel industry growth.

After eight months in office, the Carney government has signalled major policy changes through its Building Canada Act, its Major Projects Office, its federal budget and its pipeline-focused memorandum of understanding with Alberta. All of this brings federal policy at least partially in line with the list of proposals made by these industry representatives. 

One fossil fuel company spokesperson told The Narwhal they’re “pleased to see the progress that has been made.”

“These are all steps in the right direction of building a stronger Canadian economy and an acknowledgement of the critical importance of energy and energy infrastructure to our country’s competitiveness and future,” Gina Sutherland, senior advisor, corporate communications and media relations for Calgary-based Enbridge, wrote in an email response.

The pipeline and utility company’s president and CEO, Greg Ebel, is an original signatory to the industry’s vision, laid out in March in an open letter titled “Build Canada Now.” Updated versions were published in April and September as more executives and lobby groups signed on and the group sharpened its requests.

Eight of the executives who signed the September letter, largely representing companies in the oilsands, had also planned to attend a meeting with Carney on June 1, 2025, to discuss “partnerships,” according to an internal government list of confirmed participants released to The Narwhal through access to information law. Government officials suggested that during his opening remarks, Carney could relay his “intention to use the letter to guide the discussion and delve into the positions they put forward,” according to briefing notes for the prime minister for that day.

The government says its policy changes are part of a broader plan to fight climate change, support workers and boost economic growth, especially in the face of the United States throwing around tariffs and threatening worse. 

Canadians expect their government to “win” the trade war, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said Dec. 9 on Parliament Hill. “To do that, we need cards in our hands. We have some fantastic cards: our energy and natural resources.”

Which might be true. It’s also true that the fossil fuel industry appears to have been very successful at arguing its case, with its wish list ticked off one by one.

Emilia Belliveau, energy transition program manager at advocacy organization Environmental Defence, has researched the fossil fuel industry’s techniques for garnering public support.

“We’re seeing an incredible alignment of government interests and fossil fuel industry interests,” she said in an interview.

Where Canada and the oil and gas industry align

The September version of “Build Canada Now” boasts 95 signatories including major lobby groups like the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. In that version, the group called for a federal law that bans crude oil tankers from the north coast of British Columbia to be completely repealed.

That would set up a major confrontation with Coastal First Nations, whose president Marilyn Slett made it clear to Carney on Jan. 13 at a meeting in Prince Rupert, B.C., that the oil tanker moratorium must be kept in place. 

The Carney government has not repealed the tanker ban, but its memorandum of understanding with Alberta commits to changing the ban if necessary to get a new pipeline built.

Another law the industry executives wanted to see vanish is the federal carbon pricing regime. While it is still in place, the federal government released a “climate competitiveness strategy” in November that commits to negotiating new carbon pricing arrangements with the provinces. The deal it signed with Alberta also permits the province significant flexibility over how its carbon rules are applied to specific sectors like oil and gas and electricity.

The executives also asked for an overhaul of a federal law that governs environmental assessments, and the Building Canada Act strips out part of that assessment process for projects the government deems in the “national interest.” 

They wanted to kill off a proposed emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, and the Alberta deal says Canada is happy with other plans to reduce emissions and won’t implement it. 

A central goal of the government’s Major Projects Office is to shrink approval timelines for projects — another item on the wish list.

Finally, the industry representatives asked for more loan guarantees for Indigenous communities. A loan guarantee is when the government agrees to repay any debt taken on by Indigenous communities that buy ownership stakes in oil and gas projects, should they be unable to repay it themselves. 

Making it financially easier for Indigenous communities to own portions of oil and gas projects is seen as addressing historic financial barriers to Indigenous economic participation — but it can also be seen as useful for overcoming opposition to fossil fuel expansion.

The federal budget reiterates a commitment to doubling its Indigenous loan guarantee program, and directs the Major Projects Office to help with financing.

The executives wrote in the Build Canada Now letter that they have “consistently advocated for the changes required to unwind the past decade of increasing policy complexity and uncertainty that led to delayed investments, lost opportunities and a competitive disadvantage on the global energy stage.”

Federal disclosure records show industry lobbyists focused on at least two aspects of the letter, carbon pricing and the emissions cap, as well as other elements of the federal climate plan during the two months surrounding the executives’ June 1 meeting with Carney.

Sutherland, at Enbridge, said the government’s proposed policy changes will now need to be “fully implemented” for large energy projects to move forward.

The Narwhal reached out to several other signatories of the Build Canada Now letter, including the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Pathways Alliance of oilsands companies, but none responded by publication time.

Joe Calnan, vice-president of energy and Calgary operations at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, noted many of the industry’s proposals had been floated at one time or another, in particular by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith — like killing the tanker ban, altering carbon pricing and overhauling the environmental assessment law. Alberta’s oil and gas industry accounts for 84 per cent of total Canadian oil production.

Smith’s pressure on these issues “did kind of make these kinds of demands from industry more tangible and more clear as to what they’re after,” Calnan said. 

Large, publicly traded corporations also have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make money, Calnan added, and so their interests lie in ensuring increased production of oil and gas. A province like Alberta, which takes in royalties when resources are developed, also has an interest in increasing fossil fuel production.

The government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau had portrayed many of the policies changed by Carney as necessary to deliver crucial carbon pollution cuts, and to properly consider the impact of oil and gas projects on the environment, Indigenous Peoples’ constitutional rights and the long-term well-being of Canadians, whose lives are continually disrupted by wildfires, floods and other extreme weather made worse by climate change. The emissions cap, for example, was supposed to hold the industry at its word to take steps to decarbonize its production.

In November, former Trudeau-era environment minister Steven Guilbeault quit his Cabinet post following the Alberta deal’s unveiling, saying several elements of the climate plan he had worked on “have been, or are about to be, dismantled.” 

Belliveau, at Environmental Defence, said it was frustrating to watch Carney and Smith discuss a “grand bargain” over oil and gas development that purported to also plan for emissions reductions, given that similar rhetoric had been deployed seven years ago when Trudeau framed the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline as a “trade-off” for getting Alberta to sign on to climate action. 

“The last so-called grand bargain failed to produce the results that it promised, and the result that we need to actually address climate change,” Belliveau said. “Prime Minister Carney should be learning from past Liberal government mistakes.”

Pitfalls of Canada’s past climate policies

The latest government progress report on Canada’s climate plan shows the country is “significantly off track” to meeting its emissions reduction target for 2030 and 2035, according to the Canadian Climate Institute.

Carney’s environmental policy changes were also unveiled during a year when Canada faced its second-worst wildfire season, second-worst year for ice loss and major heat waves, the severity and frequency of all of which are tied to climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, of which the global oil and gas industry is the largest contributor.

Belliveau said the government should be doing more to help people cut emissions — and, over time, their bills — by providing subsidies and access for clean technologies like heat pumps, instead of doubling down on fossil fuels.

The Narwhal asked the office of Hodgson, the energy minister, about how closely the government’s policies align with the requests in the letter from oil and gas executives, and whether the changes were made to fulfill those requests. The Narwhal also asked whether the government agreed with the assertion in the Build Canada Now letter about the need to “unwind the past decade.” 

Hodgson’s office directed questions to Environment and Climate Change Canada Minister Julie Dabrusin. Her press secretary Keean Nembhard said the government is committed to working with Alberta and is relying on industrial carbon pricing to cut pollution going forward. He acknowledged the “economies of tomorrow” will be “clean, low-carbon and resilient” and that “Canada can — and must — lead the way” in addressing climate change. 

“We’re creating the conditions for world-leading clean technology to thrive — by investing in Canadian innovation, scaling homegrown solutions and positioning Canadian companies to lead in the global race to net-zero,” he said.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government says it’s paring back parts of Canada’s anti-greenwashing law after hearing from fossil fuel companies and other groups that their “good-faith efforts” to protect the environment are going unadvertised.

The changes, proposed in Carney’s Nov. 4 budget, are meant to address what his government says is a “trend” of companies staying silent about their environmental efforts out of fears of running afoul of the law, according to a statement sent to The Narwhal from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada.

Greenwashing is when companies make misleading claims about the eco-friendliness of their products or actions — making their environmental stewardship appear greater than it is. Lawmakers added the anti-greenwashing provisions to the federal Competition Act last year in part to address the issue of companies advertising that they were headed towards net-zero emissions while not presenting evidence showing they were taking any significant steps toward cutting their carbon pollution.

But now, the government believes companies are “withholding information that could aid in attracting investment for green innovation,” a departmental spokesperson said. Carney’s budget claimed the anti-greenwashing law, brought in under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, was leading to “some parties slowing or reversing efforts to protect the environment.”

When asked by The Narwhal, the federal department couldn’t name any specific examples of companies slow-walking genuine environmental efforts as a result of last year’s legal changes — which deal specifically with marketing unsubstantiated green claims, and not environmental action itself. 

One expert says any legal risks are being massively exaggerated. Wren Montgomery, co-founder of the Greenwash Action Lab and professor at the Ivey Business School at Western University, believes awareness of how to comply with the law is already fairly widespread — and the companies still complaining may simply want to avoid being held accountable for their lack of climate action.

“The only lawyers I’ve heard complain about it are the lawyers actually working in these corporations,” Montgomery said. “So it seems either just that [corporate lawyers] are too thinly spread, and don’t really understand competition law or sustainability reporting very well, or that they’re using it as an excuse.”

The government’s remarks come on the heels of a Nov. 16 open letter released by Clean50, a collective of sustainability leaders, and signed by 144 of its members in business, academia, politics and the environmental sector calling on Carney to do more to tackle the climate crisis — including reversing plans laid out in the budget to dismantle some of Canada’s anti-greenwashing rules.

The letter says it’s the Carney government’s proposed changes to the law, and not the law itself, that will undermine investor confidence and harm Canadian entrepreneurs who had already adapted to the changes.

“Renewed greenwashing can distort competition and act as a barrier to entry to genuine green firms or drive them from the market,” the letter reads.

It also comes as Canada signs on to an international pledge to combat climate disinformation that commits to “equitable access to accurate, consistent, evidence-based and understandable information on climate change.”

Fossil fuel companies pushed back on Canada’s anti-greenwashing law

The Carney government’s concerns about the law revolve around a requirement added to Canada’s Competition Act last year for businesses to back up their environmental claims with evidence that conforms to internationally recognized standards for calculating a company’s carbon footprint.

The budget argued the requirement to adhere to internationally recognized standards, as well as another rule allowing private individuals or organizations to bring greenwashing complaints before a tribunal, were “creating investment uncertainty” and “having the opposite of the desired effect.” It proposed getting rid of both rules, while keeping the base requirement for businesses to substantiate their environmental claims.

The federal Competition Bureau, which enforces fair competition in the marketplace, says deceptive marketing about environmental efforts can lead to a distorted playing field where Canadian consumers make ill-informed choices with their money. A spokesperson for the Competition Bureau said they were aware of the Carney government’s proposed changes to the law, but declined an interview request from The Narwhal.

