Resistance Theory: The Freedom Convoy’s Place in our Divided History

If there is a politico-historical thread running from Louis Riel and the buffalo-hunting Métis rebels in Confederation-era Manitoba, via Ottawa’s creation of three second-class Prairie provinces, followed by decades of friction over resource ownership and taxation, all the way to the convoys of diesel-powered trucks that rumbled into Ottawa to protest federal vaccine mandates in the winter of 2022, few have taken note. David Solway is one. As the main convoy leaders await a court verdict, Solway is taking the long view. He asserts that the truckers’ protest is a powerful contemporary manifestation of a recurring theme – perhaps the defining theme – of how Canada is governed, and to whose benefit. But while Canada’s late-19th century leaders were flawed men who made mistakes, Solway finds, the country’s current federal leadership appears outright bent on destruction.

Canadian society has evolved since 1867, but the basic outline of our national political institutions has not. As was the case in 1867, these institutions still lack the capacity to accommodate regional circumstances and regional equality.

—Donald J. Savoie, Democracy in Canada: The Disintegration of Our Institutions

The winter 2022 truckers’ protest against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s punitive vaccine mandates that shook Canada to its foundations no longer dominates the headlines. But it remains in public consciousness. Prominent protest members were recently convicted or are still on trial. Its implications are still with us and its long-term effects may well be seismic. The Freedom Convoy traversed the country from Prince Rupert, British Columbia to the nation’s capital in Ottawa to protest the biggest experiment ever in authoritarian rule over Canadians. The truckers and their fellow convoy travellers demanded the attention of a disgraceful prime minister, the abolition of the vaccine mandates, and the restoration of the tenets of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that had been abused by the prime minister, his cabinet, his bought-and-paid for media mercenaries, and his penchant judiciary.

Writing in C2C Journal, Gwyn Morgan reviews the origins of the event: “Just as the provinces were ending restrictions on the unvaccinated, the Prime Minister proclaimed that returning unvaccinated truckers would be required to ‘quarantine’ for two weeks, a condition that would be impossible to meet.” After two years of dutifully serving their country, Morgan writes, “the truckers were to be thrown out of work – cast aside like unneeded accoutrements.”

The February 2022 Freedom Convoy sought an audience with the prime minister to push for the reversal of vaccine mandates, but while the protest was entirely peaceful and at times even festive, the truckers faced harsh treatment; many were arrested and some remain in prison today. (Sources of photos: (top left) Emilijaknezevic, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; (top right and middle) Maksim Sokolov (Maxergon), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; (bottom) Ross Dunn, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

In reaction to official disregard amounting to scorn, vast columns of rigs and trucks “drove along thousands of kilometres of wintery roads to converge upon the nation’s Capital to protest in front of its Parliament buildings. The atmosphere was peaceful, even celebratory. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to meet with the blue-collar truckers, whom he slandered as vandals, racists, misogynists, antisemites, and more,” finally invoking the never-before-used Emergencies Act (successor to the almost-never-used War Measures Act) to crush the protesters.

Two years later, little has changed in Canada. Coming to the defence of a trucker, Jay Vanderwier, who had parked his rig during the protest where police had directed him, who later submitted peacefully to an arrest done unnecessarily at gunpoint, and who was recently convicted of two criminal counts of mischief by a pliable, Liberal-friendly judiciary, former Conservative MP Derek Sloan recalls that when other protesters have come to Ottawa, mainly First Nations officials, “Trudeau would gladly meet them, take a knee, drop the flag to half-mast for months on end, issue endless apologies, and more. But when these honest, hard-working Canadians came to Ottawa, he showed nothing but contempt. [H]e tried to paint them as violent extremists and seditionists.” Though less famous than protesters Tamara Lich, Chris Barber or Pat King, Vanderwier – like other equally unsung protesters – was just as committed, put just as much at risk and has suffered similarly.

Not a glowing CV: Having “never done what most people would consider a full day’s work in his life,” Justin Trudeau’s pre-office record of achievement featured being a substitute drama teacher and snowboard instructor with an apparent passion for costume parties.

