Energy
A Wealth-Creating Way of Reducing Global CO2 Emissions
From the C2C Journal
By Gwyn Morgan
It is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s contention there’s no “business case” for exporting Canada’s abundant, inexpensively produced natural gas as LNG. But Canadians might do well to politely decline management consulting advice from a former substitute drama teacher who was born into wealth and has never had to meet a payroll, balance a budget or make a sale. Bluntly stated, someone who has shown no evidence of being able to run the proverbial lemonade stand. And one whose real agenda, the evidence shows, is to strangle the nation’s most productive and wealth-generating industry. With the first LNG ship finally expected to dock at Kitimat, B.C. over the next year and load Canada’s first-ever LNG export cargo, Gwyn Morgan lays out the business and environmental cases for ramping up our LNG exports – and having them count towards Canada’s greenhouse gas reduction targets.
Pierre Poilievre’s Axe the (carbon) Tax campaign is a spectacular success. But the Conservative Party of Canada needs its own plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Paradoxically, it’s a fossil fuel that provides much of the answer.
Canada’s rich endowment of natural gas resources offers an immense opportunity to reduce global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions while also helping to rescue the Liberal-government-ravaged Canadian economy by exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) to China, Japan, South Korea and the other coal-dependent Asia-Pacific countries. Switching from coal to natural gas for producing electricity and generating heat for buildings and industrial processes can typically reduce CO2 emissions by 50 percent for the same unit of output, while all-but eliminating the toxic compounds and lung-clogging particulates emitted from burning coal that shorten the lives of millions living in smog-stricken Asian cities.
More natural gas is urgently needed, since countries throughout Asia – especially China and India – are currently adding even more coal-burning power plants to meet rapidly growing electricity demand. The benefits of fuel-switching are not speculation, but a proven result: the United States’ pronounced switch starting in the mid-2000s from coal to natural gas for electricity materially reduced that country’s CO2 emissions (see accompanying graph), nearly equalling the entire European Union’s emissions cuts, as I wrote about in this previous column.
A study by respected consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, released in late 2022, determined the following:
- “Canada is well-positioned geographically…Western Canadian LNG is much closer to Asia relative to US Gulf Coast LNG, which needs to be shipped through the Panama Canal to get to Asia”;
- “LNG from Canada would be cost-competitive for northeast Asian importers…due to its relatively low shipping and liquefaction costs”;
- “LNG from Canada has lower emissions intensity than LNG coming from many other global LNG exporters”;
- “Asia will not be able to produce enough natural gas domestically to meet its escalating demand, therefore Canadian LNG is a compelling alternative: With its high environmental standards and stewardship, Canada would be a great partner to fill the LNG demand gap in Asia”; and
- “If Canada aggressively ramps up its LNG exports…the emissions displaced from Canadian LNG would total 5.5 [gigatons of CO2 equivalent] from 2022 to 2050 or 181 [megatons of CO2 equivalent] on average per year, which is equivalent to removing all Canadian cars from the road.”
These impressive benefits – not to mention the opportunity to create tens of thousands of well-paying jobs in our country and provide long-term returns to investors, among them millions of pension-dependent retirees – were recognized long ago by the energy industry, Western provincial premiers and former prime minister Stephen Harper. And for a time it indeed seemed that Canada was on the cusp of an LNG boom. By 2010, there were more than 20 LNG projects in the works in B.C., representing hundreds of billions in total investment. These included Exxon Mobil’s $25-billion West Coast Canada project, Chinese-owned CNOOC’s $36-billion Aurora project, Malaysian firm Petronas’s $36 billion Pacific NorthWest project, and the Shell-led $43 billion LNG Canada project at Kitimat.
Aside from the jobs created and the wealth generated for the participating companies, B.C.’s annual natural gas royalties are forecast to double. Benefits for First Nations include significant employment and business opportunities, such as HaiSea Marine’s 50 percent interest in a $500 million contract.