In Canada, voluntary disclosure standards for including environmental risk in financial statements, developed based on internationally recognized criteria, refer to a framework called the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Other jurisdictions like the United States have put in place similar requirements that green claims be grounded in evidence from relevant scientific fields or verifiable criteria. 

In June, the bureau issued guidelines for organizations navigating Canada’s anti-greenwashing rules, saying it would accept any carbon accounting standard recognized in at least two countries.

Montgomery said consultants and lawyers who have been working on sustainability reporting have told her they were already aware of what green accounting standards to use, or were already incorporating them into their work. She said it was important to stick to internationally recognized standards because of the risk of industry using third-party certification methods that could prove dubious.

The government has the option of strengthening the law, Montgomery and other greenwashing experts have argued, instead of repealing parts of it. Ottawa could change the language around the use of standards, the experts said, such as removing the “international” requirement or specifying precisely which standards to use. 

Suspending the third-party right of action until those changes were made, instead of cancelling it permanently, would be a way to provide clarity without stripping away the law’s purpose, they added.

Federal government unable to name examples of decline in corporate environmental efforts

The government’s concerns over uncertainty in the law echo complaints lodged by large oil and gas companies in Canada last year, many of which said the anti-greenwashing provisions had introduced significant “uncertainty” and that the requirement to adhere to the standards in presenting their information was “vague” or “overreaching.”

The Narwhal asked the office of Industry Minister Mélanie Joly if it could name any examples of companies or organizations that were slowing or reversing genuine environmental efforts as a result of the law.

A departmental spokesperson, Andréa Daigle, responded that the government had heard from “numerous stakeholders across various sectors of the economy” that they felt unable to report on environmental achievements, but did not discuss the impact of those efforts.

The fossil fuel industry, as well as other businesses, civil society and government-run groups, had “regularly raised what they and their legal counsel considered an unacceptable risk in making public statements” when it was unclear what standards to use for backing them up, Daigle said.

“This has resulted in a trend … of withholding information that could aid in attracting investment for green innovation and informing consumers about good-faith efforts,” she said. 

The goal of paring down the law was to “ease fears of heavy enforcement that could discourage companies from speaking up, while ensuring they remain accountable for showing their claims are genuine.”

Last year, an official at Environment and Climate Change Canada told the Competition Bureau that “uncertainty” around the anti-greenwashing law “has led to some challenges” in encouraging companies to voluntarily adopt net-zero commitments under a government-run program.

At the same time, the department said it was “reasonable” to expect companies to come up with an environmental plan backed by “credible elements” that includes carbon accounting “based on international methodology,” like the law required.

Others at the time said the law seemed fine. The Canadian Renewable Energy Association, for example, said it supported the rules and said it would “strongly encourage” the adoption of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol as the internationally recognized standard of choice. 

In a 2024 survey by Angus Reid Forum, commissioned by Greenpeace Canada, 93 per cent of Canadians agreed companies should face penalties for making unproven environmental claims.

“The only other thing which Canadians have supported by that margin was preferring the Jays over the Dodgers,” Clean50 executive director Gavin Pitchford said in a statement.

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The truck slowly pulled alongside as I idled at the side of a remote dirt road in northern B.C. No cell service, the nearest town half an hour away. I’d pulled off to let industrial traffic heading the other direction pass. It was 2022 and I was on my way to meet with Indigenous land defenders embroiled in a years-long fight against a major pipeline being built through Wet’suwet’en lands and waters without the permission of Hereditary Chiefs. 

The driver of the truck rolled down his window. 

“Need any help?” he said.

I knew from markings on the truck that he worked for Forsythe, a private security company contracted by Calgary-based pipeline giant TC Energy. Security companies were hired to protect the construction of Coastal GasLink, a 670-kilometre natural gas pipeline. For years, Coastal GasLink had been a focal point for conflict, including dozens of arrests and extensive surveillance operations by private security and RCMP. What I didn’t know at the time was information about me, collected on behalf of the pipeline company, could have been shared with Canada’s national spy agency.

The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation recently reported TC Energy apparently leveraged a close relationship with former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) director David Vigneault to expand information-sharing between CSIS and major Canadian companies. In 2024 emails to Vigneault, TC Energy said the proposed arrangement was necessary due to “security threats facing Canadian industry” which the company said included “acute risks from foreign adversaries,” according to documents obtained through freedom of information legislation. Vigneault left CSIS in 2024 and now works for an American intelligence company. 

This year, Canada passed legislation delivering many of TC Energy’s requests. Critics warn the flow of information could be going both ways — that companies like TC Energy could be feeding information to CSIS. They worry this could influence how and when the spy agency and federal law enforcement conduct surveillance of individuals and groups.

It also means third-party security services like Forsythe, which employs ex-paramilitary soldiers and former RCMP officers, could be passing on information to CSIS and police about Indigenous and non-Indigenous land defenders and activists.

Tia Dafnos, an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, said the level of access gives industry an opportunity to shape a criminal justice narrative aligned with its interests. 

“One of the key concerns here is the lack of transparency and therefore accountability, when you have these discussions happening in spaces that are outside of public access,” she said.

As the federal government pushes resource extraction in response to a barrage of economic sanctions from the current Trump administration, several major industrial developments — including an expansion of Coastal GasLink — could become new sources of conflict. Now, companies being scrutinized by environmental advocates and Indigenous land defenders have direct and secretive channels of communication to Canada’s spy agency. 

“When you have something deemed to be in the national interest, a threat to that national interest would move it into the realm of a national security issue,” Dafnos said. Protecting critical infrastructure can then become a justification to monitor and criminalize project opponents, she explained.

Eric Balsam, a spokesperson with CSIS, said “the nature and severity of the threat” is what determines whether it’s a matter of national security, not the designation of a project.

“CSIS uses a variety of collection methods to monitor activities that threaten national security,” Balsam wrote in an emailed statement, adding the CSIS Act “specifically excludes investigating lawful protest and dissent.”

Balsam said CSIS could, in some circumstances, investigate “individuals and/or groups involved in protest or other forms of opposition to projects if there was reasonable suspicion that they were planning activities that pose a threat to the security of Canada,” as defined by the legislation.

Formal and informal relationships between industry executives and senior CSIS officials offer the private sector an avenue for “framing a threat or influencing the perception of threat,” Dafnos said. The secretive nature of those relationships also risks criminalizing or intimidating journalists.

Back in 2022, I told the security guard I didn’t need his help and rolled up my window. After the heavy trucks rumbled past, I drove on. He followed. 

For more than 20 kilometres, winding through deep forest beside the Wedzin Kwa (Morice River), the truck stayed close behind, a spectre in my rear view mirror. At my destination, I parked and got out, shouldering my camera and grabbing my notebook. I could see him in his truck watching my movements from a distance. I turned and went inside the land defenders’ compound.

What goes on in ‘private, high-level’ discussions between TC Energy and CSIS? No one knows

The documents obtained by The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation this fall detail email communications between TC Energy executives, the Business Council of Canada, which represents the country’s wealthiest companies, and Vigneault, who signalled his support for the industry-led initiative. It was a paper trail that confirmed what was discussed in internal company calls leaked to the media in mid-2024. 

On those calls, detailed by The Narwhal in a series of investigative reports, former staffers from the first Trump administration — including foreign service operatives and ex-military hackers — talked about the extensive intelligence-gathering operations they conducted on behalf of the pipeline company. They also said TC Energy executives were attempting to persuade CSIS to share information with corporations more freely. 

Those efforts were ultimately successful.

Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, warned the powers given to CSIS are “ripe for further abuse.”   

“This intelligence sharing blurs the line between public security and corporate interests and risks putting Indigenous land defenders and climate activists under increasingly invasive surveillance for peacefully opposing fossil fuel expansion,” he said in a statement.

Secrecy is intrinsically part of CSIS operations, which means much of what goes on in its meetings with corporations like TC Energy remains unknown. Unlike lobbying activities, which give the public a glimpse into how and when fossil fuel companies and other private sector entities interact with government officials, the “private, high-level discussions” requested by TC Energy remain a black box.

As Dafnos put it, an absence of any details about what kind of information is being shared means the public doesn’t know whether or not it should be concerned.

“It’s kind of a conundrum,” she said, adding it’s also likely information is being shared in less formal ways. 

As The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation reported, Business Council of Canada president Goldy Hyder called Vigneault a “dear friend” and said he texts him regularly.

“Are they sharing information about threats, like political opposition or grassroots opposition to energy projects?” Dafnos asked. “How do we get access to the phone calls that people are making to each other?”

‘Our democratic right’

Nikki Skuce has first-hand experience with her environmental activism attracting the attention of the federal spy agency.

While working for environmental advocacy group ForestEthics in the early 2010s, she found herself unexpectedly entangled with CSIS. At the time, she was involved in organizing opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline, an Enbridge proposal to transport bitumen from the Alberta oilsands to marine shipping routes on the northwest coast. 

Skuce said opposition to Northern Gateway drew the ire of former minister of natural resources Joe Oliver. In 2012, Oliver accused those who opposed projects like the pipeline of having a “radical ideological agenda.” He alleged they were trying to “exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects.” Others took it a step further, labelling Skuce and her peers as “eco-terrorists” or “extremists” after then-prime minister Stephen Harper and his cabinet lumped environmental advocates in with white supremacists and anti-capitalists in a controversial anti-terrorism bill. 

“It was frightening, frankly,” she said. 

She told The Narwhal she first became aware she was being spied on after a small community meeting on Nadleh Whut’en territory, about 150 kilometres west of Prince George, B.C.

“It wasn’t a meeting that stood out or anything,” she said, explaining the point was for attendees to come together in solidarity and strategize opportunities for outreach.

After the surveillance operation came to light, when records were unearthed in 2013, land defenders and environmental organizations in B.C. feared they were under constant surveillance and some felt they could no longer safely voice dissent over Northern Gateway.

“It was rattling and just a feeling in the pit of your stomach, like, what has become of this country, what’s become of Canada, that they’re spying on activists?” Skuce said.

Skuce and others targeted in the surveillance operation later testified as part of a case brought forward by the BC Civil Liberties Association, which alleged CSIS had illegally spied on citizens, groups and First Nations, and was sharing that information with fossil fuel companies. At the time, they were subject to a “gag order” prohibiting witnesses from talking about their testimonies, even to each other, Skuce said. Eventually, after lawyers with the civil liberties group fought in the courts for five years, the so-called “protest papers” were released, though heavily redacted, and the gag order was lifted. In 2024, the federal courts denied an application to release all the documents unredacted. The civil liberties association appealed that decision. 

“It was just shocking and kind of hard to believe,” Skuce said. “Since then, I think it’s gotten worse, seeing how things played out here in Wet’suwet’en territory with Coastal GasLink and the level of oppression and the weaponizing and use of injunctions.”

She said it feels like an erosion of democracy, where dissent is directly targeted and dissuaded, if not criminalized. 

