Canada’s oil exports increased by 65 per cent in 10 years under former Prime Minster Stephen Harper’s leadership according to analysis of the most recent figures issued by BP’s annual Statistical Review of World Energy.

Between 2004 and 2014, Canadian exports soared from 2,148,000 barrels per day to 3,535,000 barrels per day.

The BP data, compiled by Carbon Brief in its Global Oil Trade interactive, shows that the majority of this oil went south of the border — exports to the United States increased by 60 per cent during this time from 2,119,000 barrels per day to 3,388,000 barrels per day.

Exports to U.S. and the EU

In fact, almost 96 per cent of all Canadian crude exported in 2014 went to the U.S. The U.S. shale gas boom saw a rapid decline in the amount of oil the country imported, particularly from Mexico, Africa and South America. But this didn’t stop the flow of oil coming in from Canada.   The next biggest recipients of Canada’s oil over the last 10 years have been Europe, Japan, and South and Central America.

Europe is the second largest export market for Canada. Recently, the EU came close to labelling oilsand’s crude as high-carbon due to its energy-intensive extraction and refining process.

So it’s interesting to note that Canadian crude represents just a small fraction of the total oil imported by Europe (86,000 barrels per day in 2014 compared to 162,000 barrels per day from India, 1,575,000 barrels per day from West Africa, and 6,028,000 barrels per day from former Soviet Union countries).

Ultimately, the move to label the oilsands a highly carbon-intensive energy source was thwarted by serious lobbying efforts by the Canadian and Albertan governments under the former Conservative majority under Stephen Harper.

Harper’s Legacy

Since 2006, the Harper government pushed aggressively for the country to become an “energy superpower."

In 2014, Canada was the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, behind China, the U.S., Russia and Saudi Arabia.

While Canada's oil exports increased many environmental protections were weakened or eliminated, under the Harper government, including protections for fish, rivers and lakes. Legislative changes made under omnibus bills C-38 and C-45 eliminated thousands of environmental assessments and repealed Canada's only law for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.    During roughly the same 10-year period that Canada’s oil exports increased, not a single meeting was held between provincial, territorial and federal government ministers to specifically discuss climate change.

As Glen Murray, Ontario’s Liberal minister for environment and climate change recently told The Canadian Press: “The previous government in 10 years couldn’t produce a paragraph [on climate policy], never mind a framework, so there’s a lot of work going on [now].”

Climate Challenge

Canada has pledged as part of the Paris climate deal agreed in December to cut its annual greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution to 524 megatonnes by the end of the next decade.

But as the most recent emissions data released last month by Environment and Climate Change Canada shows, the country is way off course in meeting the weak greenhouse gas reduction targets set under the previous Conservative government.

Under Harper, Canada indicated it would reduce its greenhouse gas output only by roughly 14 per cent by 2030 based on 1990 levels.

The Trudeau government said it plans to improve on this target, but has yet to state by how much. Canada currently exceeds 1990 levels by 18 per cent. Canada has also agreed to phase out the use of fossil fuels by the end of the century and eliminate net carbon emissions by 2050. 

The federal government is set to meet with Indigenous leaders and premiers in Vancouver on March 2-3 in the hopes of laying out the framework for a national climate strategy. And as part of this, Canada’s oil production, and its ever-increasing global exports, will undoubtedly have to be factored into the decision making process.

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While the Keystone XL, Northern Gateway, Trans Mountain and Energy East pipelines remain stalled in political upheaval, environmental opposition and regulatory processing, the government of Alberta could start moving landlocked oil to tidal waters via the Arctic as early as 2015, according to a technical report recently released by the Alberta government. 

The report, authored by Canatec Associates International Ltd., an Arctic petroleum consultation firm, considers three scenarios for exporting oilsands product, all of which were deemed technically feasible. An early, exploratory shipment of oil to the Arctic could be on the move as early as next year, the report states.

The Arctic Gateway Pipeline, previously considered logistically unfeasible, has been eyed with increasing interest recently, as a warming climate begins to open up the north to new development and previously inaccessible shipment routes.

The report notes the new export route stands to benefit from a combination of a changing northern climate, hunger for resource development in Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories, and the growing desperation to move Alberta oil to Asian markets.

The Financial Post reports “an aggressive push from the federal government to reduce environmental oversight in the territory” is part of the “combination of winning conditions” adding to the proposal’s viability.

The report states Alberta “could take a leadership role within Canadian confederation, on the future of the Arctic.”

“Alberta will automatically be a major player in this industry if it has already established an Arctic Energy Gateway.”

The Canatec report notes the Arctic “lacks the equipment, personnel and logistical capacity to effectively respond to oil spills,” adding, “no oil spill response organizations are certified to work in the Arctic.”

Proposed route to the Arctic. Image from Canatec.

The pipeline is projected to transport up to 100,000 barrels of diluted bitumen a day. The Keystone XL pipeline would carry up to 700,000 barrles of oil per day from Canada to the Gulf Coast and the federally-approved Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline would have a daily capacity of 525,000 barrels of oil.

Alberta Energy spokesperson Ryan Cromb told Fort McMurray Today the report was commissioned to survey oil-export options, and not to identify an alternative to existing pipelines.

“This report was commissioned as part of our larger look at market access in all directions – east, west, north and south,” he said. “Alberta Energy is continuing to review the report and will use it to help better inform us and more fully understand market options.”