But through a decade of trying to navigate Canada’s increasingly obstructive and Byzantine regulatory process, project proponents dropped out one by one. Today LNG Canada is the only one of those major projects left standing. (Two much smaller LNG projects, Woodfibre LNG in Howe Sound at Squamish, and Cedar LNG just a few kilometres from the LNG Canada project, are also proceeding, and one other large project proposed by the Nisga’a First Nation is making regulatory progress.) LNG Canada succeeded only because South African project leader Andy Calitz, backed by the enthusiasm of the Haisla Nation which saw the immense potential to create a self-sustaining, wealth-generating economy for its people, refused to give up.
After five years of construction, the LNG Canada liquefaction facility and loading terminal are nearing completion, with the first LNG ship scheduled to sail to China in 2025 (possibly even this year). The Kitimat plant itself is just one component of Canada’s first LNG export project. TC Energy Corp.’s (formerly TransCanada Pipelines) $15 billion, recently completed Coastal GasLink pipeline will carry the required natural gas from the northeastern B.C. gas fields to the Kitimat terminal. And additional billions of dollars have been invested in drilling natural gas wells, proving up the immense reserves needed to feed the LNG facility for decades to come, and constructing field production systems.
The economic benefits are myriad. Aside from the jobs created and the wealth generated for the participating companies, B.C.’s annual natural gas royalties are forecast to double from $700 million in 2024 to $1.4 billion in 2027. Benefits for First Nations include significant employment and business opportunities, such as HaiSea Marine’s 50 percent interest in a $500 million contract.
And that’s just LNG Canada’s Phase 1, which will produce 14 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of LNG, or approximately 1.8 billion cubic feet (bcf) per day. With that one project coming on-stream, about 10 percent of Canada’s total natural gas production will be exported to international markets, earning premium prices. Construction of Phase 2 is scheduled to begin in 2026 and will double the facility’s output, with first delivery scheduled for 2032. A report from Canada Action estimates that completion of both phases will reduce CO2 emissions in Asian countries as much as would removing 18 million cars from Canadian roads. That is a far more efficient and realistic way of reducing emissions than the Trudeau government’s current scheme to force everyone into electric vehicles within a decade.
A major barrier for LNG project sponsors has been Canadian regulators’ fixation on a project’s domestic emissions – which come mainly from producing the energy needed to operate the liquefaction and storage process and loading facility. These emissions are miniscule compared to the enormous emissions reductions when natural gas is used instead of coal in consuming countries. But in their zeal to force Canada to “net zero” emissions, government authorities initially tried to veto LNG Canada generating its electricity and compression power using some of the natural gas that will be already piped to the site, insisting instead upon hydroelectric power. This seriously delayed the project due to the need for B.C. Hydro to first build a new dam to supply the required power, along with a new, $3 billion transmission line that has not even begun its environmental review process.
Regulators finally waived their objection so the project could be finished, and it will initially use natural gas for power. But the same objection is now being raised with respect to another major LNG venture proposed in the same region. The Ksi Lisims LNG project would utilize a floating liquefaction and loading facility docked at lands owned by the Nisga’a First Nation north of Prince Rupert. Its natural gas would be supplied through an already-approved but never-built pipeline planned for one of the cancelled LNG projects. The $10 billion venture would have approximately two-thirds the capacity of LNG Canada Phase 1. The facility would be powered by hydroelectricity.
Ksi Lisims sounds like a great addition to Canada’s modest LNG lineup, one that British Columbians should applaud. Instead, the proponents have been assailed by objections over the greenhouse gas emissions from the facility and the natural gas production process, and concurrently the B.C. Wilderness Committee is calling on the province’s NDP government to veto any further LNG development. None of these zealots acknowledge the vastly greater reduction of greenhouse gas emissions that will be achieved as consuming countries switch to natural gas.
Prior to the December 2018 UN Climate Change Conference in Katowice, Poland, Canada’s Conservative Party urged leaders of their nation’s delegation to propose that the use of imported natural gas to displace coal and thereby reduce emissions in one country should count towards the exporting country’s emissions reduction targets. But this made far too much sense for our Prime Minister and his team of anti-fossil-fuel eco-zealots. A new federal government that encourages LNG projects might well see a return of those other big sponsors that were driven off.