“It’s just depressing, really.”

“Legitimate protest and activism is our democratic right here in Canada and I think everyone should be concerned if we’re having our police force and spy agencies sharing that information with corporations,” she said.

— With files from Zak Vescera

Updated Nov. 13, 2025, at 12:00 p.m. PT: This article was updated to include comment from CSIS.

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.

Dennis Byrne and his wife Barb built a good life. He flew passenger jets around the world, she practiced physiotherapy. He harvested their fields, too, cultivating the land for years and occasionally grumbling about the oil access road that crossed his property.

He’s older now: 82. Not much time in the tractor and his knees only bend as far as he took his post-surgical recovery, which means they don’t bend very far. But the Byrnes were smart. They saved and they budgeted, intending to stay in their home, one hour west of Edmonton near the agricultural community of Warburg, Alta., until the end. 

“I told everybody, if they can’t find me, walk down to that creek there. I’ll be leaning against a tree somewhere, that’s as far as I’m going,” he says, pointing to the stand of trees downhill from an old oil well.

Byrne says he retired with a “damn good pension,” but money is still tighter all of a sudden. The access road leads to that old well that now sits idle. Across the way on the other side of his property, another well, the one he calls “a mess,” sits overgrown, inactive and dismantled. Byrne says the lease payments stopped coming a few months back for both wells, and the company isn’t returning calls.

“We’re short,” he says. “Barb figured we’re short three cheques, but up until just this last little while, everything was fine, and then all of a sudden they just quit coming.”The Byrnes aren’t alone. 

Up the road, Karl Zajes, the tireless organizer of the local surface rights group, has two sites for which he says he’s owed money. A little farther up, Russell and Joanne Liba have one. To the south, Jennifer Stephenson has four sites and her neighbour Cindy Terrabain has three. 

All of them are owned by MAGA Energy, short for Make Alberta Great Again, which bought 170 wells, 30 facilities and 47 pipeline licences in the area in September 2024. Some of that infrastructure is still in use, some is inactive, but many landowners say they have been left in the lurch, forcing them to go to a government tribunal to ask for tax money to cover the missing payments. They’re still waiting to hear from the tribunal.

It’s a familiar story across Alberta, a province where landowners aren’t allowed to refuse oil and gas wells on their properties, but are paid by the companies that own the wells for the loss of land. The history of faltering companies cutting off those lease payments, however, is long, thanks to an equally long history of regulatory failure and a lack of government oversight. 

Regulations meant to keep financially strained companies from acquiring new wells aren’t working as they should, and the criteria used by the energy regulator to determine the financial health of a company aren’t public, making it difficult to assess the effectiveness of the process.

“Whatever oil they’re bringing up, they’re paying royalties on it, so the government is kind of still making a little money,” Byrne says. “We kind of go by the wayside.”

Frustrated landowners are in the heart of Alberta oil country

The Byrnes are among a number of landowners that are increasingly frustrated with MAGA Energy in Brazeau and Leduc counties, an area that stretches south of Edmonton and west almost 200 kilometres — a place of industry and commerce that houses an international airport and warehouses, but that drifts into largely agricultural stretches as it moves toward the mountains. Travelling its grid of highways, township and range roads leads from fields to forest, almost all of which is sectioned off, dotted with homes, lives and livelihoods. 

Neither county is a traditional hotbed of anti–oil and gas activism.

Residents have long had relationships with companies that help offset costs with regular lease cheques. Family members work in the oilpatch. Oil and gas is the primary industry in Brazeau, followed by forestry and agriculture, and more than 10,000 wells dot its rural landscape, not to mention thousands of facilities and pipeline segments. In Leduc — home of Leduc No. 1, the well often credited with kicking off Alberta’s oil boom back in 1947 — there are now more than 4,000 wells, hundreds of facilities and thousands of kilometres of pipelines. MAGA has a cluster of hundreds of sites that straddle the two counties where disaffected landowners live. The company’s strategy, like many smaller oil and gas companies, involves buying up older wells, often at a steep discount, in hopes of wringing enough wealth out of the ground before the reservoirs are exhausted. The wells are often cheap to acquire because they come with closure and cleanup liabilities. 

A since-deleted explanation on MAGA Energy’s homepages, retrieved through the Internet Archive, says the company’s first priority “is to resume production of shut-in wells and develop the by-passed oil and gas potential.”

Regulations require the province to assess a company’s financial health before transfers are approved, and prevents transfers when taxes are owed to municipalities. Critics, however, contend those regulations are not always enforced. 

And as conventional production wanes, areas like Brazeau and Leduc are contending with operators who don’t have the funds or the desire to cover their legal cleanup obligations and lease payments. As of June, MAGA is now restricted from acquiring new licences for failure to pay its mandated annual cleanup quota.

“I don’t know how many companies are like MAGA — they’re not the only ones, they can’t be.” Stephenson says.Her land sits off a gravel road, an open space with licks of forest nearby. Two pumpjacks are visible if you walk down the driveway toward the horse corral. Like the Byrnes, her family has been careful. “We’ve just been lucky, and we’ve worked really hard,” she says. 

Her family has and continues to benefit from oil and gas. Her husband works in the industry and so does her son. Stephenson says the previous owner of the wells, Journey Energy, paid its leases on time aside from a bad stretch during the pandemic, but even then the company’s representative called to explain the situation and settled its outstanding bills quickly. 

And while she thinks there need to be conversations about weaning society off fossil fuels, she also thinks oil and gas is serving a need and will continue to do so for some time. You can’t just turn off the taps. 

But she says when MAGA stopped paying, she got mad, not least because there isn’t that communication and respect. Stephenson believes you ought to live up to your obligations. If not, you should be able to take accountability.

“It’s right or wrong,” she says when asked what’s motivating her. “There’s black and white.”

When an oil and gas company doesn’t pay its leases in Alberta, landowners can apply to the Land and Property Rights Tribunal, the arm’s-length government body, to have the outstanding money paid with tax dollars. In theory, the government then collects that money from the company, but that rarely happens. 

Since 2010, the government has paid almost $150 million to landowners and has collected $1.4 million back from the companies obligated to cover the lease payments — less than one per cent. 

The government funds also take months to appear, once landowners go through the tribunal process. Mike Hartfield, the executive director of the tribunal, told The Narwhal average wait times this year are 113 days for uncontested landowner claims and 143 days for contested claims, a sharp decrease from the previous year. He said $27 million has been paid so far for the 2025–26 fiscal year. 

“We’ll get paid through the government, but that gets to be a moot point at a certain point in time, you know what I mean? Because you’re paying me and I’m paying myself,” Stephenson says of the government using tax dollars to pay landowners. “And I don’t think that many people understand that.”

But her concerns go deeper than missing cheques. There are weeds growing in fields, mounting cleanup costs and more.  

“We’re not special, it happens a lot,” she says. “Why is the [Alberta Energy Regulator] allowing these licences to go through?”

The Alberta Energy Regulator, which laid off the majority of its communications staff — including media relations — in September, did not answer detailed questions from The Narwhal regarding the transfer of licences and regulatory oversight. It would only provide links to existing regulations and its website.MAGA Energy did not respond to multiple requests for interviews over the span of a week. The Narwhal visited the company’s headquarters in downtown Calgary to hand-deliver a list of questions and spoke with Mark Ross, VP of operations for the compnay, who declined to speak on the record prior to reviewing the questions.

The next day, Ross contacted The Narwhal and said the company was unable to respond prior to publication time, but would provide answers at a later time.

Make Alberta Great Again?

MAGA Energy certainly isn’t an outlier, nor is it the norm.

There are more than 500,000 licences issued by the regulator to approximately 3,500 companies for pipelines, wells and facilities. The majority of those companies meet minimum expectations, including paying leases to landowners, but also required spending on cleanup.

According to the regulator’s annual liability report, 91 per cent of companies were compliant with required spending quotas to shut down old wells, but that means 134 companies did not meet that threshold. Ninety eight companies also didn’t pay their share of the Orphan Well Association levy — an industry-funded organization that cleans up wells with no solvent owner. 

Companies who don’t meet those obligations are often the same companies unable to pay leases to landowners, taxes to municipalities and cover invoices from contractors. That’s hundreds of millions in unpaid taxes, billions in liabilities and more.

The regulator’s own figures show $5.5 billion in environmental liabilities are in the hands of companies that are either in financial distress, or under strain. 

Estimates for how much it would cost to close and clean up all of Alberta’s oil and gas sites is approximately $38 billion, not including the oilsands. But those estimates are conservative and the regulator itself has said liabilities could exceed $130 billion. 

Even the companies that do meet those requirements tend to have sizable inventories of inactive wells, which can sit rusting or leaking, sometimes for decades. 

There are currently more than 150,000 inactive and marginal oil and gas wells across Alberta. Inactive wells have not produced any oil or gas for months (or years). Marginal wells have a very low production. Taken together, they make up more than a third of all the wells in Alberta.

In addition, municipalities are owed $254 million in outstanding property taxes from oil and gas companies, while another $200 million has been written off in the past decade, never to be collected. According to the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, more than $100 million of the outstanding taxes are owed by 201 companies that are still operating. 

As environmental liabilities rise and municipal taxes and leases go unpaid, much of the immediate impact is on landowners. 

Karl Zajes has been pushing back against those impacts for decades — 47 years to be precise — through his involvement in surface rights groups, advocating for landowners to ensure they get fair treatment if an oil and gas company comes knocking. 

“Make it honest and sincere to the landowners, instead of taking advantage of them,” he says of his motivation to keep fighting.

Zajes is 84 now, but you wouldn’t know it — he’s a short coil of energy who never seems to stand in the same spot for more than a minute. Meeting him in the parking lot of an abandoned restaurant and gas station to start a tour of wells and properties means rolling down your window to say a quick hello before he’s off down the highway, heading to the first stop. It’s the only MAGA site on the tour with pumpjacks bobbing and oil flowing. 

On his land, just down the road from that first site, an old well pad sits amidst overgrown weeds in an area tucked back from the highway. Zajes says he is owed more than $4,000, but that will double in January when the next payment is due.

Standing in his field, he talks of another landowner in the community who showed him a lease from another company for $4,000, with some fine print that said the lease would be reduced to $100 after the first year. 

“I thought I’d get a copy of it to show people what the oil company landman and sperm have in common — one in three million turns out to be a real human being, the rest are just a bunch of slime,” he says, taking a characteristically fast moment to enjoy his own quip. 

But the issue is a serious one for Zajes, who’s been organizing increasingly well-attended meetings at the Warburg Community Hall, southeast of MAGA’s regional cluster of sites. Frustration has been boiling over in those meetings, at the current state of regulation and at the government’s latest plans to tackle those failings.