Mike Hudema from Greenpeace Canada told Fort McMurray Today it is “absolutely ridiculous” Alberta is considering an Arctic route for oil export.

“Not only should we not be expanding the oilsands at a point where we are blowing past so many environmental thresholds, but now we want to endanger one of the last remaining untouched ecosystems?” he said.

Keith Stewart, energy and climate campaigner for Greenpeace, echoed these concerns: “The melting of the arctic should be setting off alarms saying we should start moving away from fossil fuels,” he said. “Instead, we are using it as an opportunity to make things worse.”

New economic attention has been paid to Arctic shipping routes since ice levels dropped to record lows in the summer of 2012. Unprecedented ice retreat in August 2012 opened up Parry Channel in the Northwest Passage, signaling a new life to the historic shipping route that, until then, was thought too dangerous to be economic.

Ice in the Perry Channel July 17, 2012. Image by NASA.

Ice retreat in Perry Channel on August 3, 2012. Image by NASA.

In 2013 a container ship used the Northwest Passage to deliver cargo to the port in Rotterdam.

Canatec currently lists the Northwest Passage as “technically feasible to open.”

Image Credit: Tuktoyaktuk by pony_coach via Flickr.

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This is a guest post by Will Horter, executive director of the Dogwood Initiative. It was originally published in the Toronto Star.

Earthquakes happen rarely in Canadian politics, but the fault lines are shifting again on the West Coast. As the next federal election draws closer, conditions below the surface should remind political observers of another seismic event a generation ago.

Back in the early 1990s, Stephen Harper and the insurgent Reform Party forced a tectonic shift, unleashing a powerful wave of western alienation that has realigned Canadian politics to this day. Their slogan was: “The West wants in.”

You could sum up the feeling in British Columbia lately as, “The West wants out.” Today you could get in your car in Kenora and drive clear across the Prairies to the coast without ever leaving a blue Conservative riding. But the road through the Rocky Mountains could become tricky indeed if Harper’s party doesn’t change course.

The central question for British Columbians, as it was for Albertans in the 1980s and ’90s, is this: who gets to decide what’s in our best interest — Ottawa or the people who live here?

As pundits debate the technical merits of crude oil and coal export proposals through B.C., they miss the deeper sense of alienation that’s taking hold. British Columbians and especially First Nations are growing increasingly resentful of decisions they feel have been imposed on them from the outside.

A poll this year by the Manning Centre (led by Harper’s former boss, Preston Manning) found fully 68 per cent of people in B.C. feel the country is going in the wrong direction. Asked why the number was so high, the former Reform Party leader said “pipelines.”

People in B.C. don’t want out of Canada, but they want out of the Harper government’s national energy plan, such as it is. Becoming a fossil-fuel export “superpower,” in Harper’s words, holds little appeal for communities caught between Alberta’s oilsands and the refineries in Asia.

A powerful majority of British Columbians, including plenty of Tory voters, simply aren’t willing to risk their magnificent coast, local health and existing jobs for the benefit of global energy corporations — especially China’s voracious state-owned oil giants.

What shifted the tectonic plates in Alberta over decades was the chronic feeling that the federal government was preoccupied with Quebec and Ontario, leaving the West to act as the piggy bank for central Canada.

The earthquake was triggered by then prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whose infamous National Energy Program was seen as a way to redistribute wealth generated in the Alberta oilpatch to Ottawa.

Albertans were furious. A popular sticker on many truck bumpers at the time read: “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark.” (A reprint would probably do a brisk trade in many B.C. communities today.)

Twenty-five years on, the centre of power has shifted to Alberta. The National Energy Program is replaced in the current drama by the the National Energy Board, tasked with rubber-stamping the Enbridge and Kinder Morgan pipeline proposals. The electoral battlegrounds are different, but the conversations on the doorstep remain the same.

Harper is the grassroots activist who once wrote to Alberta premier Ralph Klein: “It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.”

Now Harper is the federal government, responsible for pushing unwanted projects on an unwilling province. It’s startling how far he has strayed from his populist, Reform Party roots.

Here’s another way of understanding the situation: imagine Enbridge’s crude oil pipeline and oil tanker project had been proposed for Quebec and not B.C.

What would happen if Ottawa appointed a three-person panel to review a controversial infrastructure proposal and not a single Quebecer was appointed to the panel?

Suppose before the panel even held hearings, a federal cabinet minister blasted citizens signed up for the pipeline review as “foreign radicals,” working to sabotage Canada’s national interest? What would the local newspapers say when leaked documents revealed Harper had sent CSIS and the RCMP to illegally spy on peaceful opponents?

If Ottawa forced through such a project in the face of majority opposition in Quebec, the pundits wouldn’t be talking about respecting the “due process” of the hearings. They’d be using the s-word.

There is a major difference between B.C. and its provincial cousins to the east. Here, the land question was never settled. First Nations for the most part have never signed treaties with the federal government. Mix in the alienation felt by everyday voters and the political stakes are high indeed.

Underestimating the tectonic shift underway in British Columbia could lead to a political earthquake in 2015. The results could change Canadian politics for a generation.

Image Credit: Chief Ian Campbell of the Squamish First Nation. Photo by Kris Krug.

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