And that brings us back to Pierre Poilievre and the need for a Conservative alternative to Trudeau’s carbon tax. LNG export would be not only vastly superior in reducing emissions, it would also create tens of billions of dollars in economic benefits for a beleaguered Canadian private sector. It is beyond high time. A Macdonald-Laurier Institute report, Estimating the True Size of Government in Canada, concludes that Canada’s private sector has shrunk to just 36 percent of the nation’s GDP. That’s right – Canada’s public sector now represents nearly two-thirds of the Canadian economy, if one includes in that measure the vast amounts governments spend on tax credits and other tax-related expenditures, plus the economic impacts of regulating the pricing or outputs of private industries. This is appalling.
Even more incomprehensible is a research report from the Harvard Kennedy School noting that “Communist” China’s private sector generates “approximately 60% of China’s GDP, 70% of its innovative capacity, 80% of urban employment and 90% of new jobs.” By those measures, the private sector in ostensibly free and democratic Canada, with its allegedly market-based economy, has been reduced to barely half the relative size of the private sector in authoritarian China.
It is clear that for Canada, getting out of the way of privately-driven growth in LNG exports would be a vastly superior environmental alternative to Trudeau’s economically destructive and politically divisive carbon tax, while also helping to reverse the decline of what was once a proud, thriving nation into an indebted, unproductive, government-dominated basket case.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
From Energy Now
By Stewart Muir
For years, a conservation NGO supported by major foreign foundations has taken on the guise of Indigenous governance authority on British Columbia’s north coast. Meanwhile, rights-holding First Nations with an economic agenda are reshaping the region, yet their equal weight is overlooked. A clash of values has resulted.
For more than a decade, British Columbians have been told — mostly by well-meaning journalists and various pressure groups — that an organization called Coastal First Nations speaks with authority for the entire coast. The name sounds official. It sounds governmental. It sounds like a coalition of Indigenous governments with jurisdiction over marine waters.
It isn’t any of those things.
Coastal First Nations (CFN) is a non-governmental organization, incorporated under the BC Societies Act as The Great Bear Initiative Society. It doesn’t hold Indigenous rights or title. It has no legislated role to provide benefits or services to First Nations members. It has no jurisdiction over shipping, marine safety, forestry, fisheries, energy development, or environmental regulation. Yet its statements are frequently treated as if they carry the weight of sovereign authority.
It’s time to say out loud what many leaders — municipal, Indigenous, and industry — already know: CFN is an advocacy group, not a government. Case in point, a recent news story with the following lede: “B.C.’s Coastal First Nations say they will use ‘every tool in their toolbox’ to keep oil tankers out of the northern coastal waters.” A spokesperson claimed to represent “the Rights and Title Holders of the Central and North Coast and Haida Gwaii,” yet notwithstanding the rights of any individual First Nation, CFN does not hold any formal authority.
Here’s why this matters. The truth is, Alberta has already struck its grand bargain with the rest of Canada. Now it’s time to confront the uncomfortable truth that the country is still one bargain short of a functioning national deal.
In 2026, with Canadians increasingly alert to who is shaping national conversations, there is a reasonable expectation that debates affecting our economic future should be led and conducted by Canadians — not by foreign foundations, not by out-of-country campaign strategists, and not by NGOs built to advance someone else’s policy objectives.
Where the confusion came from
CFN’s rise in public visibility traces back to the “Great Bear Rainforest” era, when U.S. philanthropic foundations poured large sums of money into environmental campaigns in British Columbia. A Senate of Canada committee document notes that the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation alone provided approximately $25 million directly to Coastal First Nations, delivered as twenty-five nearly $1 million installments.
CFN also played a central role in the Great Bear Rainforest negotiations, which were financed by a coalition of foreign philanthropies including the Packard Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Nature Conservancy/Nature United, and Tides Canada Foundation. These foundations collectively contributed tens of millions of dollars to the “conservation financing” model that anchored CFN’s operating environment.