“What the government is doing … they want the companies to produce even if they’re not paying you the rent that you’re supposed to get, as long as they’re getting a royalty,” he says. “So it’s, ‘Okay, you go rob the bank, we won’t charge you, you just give us a bit of it.’ ”

Anger over Alberta’s ‘stinking pile of shit’

To say the Alberta government relies on the money it gets from oil and gas is an understatement. The provincial budget swings wildly based on the price of oil in particular — a one-dollar change can swing the budget by $750 million. Non-renewable resources accounted for almost 27 per cent of provincial revenue in 2024–25. 

The untold billions that pour into government coffers represent a power imbalance that is difficult to comprehend. Landowners in Brazeau and Leduc are starting to chafe at the perception that oil and gas companies can break the rules, while residents are expected to abide. 

Those frustrations boiled over at a recent meeting organized by Zajes, featuring Alberta’s energy minister’s chief of staff, Vitor Marciano, as the invited speaker.

Marciano was in Warburg, which sits near the border between the two counties, to pitch the government’s latest plan to deal with a mountain of problems in Alberta’s current oil and gas regulations, including inactive wells, environmental liabilities and companies not paying their share. 

In a room bristling with resentment, Marciano struggled to connect.

“Let’s be clear, in Alberta the energy companies pay as much taxes in many years as all Albertans combined,” Marciano told the crowd. “They’re the taxpayers too.”

Stephenson, who says she is owed money by MAGA for those pumpjacks just up from her horse corral, stood up to confront Marciano about a lease-payment system she says is unfair, too slow and which ultimately uses public dollars to cover private debts. 

“I’m saying you’re right,” Marciano said after a heated exchange. “I’m also saying that bad companies will be put out of business, and I’ve got to be careful not to say much more than that because I could get in legal trouble. Bad companies will be put out of business and if you’re owed surface payments by MAGA, please file with the Land and Property Rights Tribunal.”

The government’s plan, the Mature Asset Strategy, has been controversial since it was first leaked to the media in March. Particularly controversial has been the possibility of creating a government entity — or entities — that would take ownership of aging wells owned by derelict companies.

Marciano said those wells would either be transferred to the Orphan Well Association, sold to different private operators to run or be taken over by one of the new organizations to wring whatever wealth is left in the ground, with the goal of funding their cleanup.

The report’s author, David Yager, joined Marciano at the meeting and described the current state of oil and gas regulations as a “stinking pile of shit,” an assessment that Marciano and even Premier Danielle Smith agree with.

“We’ve got to get the bad actors out of the industry, and that is what we’re trying to solve,” Smith said when asked about Yager’s comments at a news conference in September.

“It is a bit of a mess. I’ll use less colourful language. It’s been a mess for a long time.”

Critics, however, say the strategy shifts all the risk onto taxpayers.

Alberta’s Mature Asset Strategy is met with skepticism

Phillip Meintzer has been touring the province talking about what he sees as the risks tied to the Mature Asset Strategy with the Coalition for Responsible Energy, meeting landowners and organizing town halls. 

He points to the two potential government bodies that would take over aging wells — dubbed ClosureCo and HarvestCo — as two of the greatest concerns, as well as the possibility that more public dollars will be used to clean up the pollution left behind by private companies. 

“The Mature Asset Strategy is a 50-page document for 21 pretty sweeping recommendations,” he says. “So there’s not a lot of clarity.”

The government previously said it has accepted 20 of the recommendations in the strategy, but hasn’t identified which one it rejected. It’s also unclear when any of the recommendations could be put into place, but Marciano told the crowd in Warburg that it could be as early as this fall, and the energy minister’s new mandate letter calls for coordinating the “government-wide implementation” of the strategy. 

Meintzer says the reception at the meetings has been positive, with landowners concerned about impacts to their land, and curious to learn about the strategy. 

Turning those concerns into action is another goal of his organization. 

“The challenge is trying to figure out ways for people to organize, to push back, because a lot of people feel tired, exhausted, beat down,” he says. “Whether it’s the companies on their land, whether it’s the regulator, they just feel exhausted by fighting these battles on an individual level — at the household level or at the property level.”

“I think the only way that we can, let’s say, discourage the Government of Alberta from pushing some of this stuff through, is if those who are directly impacted speak up in unison and do it loudly.”

‘How are people going to justify this money coming out of their pockets?’

Before we meet in September, Zajes suggests Saint Francis, Alta., for the start of our tour of MAGA wells. “Do you know it?” he asks over the phone. 

The meeting spot is more of an intersection than a location, a collection of a few homes east of the crossroads and an old restaurant and gas bar — The Place to Eat — that is shuttered and broken, the ground littered with newspaper pages from 2005.

It’s a symbol of how easily a place can be forgotten, or ignored, even if it’s only an hour from the capital.

But with Marciano warning the crowd in Warburg that the problem is going to get worse before it gets better, the pain suffered by landowners living off gravel roads could come into focus for more people, including those in the capital. 

Stephenson doesn’t think enough people understand what’s happening, that the government is helping to pay oil company debts with public funds, after lax regulations allow bad companies to take over licences. 

“I don’t understand why people in the cities [don’t care about this.] Like, it’s not a problem until it’s a problem for you individually,” she says. “I think if more people knew, and especially going into these next few years and a recession, how are people going to justify this money coming out of their pockets?”

The Mature Asset Strategy could only exacerbate that issue, with a lack of clarity around the use of public funds to clean up wells and a proposed insurance program for operators that could be backstopped with public funds. 

Back at the Byrnes’ property, Dennis has the air of someone who has no interest in the drama. He wants to live out his years in peace and get what’s owed to him. He reluctantly showed up at Zajes’ meeting in September, but left early when tempers flared. 

He, like Zajes, has had the wells in question on his property since 1982, with various owners prior to MAGA, but he says it’s been about seven or eight years since the last time the well — still outfitted with a newer pumpjack — operated.

“They came, full crew, pulled the rods, did everything, set it back up, ran it for about a month and it’s never run since,” Byrne says of the site just up from the creek where he might lean against his last tree.

Since then, he says the only thing that’s happened is a new sticker was slapped on the fencepost sign with MAGA’s name on it. 

Byrne wasn’t as involved in fighting oil companies over the wells when they were first drilled decades ago, but others, like Zajes, were. Still are. 

“Now, here we are again, the same bloody wells,” Byrne says. “We’re fighting them all over again. I mean, it’s literally, it’s been going on that long.”

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.

Editor’s note: This story is a collaboration between the Investigative Journalism Foundation and The Narwhal. A Canadian oil and gas firm successfully pressed Canada’s spy agency to start sharing government intelligence with the country’s wealthiest companies, something advocates say will protect critical infrastructure but that critics worry could infringe on civil rights. 

TC Energy, a major North American pipeline company, asked the former head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to set up regular “information-sharing” meetings between the agency, RCMP and representatives of major Canadian companies, according to internal government documents. TC Energy said the meetings would allow for “private, high-level discussions about security threats facing Canadian industry.”

The Canadian government has since passed legislation allowing CSIS to more easily share intelligence with outside organizations, including other governments and private companies. 

TC Energy’s proposal, detailed in documents the Investigative Journalism Foundation and The Narwhal obtained via access to information legislation, argued the creation of a “Canadian Security Alliance Council” would let CSIS share “unclassified but sensitive” intelligence it collects on behalf of the government with select major corporations. The company proposed the council would include corporations with annual revenues of $500 million or more.

In a February 2024 email, TC Energy argued it needed access to this kind of information because of unspecified “acute risks from foreign adversaries” seeking to sabotage critical infrastructure. 

“[G]iven the severity of the present threat, we support immediate action as current law permits,” the company’s proposal noted. 

That pitch was seemingly well received by then-CSIS director David Vigneault, who told an executive assistant of TC Energy’s CEO, François Poirier, that he would help “advance our shared interests.” The names of TC Energy employees in those emails are redacted but their titles are not.TC Energy did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.“While the implementation of a formal program like this is a project involving multiple private and Government of Canada stakeholders, we’re seized with the issue and we appreciate your support,” Vigneault wrote to TC Energy in May 2024.

Nicole Giles, a senior assistant deputy minister at CSIS, told attendees at the Vancouver International Security Summit on Oct. 16 that the agency has given such briefings to members of the Business Council of Canada, which was involved in TC Energy’s proposal to Vigneault. Poirier is on the council’s board of directors.The result is that large Canadian corporations have unprecedented access to intelligence collected by Canada’s spy agency. 

Magali Hébert, a spokesperson with CSIS, said the agency and the business council, which represents the country’s wealthiest and most powerful companies, “have enjoyed a productive relationship that has advanced the interests of Canadians and of Canada’s economic security” since 2022.

“CSIS is considering formal mechanisms for enhancing information sharing with those outside government to help increase their resiliency to national security threats, such as foreign interference,” Hébert wrote in an emailed statement, adding the Canada Security Alliance Council is “conceptual.”Hébert said CSIS made 28 disclosures in 2024 to governments, “ethnic, cultural and religious communities” and businesses, but would not say which ones. 

Sharing intelligence the spy agency gathers with industry “can serve to protect Canada’s research ecosystem and economic prosperity from foreign interference, espionage and unwanted knowledge transfer that could pose a threat to Canada and Canada’s national security interests,” Hébert said.

‘A chilling effect’

The Business Council of Canada says information sharing is crucial to foil increasingly frequent cyberattacks from criminal networks and hostile states which aim to steal Canadian data and intellectual property, hamstring the country’s economy and even disrupt public utilities. Some hackers have even targeted smaller government entities like cities and hospitals. 

Council president Goldy Hyder told the audience at the same Vancouver summit on Oct. 16 that Canadian companies “can’t be boy scouts” in a world where such attacks are routine.“We’re being honest with people that businesses are under attack. Our economy is under attack. Our way of life is under attack,” Hyder said. 

Hyder added he considers Vigneault, who now works in the private security intelligence sector, a “dear friend,” and said they communicate regularly.The Investigative Journalism Foundation and The Narwhal approached Vigneault in person to ask about his relationship with the council and the friendly language in his emails.He referred reporters to his employer Strider, an American private intelligence company, which declined to comment.Business Council of Canada spokesperson Michèle-Jamali Paquette said the flow of information from CSIS to businesses was “tightly limited” and that it could only be used to “strengthen resilience against security threats.”But some critics and observers worry information sharing between CSIS and private companies could chill legitimate political protest, particularly demonstrations against oil and gas projects led by companies like TC Energy.

CSIS said its legislation prohibits investigating lawful protest and dissent. Hébert said the spy agency “would only investigate individuals if there was reasonable suspicion that said they were planning activities that fit within the scope of our mandate (threats to the security of Canada), such as violent extremism.”

But Vibert Jack, the litigation director of the BC Civil Liberties Association, argues the existence of such an information-sharing agreement could still discourage people from expressing their views.

“I think the overall prospect it raises is a chilling effect on overall dissent and protest,” Jack said. 

“The more data is being collected about people who are voicing dissent and the more that data gets shared between different parties, the more consequences can flow for all those people.”