And Trudeau is still on the warpath. This is a prime minister, says former Calgary Herald editor David Marsden with considerable justification, who has “never done what most people would consider a full day’s work in his life.” He certainly never sat in the cab of a semi. He certainly never raised cattle, worked on a farm, hauled timber, fished the rivers, or risked his life on an oil rig. He never tried to start a restaurant or open a business. He’s never had to meet a payroll when money was tight, or negotiate with investors and creditors. He has never excelled in any professional capacity. He has never brought a new product to market, or sold anything except his own brand. The son of a former prime minister and the beneficiary of a family trust, he did a stint of substitute teaching and was a snowboard instructor. Not a glowing CV.

“The prime minister doesn’t like Alberta,” Marsden continues, “His government policies have been designed to bring the province to its knees. He swallowed the Pollyanna spittle [about green energy saving the world] being peddled by his environment minister,” the ineffable Steven Guilbeault who, along with deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, is part of the figurative three-headed Cerberus that guards the gates of Canada’s political underworld.

Disdainful of the hardworking, energetic and still somewhat rural-based West, Trudeau, a gilt-edged Laurentian aristocrat, represents precisely what the problem is with this country. We might say that he and his fellow aristocrats are the ‘first cause’ of the truckers’ revolt, which he has done everything in his power to malign and punish.

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In essence, Trudeau is the perfect exemplar of the Eastern anointed class, the so-called Laurentian Elite (or Laurentian Consensus), a term coined in its modern sense a dozen years ago by John Ibbitson in the Literary Review of Canada and elaborated in his book, The Big Shift, co-authored with Darrell Bricker. Defined as “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central-east Canada, the term draws upon the much older “Laurentian School” of thought concerning Canada’s founding structure and originating purpose developed by mainstream (Eastern Canadian) historians like Donald Creighton. Ibbitson floated an early and rather exaggerated conviction of Laurentian collapse at a time when Justin Trudeau was a Liberal apparition planning his triumphal future and that of his Laurentian cohorts. Interestingly, The Big Shift was reprinted in 2014. One year later Trudeau swept into power, completely invalidating the book’s thesis.

Ibbitson is a parenthetical figure, a Globe and Mail journalist, whose relevance resides in the useful neologism he provided and in his status as a representative and influential Laurentian himself, as essay and book make clear. Ibbitson acknowledged that the Western provinces had been treated as “semi-colonial possessions” rather than equal members in Confederation. But he thought all had changed. “The West is in,” Ibbitson declared. “In fact, it is in charge.” This was his assessment of the effect of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government – which has proven utterly ephemeral. Harper may have been “Canada’s First Post-Laurentian Prime Minister”, as claimed in this journal, but it was not to last. Under Trudeau, the West is as out as it’s ever been. And the country as a political entity is less Canadian than it’s ever been. The Laurentian cabal lords over us still, dominant and unaccommodating.

“The West is in,” declared Toronto Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson in The Big Shift; his thesis proved to be premature, exaggerated and even invalid after Trudeau came to power, re-establishing the Laurentian approach to national governance.

Writing in the National Post, John Weissenberger has no doubt of the fact. “The Laurentian Elite were Upper Canadian Anglo-Protestants and Québécois Patricians, and their descendants still dominate the upper strata of politics, the bureaucracy, Crown corporations and agencies, academia and media,” the Montreal-born Alberta geologist wrote. The current generation of Laurentians, he notes, “Largely reflect the universal, broadly-leftist monoculture.” They are with us like a dirty shirt. Their “torpor and complacency,” however, “coupled with an increasingly arrogant detachment from many ordinary Canadians, particularly those outside central Canada, caused repeated social and political rifts.” The truckers’ protest was among the most physical of these – and could prove the most momentous.

Disdainful of the hardworking, energetic and still somewhat rural-based West, Trudeau, a gilt-edged Laurentian aristocrat, represents precisely what the problem is with this country. We might say that he and his fellow aristocrats are the “first cause” of the truckers’ revolt, which he has done everything in his power to malign and punish. Absent Trudeau and his nasty, ill-advised and unnecessary Covid-19 policies, the trucks would never have rolled.