This history isn’t speculative. It’s well documented in foundation reports, Canadian Parliamentary evidence, and the publicly disclosed financial architecture behind the Great Bear Rainforest. For a generation, well-funded U.S. environmental campaigns have worked to make Canadians afraid of their own shadow by seeding doubt, stoking paralysis, and teaching a resource nation to second-guess the very wealth that built it.
Between 2010 and 2018, an independent forensic accounting review by Deloitte Forensic (backed by the Alberta government) found that foreign foundations provided roughly $788.1 million in grants for Canadian environmental initiatives. The largest single category — by a wide margin — was marine-based initiatives, totalling $297.2 million. In Deloitte’s categorization, “marine-based” overwhelmingly refers to coastal campaigns: Great Bear Rainforest–related advocacy, anti-tanker/shipping activism, marine-use regulation campaigns, marine ecological programs, and other coastal political work.
Land-based initiatives were the second-largest category ($191 million), followed by wildlife preservation ($173 million).
The forensic review also showed that of the $427.2 million that physically entered Canada, 82% — approximately $350.3 million — was spent in British Columbia, with the dominant share directed specifically toward coastal and marine initiatives.
Taken together, these findings confirm that foreign-funded environmental activity in Canada has been geographically concentrated in British Columbia and thematically concentrated on the coast – exactly the domain where CFN has been positioned as a public-facing authority.
The real authority lies with the nations themselves
If British Columbians want to understand who truly governs the coast, they should look to the Indigenous governments that hold rights, title, citizens, and accountability — not NGOs that comment from the sidelines. That means not overlooking:
- Haisla Nation, leaders of Cedar LNG
- Nisga’a Nation, co-developers of Ksi Lisims LNG
- Gitxaala Nation, asserting legal and territorial authority
- Kitselas and Kitsumkalum, both shaping regional development
These governments are also coastal First Nations. They negotiate major economic partnerships, steward lands and waters, and make decisions grounded in their own legal orders. Moreover, representation is the key measure of accountability in a democracy: First Nations governing councils are elected by their members. The CFN is not elected. The nations are accountable to their own people — not to U.S. philanthropies or to the strategic objectives of foreign-backed environmental campaigns.
The Haisla Nation once belonged to CFN, but quit in protest in 2012 when the body opposed LNG. The Haisla council went on to fully embrace economic development via liquefied natural gas and own the upcoming Cedar LNG project.
Meanwhile, the central and northern coastal regions where CFN has opposed numerous economic opportunities continue to suffer the worst child poverty in British Columbia.
In the delicate politics of the region’s First Nations alliances, relationships are constantly in motion and governed by inviolable traditions of mutual respect. From these threads, it has to be said that the CFN’s strategy of weaving the appearance of unanimity is truly a fabrication. In point of fact, CFN represents just one half of the story. My data source tells the story, by drawing together the latest available economic and demographic information for 216 British Columbia First Nations:
- Status Indian residents of CFN communities on the north coast number 5,484, with a total membership near and far of 20,447.
- The pro-development group noted earlier numbers 5,505 living local out of a total membership of 16,830.
In other words, virtually equal. Hence it’s obvious that any media report citing CFN as the singular authority for local First Nations interests is a misleading one. CFN speaks for only a slice of the North Coast, not the whole, and the numbers make that impossible to ignore.
When a CFN motion opposing responsible resource development was adopted by the Assembly of First Nations (see Dec. 2 news), it was further evidence that the deck is stacked against First Nations that are accountable and position themselves as having broad responsibilities, including but not limited to raising the standard of living of their members.
The future belongs to the nations
The politics of LNG on the North Coast can’t be grasped without staring directly at the tanker ban — not as scripture, but as the political curiosity it has become. Anyone who knows these waters understands it’s mostly theatre: it doesn’t question letting Alaska oil tanker ships transit our exclusive economic zone when we cannot, and it doesn’t touch the real risks coastal people actually worry about. Yet waving it away is naïve. The ban behaves like a trickster spirit in our public life — capricious, emotionally loaded, and capable of turning a routine policy debate into a cultural conflagration with barely a flick of its tail.