TC Energy, Business Council of Canada said spy intelligence needed to ward off threats

TC Energy has long sought to increase corporate access to CSIS intelligence, which historically has rarely been shared even with other governments.

The Calgary-based energy company retained former staffers from the office of U.S. President Donald Trump to lobby CSIS for such changes, including at an October 2023 security summit in Palo Alto, Calif. 

The Narwhal previously obtained recordings of internal TC Energy meetings including one where Michael Evanoff, a former assistant secretary of state in the Trump administration who went on to work for TC Energy, said he had directly approached Vigneault about making it easier to share classified intelligence with companies. 

TC Energy, in its February 2024 proposal, described the agency’s information-sharing rules as “archaic.”

The pipeline company pitched the security working group as an “interim” solution, saying it could be used to distribute intelligence that was unclassified but still sensitive. The proposal suggested the group would be composed of CSIS, RCMP, the federal Ministry of Public Safety and representatives from a select group of Canadian companies.

TC Energy suggested the “convenor” of those meetings could be the Business Council of Canada, which represents banks, telecommunications firms, automakers, energy companies and accounting offices. 

But TC Energy and the Business Council of Canada also appear to have lobbied to loosen CSIS rules around sharing more sensitive information, which may have helped ultimately change Canada’s legislation. 

In November 2023, a month after the Palo Alto conference, Vigneault wrote an email to a TC Energy representative, saying its participation was “widely recognized by our partners as an important sign of Canada’s commitment to broadening and deepening relationships and cooperation with governments and private sector partners on national security matters.”

Vigneault later wrote in May 2024, encouraging TC Energy and the business council to bring its concerns about CSIS information sharing to Parliament.

The business council went on to support legislation — Bill C-70 — which included amendments to the CSIS Act allowing the agency to share classified information outside of government with the permission of the minister of public safety. 

The bill also created new criminal offences for sabotaging critical infrastructure and made it a criminal offence to distribute material that can be used to sabotage such infrastructure.Paquette, the council’s spokesperson, said CSIS previously “lacked the legal authority to proactively share threat intelligence with the private sector for the purpose of building economy-wide resilience.” She contrasted that to the United States and the United Kingdom, which have long had programs allowing intelligence agencies to more easily share information with private businesses.

“This gap left Canadian companies often fending for themselves despite CSIS possessing the knowledge and expertise to help them withstand such threats,” Paquette wrote in an email to the Investigative Journalism Foundation and The Narwhal. “By limiting CSIS’s ability to meaningfully engage with businesses, it also left CSIS, and the broader Canadian government, without a more complete understanding of the national security threats facing the Canadian economy.”

Paquette did not explain the nature of security threats the council is concerned its members face. 

Experts warn corporate access to government intelligence could be used to quash protests, advance projects

Many in the intelligence community see such partnerships as universally beneficial. 

Nitin Natarajan, a consultant who previously served as the deputy director for the American Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said sharing intelligence with private partners and local governments can help spur needed spending on things like cybersecurity.“We’re asking state-level jurisdictions and small cities to use taxpayer dollars to increase their cyber defences. We’re asking water utilities that have no money … we need to be able to do a good job of saying why,” Natarajan said.Natarajan, who helped start up multiple intelligence-sharing programs in his prior role, said such collaborations are “more critical today than [they’ve] ever been because hackers are targeting organizations like public utilities, municipalities and even small and medium-sized businesses.”

Natarajan said the goal of those attacks is to “disrupt the day-to day-lives” of citizens. “That’s a very different tactic,” he added.

Other observers, though, see risks in spy agencies partnering with the private sector.

Tia Dafnos, an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, said the informal relationships between corporate executives and intelligence agencies add a layer of secrecy the public should be concerned about.

“One of the key concerns here is around the lack of transparency — and therefore accountability — when you have these discussions happening in spaces that are outside of public access.”

Dafnos said formalizing a group where powerful companies can discuss security issues with the likes of CSIS and the RCMP opens opportunities for corporations to advance their interests. 

“Creating these venues is sort of creating space for the blurring of interests.”

Companies like TC Energy employ extensive in-house security personnel and also contract out to third parties, which “engage proactively in forms of information collection and monitoring related to threats, which includes protests and opposition, the political climate surrounding their company and proposed projects and so forth,” Dafnos said.

“Those informal kinds of relationships are also significant, whether or not it’s having an impact in sort of directing the gaze or focus, or leading the RCMP, for example, to spend more time looking at a certain group or certain issue,” she explained, noting it is uncertain to what degree this takes place. “But those resources are there and they can be capitalized on.” 

The BC Civil Liberties Association previously filed complaints against CSIS, alleging the agency spied on environmental groups opposed to a pipeline project in northern B.C. 

Jack, who works for the organization, worries allowing CSIS to share such intelligence with companies — even unclassified information — could be used to quash similar protests in the future. 

“I think it’s fair to assume that part of the goal here for TC Energy is to find ways to prevent protest or lessen their impact at least on their operations,” Jack said. 

He is also perturbed by the tone of the emails between Vigneault and TC Energy. 

“It really seems as though CSIS views oil and gas companies as their partners, and when we see what they say about protestors and Indigenous land defenders, it’s clear they don’t see them as having shared interests,” Jack said.

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.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first 100 days after winning the federal election were flooded with natural resource lobbyists, from oil refiners and pipeline operators to a mining giant and steel producers, data analysis shows. Environmental groups say they couldn’t get a word in.

The lobbying blitz coincided with Carney’s government tabling Bill C-5 on June 6, his 39th day in office, following the spring election. The set of sweeping laws passed the House on June 20, his 53rd day in office following the election, allowing cabinet to fast-track major industrial projects by overriding key environmental and safety protections, in the “national interest” of Canadians.

Prominent environmental advocates say they concurrently struggled to secure any back-and-forth with the Prime Minister to discuss environment-related legislation, despite fossil fuel and mining executives being granted repeated access. They say the imbalance reflects a prioritization of industry voices by Carney during the drafting of Bill C-5, many of whom stand to benefit from expedited industrial projects, while sidelining organizations pushing for stronger environmental protections in the face of imminent climate change.

“There has been an unending parade of fossil fuel lobbyists in Ottawa, all getting meetings with various people, [including the] Prime Minister,” Environmental Defence executive director Tim Gray, said. “He is hearing disproportionately from the industries that represented the 20th century economy, not the 21st century economy … as the rest of the world electrifies and moves towards a cleaner economy.”

Using open data from the federal government’s registry of lobbyists, The Narwhal tracked every disclosed lobbying event, whether in person, over the phone, or in videoconference, with Carney between April 28 and Aug. 6, 2025 — his first 100 days in office after winning the federal election. (He was officially sworn in on March 14, after taking over leadership of the Liberal Party from former prime minister Justin Trudeau, but Parliament was dissolved soon after and the election triggered.)

Analysis of those records found that of the 44 organizations to have disclosed securing lobbying access with the new prime minister during that time, almost half, or 45 per cent, represented natural resource interests. Two days into his new mandate as prime minister, he had his first two disclosed lobbyist meetings, one with oil and gas producer Suncor, the other with pipeline operator and gas processor NorthRiver Midstream. During his first three-plus months, his office also met with steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal Dofasco and oil and gas industry groups like the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Pathways Alliance, which is a collective of major oilsands producers.

An additional 13 per cent of meetings were with lobbyists representing the interests of automotive and other industrial organizations, including Volkswagen, Stellantis, the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association and the Cement Association of Canada. The remaining 40 per cent of organizations Carney met with were a mix of unions, business associations and other private interest groups.

Previous reporting from The Narwhal found that oil and gas companies successfully secured lobbying access to the new Prime Minister in his early days, including at an in-person gathering, as they pushed for him to knock down key Trudeau-era environmental policies. Our analysis reveals the scale of that lobbying: in his first 100 days, Carney heard from representatives from the sector at a pace of roughly once every three days — though several of these instances occurred on the same day, and at the same meetings.

Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, an Ottawa non-profit focused on making Canadian governments and corporations more accountable, said the lobbying disclosures likely represent a fraction of what natural resource companies have actually undertaken in the first months since Carney took office.

“It’s really easy to lobby in secret when all you have to do is exploit one of a dozen loopholes [in the Lobbying Act],” Conacher said. He highlighted the absence of any requirement for lobbyists to disclose unpaid lobbying, written communications like emails or texts, casual conversations (as opposed to “arranged” communications), lobbying for tax credits or communications with regulatory agencies about the enforcement of laws that apply to one’s business.

The Narwhal’s analysis also does not include lobbying of senior government officials and cabinet ministers.

Environmental organizations unable to meet with Prime Minister Carney

The findings are very different for meetings between the prime minister and environmentalists, who say they have been unable to secure access. Analysis of federal lobbying records shows that of the 53 lobbying communications listed in the registry in Carney’s first 100 days, none appear to be with an environmental advocacy organization.

After reaching out to the prime minister, Gray said Carney’s staff told Environmental Defence he would not speak with them, but did not provide a rationale.

“The prime minister needs to hear what environmental organizations — which represent millions of Canadians — think about major projects and realignment of our economy,” Gray said.

The Prime Minister’s Office did not respond to questions from The Narwhal on natural resource lobbying and why access was not granted to environmental groups, including Environmental Defence.

Spokespeople from environmental advocacy groups Ecojustice, MiningWatch and Nature Canada told The Narwhal they had similar experiences: each reached out to the Prime Minister’s Office in his first 100 days to discuss either mandate letters, pending legislation or prescient environmental issues. None were granted access.

When Carney won the federal election, Nature Canada director of policy Akaash Maharaj said the conservation charity was initially optimistic about the new prime minister’s campaign commitments on nature protection. Then came some early cabinet announcements that Maharaj called confusing — in May, Carney bundled the portfolios of Parks Canada and Heritage Canada and created the new position of Secretary of State for Nature.

Maharaj said Nature Canada reached out to the Prime Minister’s Office multiple times, with Carney’s office acknowledging the charity’s emails but never extending an invitation to meet with him or his senior staff. Nature Canada representatives instead met with the Environment Minister and Secretary of State for Nature.

As natural resource industry representatives continued to gain access to the prime minister himself, Nature Canada doubled down: on Sept. 9, the charity penned an open letter with seven other conservation charities to Carney’s office and all Canadian premiers, stating that “tariff responses and nation-building projects cannot be accomplished at the expense of [Canada’s] natural heritage.” In that letter, the charities reiterated their interests in meeting with the prime minister. As of Oct. 7, Maharaj said Nature Canada has not received a reply about their request for a meeting with the prime minister.   

Maharaj said the Prime Minister’s Office did confirm receipt of a Sept. 3, 2025, letter from Nature Canada and eight other national organizations including Ecojustice and Environmental Defence. That letter did not ask for a meeting, rather urging Ottawa to limit “national interest” designations under the Building Canada Act to projects that advance reconciliation, protect the environment and exclude fossil fuel development meant for export.