Louis Riel Would Have Understood the Truckers

To properly understand the truckers’ opposition to the Trudeau Liberals’ vaccine mandate, we need to go back to Canada’s beginnings. The British North America Act of 1867 (later renamed the Constitution Act, 1867) recognized a self-governing Dominion comprising a rump Quebec and Ontario and the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. What was known as Rupert’s Land covered the vast extent of the interior landmass, including what later became Manitoba (1870) and Saskatchewan (1905). Alberta (1905) was carved out from both Rupert’s Land and the adjacent North-Western Territory.

The administrative core of the new country, however, was found in the centre-east with its capital in the backwater town of Ottawa. As we have seen, what came to be known as the Laurentian Compact exercised political and economic control of the fledgling nation and, as noted, remains the administrative, political and financial power-centre to this day.

In 1867, the newly created, self-governing Dominion of Canada included several provinces, soon followed by the purchase of Rupert’s Land (left map), parts of which later became the second-class provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta; political and economic control over the young nation rested in the hands of the Laurentian Compact, the elite based in the St. Lawrence River watershed (right map). (Source of maps: (left) Golbez, licensed under CC BY 2.5; (right) Kmusser, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5)

To understand in yet greater detail the gravamen of the truckers’ protest, one must return specifically to the period between 1869 and 1885. These years saw the Red River Rebellion and the subsequent North-West Rebellion, studied in meticulous, close-packed detail in George Stanley’s magisterial The Birth of Western Canada: A History of the Riel Rebellions and Tom Flanagan’s illuminating essay in The Dorchester Review.

When the newly installed Canadian federal government took formal control of Rupert’s Land in 1870, it did not consult with the indigenous Métis, aka the Bois-Brûlé population (children of the union between First Nations women and French and English trappers). Local resentment at being passed over led eventually, under the leadership of Louis Riel, to a Métis uprising, resulting in the formation of a provisional government for purposes of negotiation with Ottawa regarding terms of entry into the Canadian Confederation.

This initiative did not work out well and the Métis did not flourish under the new dispensation. In the course of time a large proportion of Métis lost title to their land, which ultimately contributed to the bloody North-West Resistance of 1885, culminating in the total victory of the federal government, a string of executions including that of Riel, and the further deterioration of relations between the Prairie West and central Canada, which continues to this day. There were, of course, atrocities on both sides, but there is no doubt that the Métis got the short end of the stick.

Canada’s newly established federal government failed to consult with the Métis population of Rupert’s Land, which triggered an uprising under Louis Riel (left) and eventually the bloody North-West Resistance, which was crushed by federal troops. Shown at right, the Battle of Batoche during the North-West Rebellion. (Source of left photo: Manitoba Historical Society Archives)

In his 1954 book Social Credit and Federal Power in Canada, political scientist James Mallory described the Prairie additions as “provinces in the Roman sense.” (According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, the origin of the term is obscure, “mistakenly derived from pro + vincere [vanquished] by Roman antiquarians. Its basic meaning is the sphere in which a magistrate is to function.” In his recent C2C essay on Alberta’s future, University of Calgary professor Barry Cooper went with the more martial version of the disputed etymology.) In our terms, the Prairie provinces were regions dominated by the ruling, administrative centre to whom they owed fealty and paid tribute. Parsing Mallory, Cooper explains: “Ottawa acted as a new Rome on the Rideau. The territories (and soon-to-be second-class provinces)…existed to strengthen and benefit Laurentian Canada by analogy with Roman Italy, and to enrich its leading citizens.”

‘We desire, and all Canadian Patriots desire,’ stated Sifton, ‘that the great trade of the prairies shall go to enrich our people to the East, to build up our factories and our places of work, and in every legitimate way to our prosperity.’