This is why Coastal First Nations retain such gravitational pull. For years, the ban has served as the moral architecture of their Great Bear Sea campaign. CFN represents a long-game strategy — build legitimacy, occupy the moral high ground, and shape the destiny of a nation by holding the symbolic centre. Their concerns seem genuine and rooted in lived stewardship – yet were shaped by Madison Avenue minds hired by American philanthropists to affect our politics. But a near equal number of coastal nation residents unified by a different outlook also have skin in the game. They are charting futures grounded in prosperity, environmental care, and sovereignty on their own terms, and their authority is the real thing — born of title, law, and accountability to their own people.
And here is the irony worth heeding: the tanker ban’s pageantry masks a solution. It is dragging into daylight a conversation the province has avoided for decades — a conversation that will soon prove inevitable as court rulings unsettle the very foundation of property rights in British Columbia. This is the hinge that the moment turns on.
Canada cannot resolve its growing national contradictions without moving its energy to global markets. Alberta has already made its grand bargain with the country. Now British Columbia must craft its own — harnessing the prosperity of energy development to discharge political debts and finally settle the title question that has defined the province’s modern era.
Stewart Muir
From Energy Now
By Canada Powered by Women
Canada has entered a new period of energy cooperation, marking one of the biggest shifts in federal–provincial alignment on energy priorities in years.
Last week as Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that outlines how both governments will approach a potential pipeline to British Columbia’s coast.
The agreement, which has been described as a “new starting point” after years of tension, lays the groundwork for a privately financed pipeline while also linking this commitment to a broader set of infrastructure priorities across oil and gas, LNG, renewables, critical minerals and electricity transmission.
It also sets out how a privately financed project, moving roughly 300,000 to 400,000 barrels of oil to global markets each day, will be reviewed.
Now that the announcement is behind us, attention has turned to how (or if) a pipeline is going to get built.
Alberta has set out its ambitions, British Columbia has its conditions, and the federal government has its own expectations. Together, these positions are shaping what some are calling a “grand bargain” which will be made up of trade-offs.
Trade-offs are not a new concept for the engaged women that Canada Powered by Women (CPW) represents, as they’ve been showing up in our research for several years now. And anyone who reads us also knows we like to look at what the data says.
According to new polling from the Angus Reid Institute, a clear majority of Canadians support a pipeline, with national backing above 60 per cent. And there’s strong support for the pipeline among those in B.C. This aligns with other emerging data points that show Canadians are looking for practical solutions that strengthen affordability and long-term reliability.
By the numbers:
• 60 per cent of Canadians support the pipeline concept, while 25 per cent oppose it.
• 53 per cent of people support in British Columbia, compared to 37 percent opposed.
• 74 per cent of people in Alberta and Saskatchewan support the pipeline.
Our research shows the same trends.
A large majority (85 per cent) of engaged women agree that building pipelines and refining capacity within the country should be prioritized. They favour policies that will progress stability, affordability and long-term economic opportunity.
A key feature of the MOU is the expectation of Indigenous ownership and benefit sharing, which Alberta and B.C. governments identify as essential, and which aligns with public opinion. As of right now, Indigenous groups remain split on support for a pipeline.
The agreement also signals that changes to the federal Oil Tanker Moratorium Act may need to be considered. The moratorium, in place since 2019, is designed to limit large tanker traffic on the North Coast of B.C. because of navigation risks in narrow channels and the need to protect sensitive coastal ecosystems.
Those in favour of the pipeline point to this as a critical barrier to moving Canadian oil to international markets.
Polling from the Angus Reid Institute shows that 47 per cent of Canadians believe the moratorium could be modified or repealed if stronger safety measures are in place. Again, we come back to trade-offs.
The MOU is a starting point and does not replace consultation, environmental review or provincial alignment. These steps are still required before any project can advance. Taken together, the agreement and the data show broad support for strengthening Canada’s energy options.
This will be an issue that engaged women are no doubt going to watch, and the conversation is likely to move from ideas to discussing what trade-offs can be made to bring this opportunity to life.
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