Nonetheless, Maharaj said the frequency of natural resource industry lobbying isn’t surprising. But he pointed out that this outsized industrial influence stands in contrast to the reality of Canada’s economy. Small- and medium-sized businesses employ more than three quarters of Canadians and, according to Statistics Canada, Canada’s natural resources sector made up just 3.4 per cent of all employee jobs in the country in 2023. Maharaj said prioritizing access to already wealthy and powerful institutions and forgoing environmental standards in the midst of Trump’s trade war is not in the interest of Canadians.

“Eventually the time of crisis will pass, but the effects of the decisions we make during this crisis will last for generations, especially for major national projects,” Maharaj said. “Canadians are right to say that during a time of economic anxiety, their focus has to be on the economic well-being of their family. But that is not incompatible with environmental standards, including standards that don’t exacerbate climate change.”

Updated on Oct. 16, 2025, at 11:48 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to correct a statement from a source that lobbying for tax cuts does not have to be registered and disclosed. Lobbying for tax cuts does have to be disclosed, while lobbying for tax credits does not.

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If Vitor Marciano, the chief of staff to Alberta’s energy minister, thought he was going to get a warm reception at a recent meeting in the village of Warburg, he was mistaken. 

Marciano faced jeers and doubt as he tried to sell a largely rural crowd on the government’s latest plan to deal with a cascade of problems caused by the oil and gas sector. 

Around 100 people were in the Warburg Community Hall on Sept. 9 to hear Marciano talk about the Mature Asset Strategy. It’s a series of recommendations the government says will help with the oil and gas industry’s unpaid taxes and leases, which include tens of thousands of inactive wells and environmental liabilities of almost $38 billion, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator. 

He was joined, unexpectedly, by the author of that strategy, Dave Yager, a board member of the regulator and a special advisor to Premier Danielle Smith. Yager was not advertised as a guest.

“The mature asset strategy will not give companies taxpayer dollars to clean up their assets,” Marciano said, summarizing his message to the crowd.

“It will,” came a voice from the back of the room.

“The mature asset strategy will not end or diminish the Orphan Well Association,” Marciano said, referring to the industry-funded association meant to deal with wells left behind by bankrupt companies. 

“It will,” came the same voice. 

“The mature asset strategy does not violate the polluter-pay principle,” Marciano continued.

“It will,” came the reply. 

That disagreement set the stage for the night, though it was one of the quieter exchanges, with the crowd often interrupting and arguing with Marciano. The level of frustration was high, with what many see as regulatory failure and government complicity — a view that Marciano himself largely agreed with, but which he promised would change. 

Many in the crowd remained unconvinced, and Marciano’s own presentation didn’t help. 

Twice in the early stages of his talk, Marciano was interrupted by audience members representing organizations that were mentioned in Marciano’s slides. They did not agree with his characterizations of facts. 

Surface rights groups were involved from the first meeting to discuss a path forward, according to Marciano. Not true, according to William Heidecker, a rancher and the president of the Alberta Surface Rights Federation, who said a request to be included was rebuffed. The Rural Municipalities of Alberta are working on solutions within the new strategy to tackle unpaid taxes, according to Marciano. Not true, according to Wyatt Skovron, the general manager of policy and advocacy for the association, who made clear the organization wants nothing to do with the new plan. 

Jennifer Stephenson, a local landowner, sparred with Marciano over not receiving a company’s lease payments on her land. Marciano said she needs to apply for reimbursement from the government. 

“It’s still our tax dollars,” she said. “That’s not good enough.”

In the room, there was palpable anger with the government and with the regulator for not enforcing existing rules. Grievances included wells being transferred to financially unstable companies, inspections that don’t happen, wells that aren’t closed and cleaned, payments that aren’t made, as well as the complaint that licences aren’t pulled and bad actors removed. 

Many in the room are also fighting to get land lease payments — the money owed to farmers and landowners by companies with wells on their land. 

Marciano and Yager’s message was: yes, mistakes were made. Now, please trust that we’re going to fix them. 

Proposed strategy to deal with oil and gas wells would see government take over old wells itself

It wasn’t just locals at the meeting, a sign of the scale of Alberta’s problems and the controversy of the government’s plans.

Rakhi Pancholi, deputy leader of the Alberta NDP was there, as was Paul McLauchlin, the former president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta. There was Susanne Calabrese, a lawyer for Ecojustice who is pushing for an ethics investigation against Yager, along with her client Dwight Popowich, and more.

Municipalities are owed $254 million in outstanding property taxes from oil and gas companies, while another $200 million has been written off in the past decade, never to be collected. According to the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, more than $100 million of the outstanding taxes are owed by 201 companies that are still operating. 

There are nearly 80,000 inactive wells scattered across the province, some of which haven’t produced any oil or gas for decades, often leaching pollution in the ground and the air. 

Landowners with failing companies on their properties have to wait months for the government to reimburse unpaid leases. The government paid more than $150 million to cover lease obligations for private companies between 2010 and 2024 and in that time has recovered less than one per cent from those companies. 

The mature asset strategy — developed to respond to many of these issues — has been controversial since it was first leaked to the media in March. Particularly controversial has been the possibility of creating a government entity that would take ownership of aging wells owned by derelict companies, dubbed “HarvestCo.” That and other proposals in the strategy could be government policy this fall.

Those wells would either be transferred to the Orphan Well Association, sold to different private operators to run or be taken over by HarvestCo to wring whatever wealth is left in the ground, with the goal of funding their cleanup. 

Critics say it shifts all the risk onto taxpayers, while Marciano argues it would be an effective way for the government to reap financial rewards from old wells and help pay for cleanup. He said it would also help shut down bad operators, even if the process would seem to copy the business practices of companies that buy up cheap wells to reap profit and then disappear.

In effect, Marciano said, this would be a government-sanctioned organization mimicking what he called “industry stripper companies,” referring to companies that buy wells cheaply and pull as much profit from them while shirking responsibilities including taxes, leases and cleanup. Too often, Marciano added, the companies function as “pump and dumps.”

The government, Marciano believes, could do it better.

‘Gigantic problem’: top political staffer acknowledges issues in Alberta oil and gas sector

Marciano repeatedly said past governments have ignored what he called a “gigantic problem” in Alberta’s oil and gas sector. He said there are good companies, but there are also bad ones inching along and not paying their dues. 

Listening to stakeholders while crafting the report, he said, showed the government that “trust was broken and the trust had to be repaired.”

But Marciano also repeatedly warned the problems are going to get worse before they get better. 

“Folks, companies are going to go down, and more companies are going to go down over the next few years than have gone down in the past,” he said. 

The regulator is going to be more aggressive at shutting down failing companies and preventing them from buying up wells in the first place, he said. The government strategy could include a sort of security deposit to clean up wells, but that might not actually involve cash and could include the government as a sort of insurance backstop. Details are still unclear. 

“We owe it to it to rural Alberta, to the jobs, to the taxpayers, to the economic opportunity, to make sure that the cleanup of these assets is done as efficiently, as intelligently as possible, while recognizing that there are companies that need to be put out of business, and they’re going to get put out of business,” Marciano said. 

Yager was more straightforward about the problem. 

“I think I can say this in this town — I now refer to it as the giant stinking pile of shit. This is a mess. It always has been a mess,” he said of the issues facing Alberta.

Yager, who was hired to review the regulator and find solutions to its shortcomings, said when he arrived in 2023, the liability department, which tries to prevent bad companies from taking over wells, was not effective. It was using old data to try and predict if companies were failing. He said he was “mortified.” 

Renato Gandia, a spokesperson for the Alberta Energy Regulator, did not respond to questions asking for reaction to Yager’s comments, or whether the liability department has changed the way it operates. 

“Any changes to the Alberta Energy Regulator would need to be led by the Government of Alberta,” he said by email. “We encourage you to reach out to them directly.”

The regulator, an arm’s-length agency which Yager’s own review said should be more independent of government, did not reply to a follow-up email, but instead forwarded the request to the government — specifically, to the office of Energy Minister Brian Jean.

“Minister Jean has long acknowledged that the issues around some oil and gas companies not paying their municipal taxes or surface leases have not been dealt with to the satisfaction of all stakeholders by previous governments,” wrote a spokesperson, in response to the forwarded request. “We have confidence that the mature asset strategy process and other reforms undertaken by the Alberta Energy Regulator will begin to deal with these issues and result in the Alberta Energy Regulator being able to improve its ability to assess licencees and to act more effectively on those that are not regulatorily compliant.”

Marciano didn’t respond to a follow-up call by publication time.

Yager said he wants to ensure indicators, such as companies not paying contractors or surface leases, are considered. 

“There’s going to be material changes coming out of regulatory enforcement on all of these files, because now they are capable of doing something,” he said.

What that “something” is still needs to be ironed out. Yager said it’s a work in progress. 

Regulators should ‘do their damn job’: landowner

While Yager and Marciano promised better enforcement and action on the issues plaguing Alberta, and rural Alberta in particular, many in the crowd were frustrated with being asked to wait. 

Many wondered why the government needs to completely overhaul the system instead of simply enforcing the regulations already in place.

Heidecker, with the surface rights federation, said the regulator already has the ability to pull licences when companies don’t pay their leases, noting there are rules in place to crack down on bad actors and those rules aren’t being enforced. 

“What we need is regulators to do their damn job,” he said. “Let’s get some things done.”

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When Prime Minister Mark Carney met with oil and gas executives in June, he touted “partnerships” to make Canada an “energy superpower,” but disclosure reports show industry leaders had something else in their crosshairs: the federal climate plan.

On that day, and throughout the two months on either side of it, the oil and gas industry lobbied Carney and his ministers not only on economic issues, like U.S. tariffs — but also on several of former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies in the Emissions Reduction Plan, according to The Narwhal’s review of lobbying activity disclosures.

These include: the clean fuel regulations, passed in 2022, which require oil and gas companies to slash the amount of carbon pollution they generate as a byproduct of producing fuel; the clean electricity regulations, put in place at the end of 2024 to achieve a net-zero power grid; the 2018 rules for methane, the main component of natural gas and a potent heat-trapping compound; and the proposed oil and gas emissions cap, the draft rules for which were released last year.

The filings on the federal lobbying commissioner’s website don’t show whether companies are for or against policies when they lobby. The Narwhal reached out to all the oil and gas companies and industry organizations that filed disclosure reports during the time period studied to ask what policy changes they wanted to see. 

Pipeline company Enbridge, which lobbied Carney over both the clean fuel and clean electricity rules, responded that the firm believes it’s “important to keep governments at all levels informed about our business and operations.” 

The company regularly engages with government and elected officials on “a variety of topics,” spokesperson Jesse Semko said, including oil and gas, renewables and emissions policy. Semko said Enbridge respects and follows transparency rules. Other oil and gas organizations did not respond to The Narwhal’s queries.

Alex Cool-Fergus, national policy manager at Climate Action Network Canada, a non-governmental organization which has been tracking the implementation of Trudeau’s climate plan, said public commentary from the industry suggests it’s not particularly interested in trying to improve the climate plan.