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Here we must refer to the record of the influential Sir Clifford Sifton in the years 1895-1905. As J.W. Dafoe writes in his biography, CLIFFORD SIFTON in Relation to HIS TIMES, Sifton was a major figure in early Canadian affairs, joining Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government in 1896. He became federal Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, responsible for immigration and settlement of the Prairies. Under his leadership, immigration to the Prairie West increased from 16,835 in 1896 to 141,465 in 1905. Against attacks by English-speaking Canadians who feared that immigrants from eastern and central Europe would be a threat to their culture and livelihood, Sifton famously defended the “stalwart peasants in sheep-skin coats” who were turning some of the most difficult areas of the West into productive farms. Sifton touted the phrase the “Last Best West” to market the Canadian Prairies to prospective immigrants.

But there was another side to Sifton which also needs to be conceded. According to the Alberta Prosperity Project, Alberta and the Prairie West have gotten a raw deal from the central establishment since their inception as part of the Dominion. The editors quote Sifton’s speech to Parliament during its 1904 session: “We desire, and all Canadian Patriots desire, that the great trade of the prairies shall go to enrich our people to the East, to build up our factories and our places of work, and in every legitimate way to our prosperity.” As former military engineer and warrant officer Tex Leugner commented in the Cochrane Eagle, “Note the phrase ‘to enrich our own people in the East’! How prophetic Sifton was in laying the groundwork for the theft that has gone on unabated since 1905.”

The Laurentian view, crystallized: Sir Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, famously defended the “stalwart peasants in sheep-skin coats” who were used to settle the Prairies and whose trade “shall go to enrich our people to the East.” (Sources of photos: (left) Library and Archives Canada/PA-27943; (right) Library and Archives Canada/C-000681)

The question was also examined by Mabel F. Timlin in a paper titled Canada’s Immigration Policy, 1896-1910, printed in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (Vol. XXVI, No. 4, November 1960, pp. 517-532). Timlin cites Sifton’s letter of April 15, 1901 to Laurier in which Sifton advocates the importance of “encouraging immigration for the development of natural resources and the increase in production of wealth from these resources.” The wealth so generated comes to rest mainly in the coffers and consortiums of the East. The intimation is disturbing. Sifton was a man of the West, the de facto founder of the province of Manitoba. At the same time, he was also a man of the East, working to enrich its power and economic nexus. A veritable Jekyll and Hyde, Sifton is a symbol of a divided Canada, a country that has not yet decided what it wants to be.

The Modern-Day Laurentian Economic Model

Commenting on the present imbroglio in which the country finds itself, Leugner takes issue with Laurentian profiteering and self-aggrandizement specifically in the form of Canada’s so-called “Equalization” program. The federal government describes it as a means “for addressing fiscal disparities among provinces”; equalization works by indirectly transferring revenues drawn from the taxpayers of more-productive and higher-income provinces to less prosperous provincial governments.

The Prairies are Canada’s food and energy breadbasket and have suffered under the rule of Eastern Canada’s Laurentian peerage, more recently with former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s low-pricing, high-taxing National Energy Program (NEP) in 1980, which devastated Alberta’s oil industry and entire economy.

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One can see the intrinsic problem for a country where some jurisdictions perennially lag and others consistently out-perform. Alberta’s average equalization contribution is substantially over-leveraged. According to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, equalization has cost Alberta taxpayers $67 billion since its inception in 1957, making the cost of equalization per Albertan $20,200 since 1957; in 2021, equalization overall cost Alberta taxpayers $2.9 billion. The Fraser Institute pegs the 2017 net outflow at $3.1 billion. Estimates may vary but remain within the same ballpark.

Since the inception of Canada’s equalization program in 1957, Alberta has made a net contribution of $67 billion – which in turn represents only a small part of the province’s immense financial contribution to federal coffers and the governments and residents of other provinces.

Even more significantly, the Fraser Institute notes that the equalization drain represents “just a small part of the province’s outsized contribution to confederation in recent years.” It calculates that “the gap between Albertans’ contribution to federal revenues and federal expenditures plus transfers to the province, totalled $20.5 billion annually in 2017/18. And this measure excludes Albertans’ disproportionate cumulative contribution to the Canada Pension Plan, which on net totalled $2.9 billion in 2017.”