“These are long-standing demands from these various industries: ‘Get rid of these things, we don’t want to be a part of this,’ ” Cool-Fergus said.

“I think it’s important that these policies are not just based on who has the money to get the lobbyists, but really based on what, ultimately, is going to make Canadians safer and healthier.” 

The oil and gas industry’s lobbying on Canada’s climate plan

Elements of the Emissions Reduction Plan that oil and gas industry representatives lobbied on during May and June 2025, according to federal disclosure records reviewed by The Narwhal.

Clean fuel regulations

• Suncor Energy
• Enbridge
• Shell Canada
• Canadian Natural Resources Limited
• Cenovus Energy

Methane regulations

• MEG Energy
• Tourmaline Oil
• Enbridge
• Canadian Natural Resources Limited
• Cenovus Energy

Carbon capture, utilization and storage

• MEG Energy
• Shell Canada
• Pathways Alliance
• Enbridge
• Cenovus Energy

Hydrogen strategy

• Suncor Energy
• Shell Canada
• Enbridge
• TC Energy

Carbon pricing

• Enbridge
• Cenovus Energy
• Imperial Oil
• Suncor Energy

Net-zero emissions

• Suncor Energy
• Canadian Natural Resources Limited
• Cenovus Energy

Emissions cap

• TC Energy
• Tourmaline Oil
• Imperial Oil

Clean Growth Program

• MEG Energy
• Shell Canada

Clean electricity regulations

• Enbridge

Aside from the consumer-focused side of the federal carbon pricing regime, which was removed by Carney effective April 1, and some programs that have run their course, many elements of the climate plan remain in place under his government. 

The plan, legally required under Canada’s net-zero law, was published in 2022 and called for a “cap and cut” on greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector, in order to get the country to net-zero emissions by 2050. 

The Carney government is preparing to “provide an update” to the federal climate plan, “taking into account the evolving global and economic context,” Keean Nembhard, a spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Minister Julie Dabrusin, said in response to The Narwhal’s questions.

Nembhard said the government would provide an update to the climate plan “by the end of the year” but did not say what that would involve.

“Canada continues to work towards its 2030 targets, and we’re committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 — not just because it’s essential for the climate, but because we cannot ignore the reality at home,” he said.

“Canada is warming at twice the global average and up to three times faster in the North. Building climate resilience and meeting our targets is economically smart, fiscally responsible and essential to protecting Canadians and the places they call home.”

Oil and gas lobbying on rules for cleaner fuels, electricity, methane

The climate plan pays particular attention to the oil and gas sector because it’s the single largest industrial contributor to the country’s carbon pollution. 

In 2023, the most recent year of available data, the industry accounted for almost one-third of all national emissions. Oil and gas emissions have also surged 77 per cent since 1990, mainly due to massive oilsands expansion.

Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are driving climate change, which is making extreme weather and air quality worse in Canada and around the world. Federal climate scientists said 37 extreme heat events in Canada last year were exacerbated because of human-caused climate change.

“If you speak to your average person who has experienced the incredibly horrific events of the past couple of months, in terms of wildfires and heat waves and air pollution, they want to see action,” Cool-Fergus said.

The lobbying comes in the wake of a public push by fossil fuel organizations this year to see the federal government knock down key Trudeau-era environmental policies, noted Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist at Greenpeace Canada.

The industry has portrayed this push as a prudent response to the country’s changing relationship with the United States, including tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration is trying to sweep away most U.S. climate regulations. 

In February, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the country’s largest oil and gas lobby group, called on the federal government to relinquish control of “any emissions reductions policies” to the provinces, arguing this would help keep energy “affordable and competitive.”

That was followed by an open letter in March titled “Build Canada Now” written by 14 oil and gas companies, including many large oilsands firms, asking party leaders to commit to killing federal carbon pricing and the proposed emissions cap in order for Canada to “defend its sovereignty.”

“Canadian oil lobbyists have been remarkably, and appallingly, consistent in demanding that the government of Canada follow Donald Trump’s lead and eliminate federal climate policy in favour of boosting fossil fuels,” Stewart said.

At the June 1 meeting, Carney sat down with executives from many of the companies that had written to him in the open letter to discuss their demands in person. The conversation had been framed days earlier by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith as revolving around building new pipelines. 

But the disclosure reports for that day, from organizations whose executives were present at that closed-door “energy roundtable” in Calgary, show lobbying on a range of long-established climate rules, funds and programs.

Oilsands company MEG Energy, for example, disclosed that it lobbied Carney on June 1 over two funds that date back to 2017, a $600-million competition for low-carbon projects called the Low Carbon Economy Challenge and a $155-million fund for clean technology research called the Clean Growth Program. Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson, who was also present at the meeting with Carney, is a former board member for MEG Energy.

Along with MEG Energy, the oilsands companies Suncor Energy, Cenovus Energy and Canadian Natural Resources were also participants in the Clean Growth Program. These companies are also all part of the Pathways Alliance lobby group, which wants government funding and favourable regulations to help build a carbon-capture megaproject in the oilpatch. 

The Pathways Alliance disclosed that it lobbied the prime minister on “potential collaboration between industry and government” on emissions and carbon capture. The alliance has previously asked the government to delay and weaken the emissions cap and to avoid a federal environmental assessment.

Imperial Oil, another member of the oilsands alliance, said it lobbied Carney on “the global competitiveness of the energy sector.” All of those companies signed the open letter calling for federal carbon pricing and plans for the emissions cap to be abandoned.

Enbridge and Suncor Energy lobbied Carney on the clean fuel regulations, records show. Suncor operates refineries, some of which produce gasoline or diesel, and also sells fuel to consumers under its Petro-Canada brand, while Enbridge operates gas distribution businesses, including a near-monopoly in Ontario.

The clean fuel rules are meant to reduce the energy that goes into making fuel: gasoline produced from the oilsands, for example, would typically begin its life as the sticky tar-like substance bitumen, before being upgraded into synthetic crude oil, then run through a refinery, all of which takes energy. The Pembina Institute has said the clean fuel regulations could cut more than 200 million tonnes of greenhouse gases by 2040. 

More than half of oil and gas lobbying records show climate plan communications

A majority of the lobbying disclosures from oil and gas companies that The Narwhal reviewed during the period of May and June involved some kind of messaging about the Emissions Reduction Plan or its components.

An executive from Shell Canada, which runs refineries and petrochemical plants across the country and owns a portion of the LNG Canada terminal in Kitimat, B.C., lobbied on the Clean Fuels Fund during the day of Carney’s meeting, and then the company raised the topic again when lobbying a senior public servant a couple weeks later.

Enbridge lobbied on the clean electricity regulations on June 1, and then the company brought up that topic three more times with officials in the Finance, Environment and Natural Resources departments, records show.

Enbridge also disclosed it lobbied the prime minister on Canada’s regulations on methane. Years of scientific studies have shown methane from oil and gas production has been severely underestimated in Canada.

Tourmaline Oil, a large natural gas producer that runs fracking operations, disclosed it had lobbied Carney on the subject of the Emissions Reduction Plan itself, and the proposed emissions cap. The company filed five lobbying records in June showing it planned to raise the topic of the emissions cap and the climate plan with a range of officials in Environment and Climate Change Canada and Natural Resources Canada.

Other topics the oil and gas companies lobbied on during the May-June period include carbon capture, utilization and storage technology, like Pathways Alliance is proposing, as well as hydrogen fuel, carbon pricing and Canada’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

Sometimes the subject matter listed in lobbying records are vague. A lobbyist representing pipeline company TC Energy, for example, lobbied on May 23 about “federal emissions policy” without specifying which ones. Companies can also lobby via consulting firms, and larger companies might use both consultants and in-house lobbyists to communicate the same message.

As well, lobbying records only show the date of the communication, the organization doing the lobbying, the person or people being lobbied and the subject matter, and not other information like whether the lobbying occurred in person.

Updated on Aug. 27, 2025, at 9:59 a.m. ET : This story has been updated to include information Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin’s office provided after publication about when the government planned to update the Emissions Reduction Plan.

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This investigation is a collaboration between The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation.

One of Canada’s largest oil and gas companies violated a deal it struck with B.C.’s energy regulator to address thousands of inactive pipelines in the province — and faced no financial penalties for doing so. 

Internal government documents obtained by The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation reveal Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (commonly called CNRL) failed to meet targets it proposed to the BC Energy Regulator to gradually deactivate more than 4,300 pipelines it operated across the province. 

Companies like CNRL operate thousands of short pipelines which connect natural gas wells — including fracking operations — to major pipeline networks. When the wells no longer produce gas, companies operating in B.C. are required to decommission pipelines within 18 months. The legal timeline is aimed at protecting the environment from leaks and damage as pipelines gradually decay. Deactivating a pipeline includes removing any fluid and disconnecting it from the system. The sealed-off pipeline will remain in the ground in perpetuity.

In 2020, the BC Energy Regulator found CNRL hadn’t deactivated thousands of pipelines and set out to get the company back into compliance with the law. CNRL proposed a detailed, multi-year plan for decommissioning its pipelines as part of an exemption from B.C.’s normal environmental regulations.Under that plan, CNRL was to deactivate a targeted number of pipelines each year until 2028, with exact annual targets ranging from 398 to 544.The regulator agreed and gave CNRL the extra eight years to get the work done. 

But in 2023, the regulator revoked CNRL’s exemption after learning the company “failed to deactivate the pipelines in accordance with the timelines set out in the plan,” according to the documents obtained under freedom of information legislation. The regulator later said in a statement that CNRL had failed to meet targets for three years in a row.

That led to the regulator issuing an order demanding CNRL clean up some of its pipelines. The company complied. The BC Energy Regulator then approved a second exemption for CNRL in 2024 and says the company is exceeding targets under that plan.

The regulator told The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation in an emailed statement it did not fine CNRL (which posted gross revenues of more than $41 billion last year, according to its 2024 financial statements) because it did not deem it necessary to ensure the company got back into compliance. The regulator added it could still “pursue a contravention and the issuance of an administrative monetary penalty in the event CNRL does not meet its remaining deactivation requirements.” In early March, CNRL still had 865 pipelines to decommission, according to a previous statement from the regulator. 

It is unclear why the company failed to meet the requirements for deactivating its pipelines, including failing to follow its own plan. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment made via email and over the phone. 

CNRL’s failure to deactivate pipelines is ‘consistent with a pattern’: legal expert 

The documents obtained by The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation provide an inside look at the regulator’s approach to working with companies when they fail to follow the rules.

In March 2024, BC Energy Regulator vice-president Nicole Koosmann wrote to CNRL expressing concern that the company “failed to to complete the deactivation requirements under the initial plan” but said complying with the normal rules was “not reasonably practicable” given the thousands of pipelines that had to be shut down. 

“I am further satisfied that adherence to the targets and commitments set out in the updated plan remains the most effective and efficient way to achieve compliance with regulatory requirements and to minimize the risk associated with the remaining pipelines,” she wrote at the time. 

Koosmann’s letter to CNRL came after government officials discovered the company had “not met the targets for any of the years 2020, 2021 or 2022,” according to an unattributed statement from the regulator.

That led the regulator to invoke a clause in the agreement that rendered it null and void if the company failed to meet its end of the bargain. The regulator then issued a general order, forcing the company to deactivate hundreds of pipelines, and renewed the pipeline exemption. The spokesperson said it struck the second deal with CNRL in part because of the “public interest in having the pipelines brought into compliance more quickly with less land disturbance.”

(Until previous reporting by The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation, exemptions like this were not publicly disclosed — the regulator has since started developing a publicly available database.)

Martin Olszynski, the chair in energy, resources and sustainability at the University of Calgary’s law school, said CNRL has a track record of being slow to clean up and deactivate its assets. As of June 2, the Alberta Energy Regulator reported CNRL holds more than 20,000 inactive wells in that province — or more than 25 per cent of Alberta’s inactive wells. 

“It’s consistent with a pattern that I’ve seen that this is a company that has a really hard time dealing with the backends of its assets,” Olszynski said.

‘What teeth does the regulator have?’

CNRL is now “exceeding their targets for pipeline deactivation” under the new plan, which would see the company shut down all of the pipelines by 2028, according to the regulator.

Olszynski said the BC Energy Regulator’s approach — ordering the company to comply but stopping short of a fine — could be perceived as soft. But he also pointed out it seemed to produce the desired effect of jolting the company into compliance. 

“The regulator has been pushing and pulling. It has used the power that it has to force these guys to do the work,” he said. 

The regulator also has a vested interest in maintaining a good relationship with the company, he added. 

“As a regulator, they’re not about bringing down the man,” Olszynski said. “Capitalism, that’s beyond their wheelhouse.” 

Jeremy Valeriote, the interim leader of the BC Green Party, said the lack of penalties highlights a cultural problem of the province’s regulators being too lenient with oil and gas companies.

“It begs the question, what teeth does the regulator have?” he said. 

The BC Energy Regulator, formerly the BC Oil and Gas Commission, is mostly funded by levies on companies that run oil and gas projects. The sector has been expanding in recent years as B.C. gears up to become a major exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG). 

Valeriote said he worries the regulator is unwilling to confront companies that break the rules, and what that means as it takes on additional responsibilities. The B.C. government has been allocating extra powers to the BC Energy Regulator, including responsibility for overseeing renewable energy projects such as wind farms. 

“They need to prove to the public that they can fill the role, especially if they’re going into new areas and new sectors and they’re looking to build public trust,” he said.

Updated on July 7, 2025, at 12:40 p.m. PT: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Nicole Koosmann’s name.

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In early October 2023, a senior bureaucrat in the Ontario Energy Ministry emailed an Enbridge official with a “sort of urgent” request. 

Newly released internal documents show that Premier Doug Ford had called the natural gas giant that month to discuss delays in obtaining a natural gas connection for a facility whose name is redacted in the documents. The issue was so important, Ford made the call on a weekend. The following day, per the emails, the premier was set to meet with the president and CEO of Enbridge and the executive vice-president of Enbridge Gas in Etobicoke, Ont., where Ford resides. 

“I really need to know what this is and what the status is and what the next steps are,” the government official said in their email to Enbridge Gas. 

The communication is just the latest example of the close relationship between Ford’s government and Enbridge, at a time when the government is setting out its long-term energy plans. Those plans include expanding natural gas infrastructure and codifying Ontario’s dependency on the fossil fuel, which is largely made up of methane, a greenhouse gas that causes global heating.

It’s part of a 3,532-page document package containing hundreds of government briefings and emails from 2021 to 2023. They reveal provincial officials acted as liaisons between Enbridge and the public, with one bureaucrat in contact with the company on a daily basis. They also show elected officials, including Ford himself, in talks with the company’s top leadership.

The documents were obtained via freedom of information legislation and shared with The Narwhal by an energy expert. Enbridge Gas, the Ministry of Energy and the premier’s office did not respond to The Narwhal’s requests for comment.

“Natural gas is fundamental as an insurance policy to keep the lights on,” Energy Minister Stephen Lecce told reporters when he announced the province’s new long-term energy plan on June 12. Without natural gas, he said, Ontarians will experience “liability issues, blackouts and higher energy costs.”

Time and again, the Ford government has come out in support of projects proposed by Enbridge Gas, the $50-billion, Calgary-based private company with a near-monopoly on gas distribution in Ontario. Most notably, the government overturned a decision by an independent regulator that would have forced Enbridge to stop passing down the costs of new gas hookups to Ontarians — all to protect the company’s bottom line, according to internal documents The Narwhal reported on last year. 

Enbridge and natural gas already run deep in Ontario. The fossil fuel is the primary source of heating for three-quarters of homes in the province. But the onset of the climate emergency — and the need to move away from heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as methane — is absent from the Ford government’s actions or long-term energy plans.

The grid is already dirtier as a result: in 2021, the electricity system was 94 per cent emissions-free, but has now dropped to about 84 per cent. The Ford government has promised a near-emissions free grid by 2050, but is veering in the opposite direction. 

Here’s what you need to know about the Ontario government’s long-term future — and past —  with natural gas. 

Internal documents illustrate close relationship between Ontario officials and Enbridge Gas

Internal documents in the newly released package show Enbridge Gas regularly emailing officials in the Energy Ministry to inform them of project proposals in different communities. This included battery projects and pipeline expansions, as well as any opposition to either. 

These emails show that in 2023, the Energy Ministry told someone wanting a connection that it would put them in touch with a staff member “who talks to Enbridge every day.” This was just one example of the ministry’s involvement in guiding the expansion of natural gas, from offering homeowners suggestions on how to get hookups, to relaying detailed constituent complaints about delays in Enbridge providing natural gas connections. The ministry also relayed residents’ questions about subsidies for switching to heat pumps, a government-funded program Enbridge administers. 

In several instances, senior government officials in the Energy Ministry, including the minister’s chief of staff, asked Enbridge staff to show support for proposed energy laws. “Continued support for this legislation is critical to success, it would be great to see Enbridge at committee as well, and a supportive letter to legislators would also be helpful!” a senior official wrote to company representatives in November 2023. In response, the company created one-page documents detailing why it felt that various laws would increase access to reliable power across the province. 

“As a responsible gas supplier, Enbridge Gas maintains transparent communication with all levels of government in the regions where we operate,” Enbridge Gas spokesperson Leanne McNaughton told The Narwhal in April 2024. “This helps us ensure that our residential, commercial and industrial customers continue to have access to a resilient energy source of their choice.” 

Enbridge staff also took the opportunity in these back-and-forths to offer advice to the government about the future of the province’s grid. In one such note, the company said, “Achieving the goals of a coordinated energy system in Ontario will be difficult, if not impossible, unless Enbridge Gas has an equivalent seat at the system planning table.” 

Ontario’s energy plan keeps natural gas in the mix until 2050 — 10 years longer than experts say is necessary

The long-term provincial energy plan released June 12 is a 152-page document titled “Energy for Generations.” It’s a compilation of promises already made to deal with the energy supply crisis ahead: a lot more nuclear (which will take years to get up and running), a lot more energy efficiency programs (to replace those the Progressive Conservative Party scrapped when it came to power) and a lot more natural gas — one of Ontario’s cheapest and last remaining fossil fuel-based sources of energy. 

One slightly new aspect of this plan is Ontario’s first official natural gas policy, which codifies what this government has been arguing for many years: that the methane-heavy fossil fuel is “vital” and “critical.” 

“There is no alternative,” Energy Minister Lecce said repeatedly as he unveiled the plan, especially in this time of rising demand for power. That demand is spurred by the electrification of transportation and buildings, as well as the push for more power-hungry data centres to facilitate artificial intelligence. The government is also attempting to integrate electricity and heating in its new “coordinated energy planning” approach, and proposes that both be increasingly generated by natural gas.

The province has been weighing its use of natural gas for several years. In a government-commissioned report The Narwhal reported on in December — which was withheld from the public until now — experts urged the province to phase out natural gas and drastically increase nuclear and wind energy to reduce emissions.

The Independent Electricity System Operator, the Crown agency in charge of balancing energy supply and demand, has projected that natural gas could be phased out by 2040 without causing much disruption. 

Ontario’s new long-term energy plan deviates from the operator. The government projects the fossil fuel will be used until at least 2050 and then sparingly, as various nuclear facilities in refurbishment come back online. About this two-decade-plus stretch, the plan says, “This will result in a short-term increase in electricity system emissions.” 

When asked about the discrepancy between experts’ climate caution and his government’s plan, Lecce said, in order to maintain reliability, the government will not phase out natural gas.  

Ontario directs independent energy board to enable ‘continued rational expansion of the natural gas system’

Part of the government’s new natural gas policy is a directive to the Ontario Energy Board that its decisions weigh “allowing gas utilities an opportunity to earn a fair return on investment, and enabling the continued rational expansion of the natural gas system.”

The Ontario Energy Board is the independent regulator for electricity and natural gas in the province, tasked with approving and denying plans set out by energy companies. Its job is to implement policy set by the provincial government and to keep industry accountable, ensuring decisions are financially responsible and in the public interest. 

The province’s new order comes just over a year after the Ford government made the unprecedented move to overturn the energy board ruling that would have forced Enbridge or developers to pay for natural gas hookups in new homes, instead of passing the cost on to homeowners. At the time, the board justified its ruling — which came after a year-long deliberation involving tens of thousands of pages of documents, public hearings and dozens of interviews across the energy industry — as being more economical for ratepayers and in line with transition to renewable energy. The board found that the energy transition will likely make natural gas “a stranded asset,” financially unviable or socially unacceptable as lower emissions energy sources, like electric heat pumps, increase and improve.

The internal emails recently shared with The Narwhal show that in the lead-up to that decision, officials with Enbridge Gas were communicating with bureaucrats about how various board proceedings were delaying the company’s ability to build pipelines and other natural gas infrastructure. 

Company officials shared briefings with the province that said certain environmental advocacy groups had delayed Enbridge’s board approvals. The briefings said over the course of 2023, the company had faced “several outstanding issues” with the board, “including weighing into policy decisions, regulatory approval delays and determining based on their views of climate change if ‘gas is good.’ ” 

In the documents, the company stated delays it attributed to the board had increased project costs and forced it to pause construction. 

“If the government would like to see these [natural gas expansion] projects proceed, they must work with the [Ontario Energy Board] to create the regulatory certainty needed,” company officials wrote repeatedly to officials in the Energy Ministry and to various MPPs. Enbridge representatives also asked the government how the company could earn back investments as they wait for board decisions. 

“These ongoing delays for residential, business and Indigenous communities waiting for access to reliable, affordable natural gas … are unacceptable.”

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