Meanwhile, as Alberta is being plundered, Justin Trudeau, like his father Pierre, is doing everything in his power to eviscerate Alberta’s energy industry, the source of its prosperity and of Canada’s solvency. Indeed, the recently completed Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, shipping oil at last after a horrendous nearly 15-year gestation, is slated to contribute 0.25 percent to Canada’s GDP growth next year – more, indeed, than the entire province of B.C. Leugner concludes, despairingly: “It is my opinion that Canada, as it’s currently structured, is a broken nation.” This from a veteran, much-deployed officer in the Canadian military.

“The province that carries most of the weight, bears the most pain”: Alberta’s oil and natural gas industry and entire economy were devastated by the taxes and regulations of Pierre Trudeau’s (top) 1980 National Energy Program; today Alberta’s burden is amplified by the younger Trudeau’s onerous carbon tax. Shown at bottom, a pro-pipeline demonstration in Calgary, Alberta. (Source of bottom photo: The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh)

The Prairies are Canada’s food and energy breadbasket and have suffered under the rule of Eastern Canada’s Laurentian peerage, particularly with former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s low-pricing, high-taxing National Energy Program (NEP) in 1980, which devastated Alberta’s oil industry and entire economy. Justin Trudeau is picking up where his father left off, slapping an onerous carbon tax on the nation that has already pulverized the national economy and has proved especially costly to Prairie agriculture and energy production. As the late Rex Murphy wrote in the National Post, Alberta is “the province that carries most of the weight, bears the most pain and has the least say in this mad enterprise.”

The tax, Murphy continued, will “injure the very farmers who have been stocking the supermarket shelves during COVID, put oil workers (at least those who still have jobs) out of work, and increase the cost of living for everyone…This new carbon tax will throw a spike in the heart of the oil and gas industry. Keep in mind that it is but the most recent in a long string of policies designed to hamstring the industry, block its exports and drive investment out of the province.”

The Enduring Meaning of the Truckers’ Protest

Section 92A [of the Constitution Act] confirms the constitutional foundation for provincial natural resource management and a significant role in natural resource trade and anchors Alberta’s energy resource economic strength. This is Peter Lougheed’s economic legacy for Alberta.

—ABlawg.ca

This is how we need to understand the truckers’ massive 2022 protest, nominally a form of domestic resistance against the vaccine mandates that crippled their health and their livelihoods, as it did the nation in large. But it is fundamentally an expression of the greater historical context of Eastern political, legislative and market domination of the Western provinciae and the determined response of a long misprized, undervalued and misrepresented sector of the nation, rising up against the metaphorical equivalent of the federal government’s 1885 land grab.

Resistance is continuing to mount. The province of Saskatchewan has refused to pay the federal government’s carbon levy and has just been granted an injunction to stop the Canada Revenue Agency from simply garnisheeing the (mounting) outstanding sum. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s UCP government introduced and quickly passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act in response to proposed federal net-zero electricity grid regulations and other recurring intrusions on the province’s core jurisdictions. “We are left with no choice but to create a shield to protect Albertans from Ottawa’s dangerous and unconstitutional electricity regulations,” Smith said at the time. She has also proposed an Alberta Crown Corporation that would be wholly owned by the province and over which the federal government could exert no control, which would function as a market generator.

To defend against the federal government’s ongoing intrusions on Alberta’s constitutional jurisdiction, Danielle Smith’s (top) UCP government passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act – a “shield to protect Albertans from Ottawa’s dangerous and unconstitutional electricity regulation.” Shown at bottom, supporters of the Sovereignty Act gather in Edmonton, Alberta, December 2022. (Sources of photos: (top) Alberta Newsroom, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; (bottom) Caleb Perreaux/CBC)

As to be expected, the Sovereignty Act has been denounced by all the usual Laurentian suspects and Liberal toadies: the CBC, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and many others. No matter. The aforementioned Barry Cooper places Alberta’s Sovereignty Act in the context of the Prairie provinces’ long struggle for due constitutional recognition and the political equality of their citizens. And he is right. The germ of the issue goes back to the unequal founding of Canada as a Confederation and is now culminating in manifestations like the Freedom Convoy and its consequences, Saskatchewan’s defiance of Trudeau’s carbon tax and Alberta’s long-deferred Sovereignty Act.

The truckers’ Freedom Convoy was not just a desperate response to the Trudeau government’s ruinous vaccine mandate but, the author believes, a historically significant attempt to restore the political balance between Eastern and Western Canada. (Source of photo: Maksim Sokolov (Maxergon), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Canadian Constitution establishes that the federal Parliament deals mainly with issues that concern the country as a whole, including inter-provincial trade, national defence, criminal law, money, patents, and the postal service, whereas the provinces have the authority to make laws about education, property, civil rights, the administration of justice, hospitals, municipalities, and other local or private matters. Lands and resources within or lying beneath provinces are also clearly-stated areas of provincial jurisdiction and ownership. Pointedly, “Crown” lands are almost always owned by the Crown in right of the province within which they fall.

The federal government has no business intruding on the rights of the provincial domain as guaranteed by the Constitution. But under Trudeau the Younger, that is virtually all it does. Ottawa has gone even further in moving to centralize political control in the Prime Minister’s Office rather than respecting provincial jurisdiction.

The truckers’ response to the federal usurpation of plenary authority under cover of a pandemic was in the last analysis an attempt to right the political, economic and administrative balance between Eastern and Western Canada. Laurentian hegemony had to be cut down to size, and though it appeared that the federal power had once again – as in the 1885 hecatomb of the Prairie rebels – won the day, routing the truckers, confiscating vehicles, freezing bank accounts, imprisoning its leaders and mobilizing the legacy media to blanket the nation with lies, the aftermath was an awakened and defiant Western Canada, an almost universally hated prime minister, a Liberal party on the ropes, and a gradual vindication of the Truckers’ bravery and suffering in an honourable and democratic cause.

Justice is now Being Served

Let not my people be held at ransom.

Let them thrive, let them be defended.

—Louis Riel, from Selected Poetry of Louis Riel

“The North-West Rebellion was far more important in its results than in itself,” wrote the aforementioned George Stanley in The Birth of Western Canada. The truckers’ descent upon Ottawa is one of those later results of the Red River Rebellion that Stanley had considered to be of enduring significance. The analogy suggested by the reliable trucker supply chain over the years and during the pandemic, namely, of the West feeding the East with comestibles, goods and energy, should have been obvious to any observant person. Justice is now being served. The protest inspired confidence in its purpose, exposed the federal government as an authoritarian leviathan, and led to the responses that we are witnessing in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Should the respective powers and responsibilities of federal and provincial authority be clarified and genuinely ratified, should a fair distribution of obligations and prerogatives between Ottawa and the Western capitals be arrived at, the truckers may yet have saved the country from its downward spiral.

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At this historic juncture, the Laurentian elite must agree to terms and make peace with the Prairie West if both are to become true partners in a renovated Confederation. At the moment, the most important city in Canada is not to be found in the Laurentian triangle of Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Despite its current problems with an unpopular mayor and a compromised infrastructure, the most important city in Canada today is Calgary, not only the home of the world-famous Calgary Stampede, but also “the epicenter of the energy industry in Canada with head offices of every major company…located in the city,” as an upcoming global energy conference describes it.

The nation’s most important city, the author argues, is not Ottawa, Toronto or Montreal, but Calgary – home of the world-famous Calgary Stampede and “the epicenter of the energy industry in Canada with head offices of every major company.” (Sources of photos (clockwise starting top-left): micha_dauber, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; Gnosis, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; Ron Cogswell from Arlington, Virginia, USA, licensed under CC BY 2.0; JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock)

The irony is exquisite. Should the respective powers and responsibilities of federal and provincial authority be clarified and genuinely ratified, should a fair distribution of obligations and prerogatives between Ottawa and the Western capitals be arrived at, the truckers may yet have saved the country from its downward spiral and helped to create the just and equable Canada that it should have been from the beginning. As the above-quoted Savoie writes in Democracy in Canada, “Canada was born to break the political deadlock between Canada West and Canada East.”

It was a long road from Prince Rupert to Ottawa, but a road, as it turns out, that had to be travelled.

David Solway’s latest prose book is Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam, and the West (New English Review Press, 2023). A new poetry chapbook, From the Sommelier’s Notebook, was released in July 2024 (Little Nightingale Press). Solway has produced two CDs of original songs: Blood Guitar and Other Tales (2014) and Partial to Cain (2019) on which he is accompanied by his pianist wife Janice Fiamengo. A third CD, The Dark, is in planning.

Related Topics:#C2CJournal #FreedomConvoy Canada'sDividedHistory DavidSolway WesternCanada

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Why the Trump Administration is Unlikely to Impose Import Tariffs on Canadian Oil and Natural Gas

Published on November 25, 2024

Todayville

From the C2C Journal

By George Koch

Few things about Donald Trump’s recent election are causing worse disarray worldwide than the incoming U.S. President’s vow to erect a tariff wall against all imports in order to spur a resurgence in American manufacturing might. Canada’s up to $200-billion-a-year worth of oil and natural gas exports lie at stake, feared to be among the new Administration’s tariff targets. But how strong is the basis for such fears? Probing the political psychology of Trump’s economic and trade policies and examining the intricate mechanism that is North America’s vast integrated oil and natural gas sector, George Koch illuminates the role Canadian energy can play in the U.S. economic revival and the Trump team’s geopolitical drive for global “energy dominance”.

Tariff,” U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump was fond of saying with a smirk, “it’s my favorite word.” It was enough to curdle the blood and wobble the knees of political leaders, trade officials and business groups around the world – not least in export-dependent Canada. This was one Trumpian campaign line not swatted aside by critics as bombast, trolling, dog-whistling to the “extreme right” or unhinged fantasy. And with evident good reason.

After all, it was President #45 who after rising to political prominence largely on his promise to go after “bad trade deals” had upended 70 years of U.S. trade policy by imposing tariffs on Chinese (and some Canadian) imports and demanding to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. It was returning candidate Trump who picked as his running mate J.D. Vance, whose life story growing up amidst family wreckage in rural Ohio is almost the embodied result of a hollowed-out manufacturing economy, and who today is an articulate frontman for the something-less-than-free school of international trade. And it is President-elect Trump who has nominated prominent advocates of “America-first” trade policy – in which tariffs are central – to become his Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of the Treasury.

Tariff king: Consistent with his first presidency, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to pursue an “America-first” trade policy this time. Shown, Trump speaking during an America First Policy Institute gala at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida estate, November 2024. (Source of photo: AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Few sectors in any country stand to suffer greater damage from U.S. tariffs than Canadian energy. Canada’s fossil fuel production is at record levels, with crude oil averaging 5.8 million barrels per day so far this year and natural gas well over 18 billion cubic feet per day. Exports of these key commodities (plus natural gas “liquids” like ethane and propane) are valued at more than $134 billion per year – another measure has it at US$160 billion – with exports of petrochemicals generating billions more. Canada’s oil and gas sector is directly responsible for $210 billion of the nation’s GDP and 25 percent of its exports.

Yet while the industry today is a marvel of leading technology, deep expertise and operating efficiency, Canadian energy remains costly to produce, heavily taxed and saddled with ever-increasing regulations, such as the recently announced federal “emissions cap”. Moreover, the remoteness of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin – the world-scale producing region that covers most of Alberta plus northeast B.C., southern Saskatchewan and a corner of Manitoba – imposes costs not incurred by U.S. producers. Constraints on export capacity effectively trap oil and gas within Western Canada, dampening regional benchmark commodity prices. And the industry remains over-dependent on the U.S. market; the expanded Trans Mountain pipeline will enable at best 20 percent of Canada’s crude oil production to access offshore markets, while the country’s first liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal is not yet operational.

This critical industry thus sits exposed and vulnerable to U.S. tariffs. A levy of 10-20 percent – the rate Trump has said he wants to slap on all imports – would be catastrophic, reducing Canada’s energy exports by an estimated 22 percent, causing domestic pricing to collapse and, with it, any new capital investment. Thousands would lose their jobs and government deficits would soar. Rory Johnston, a Toronto-based oil market researcher and founder of Commodity Context, describes Canada as “uniquely vulnerable to market pressure posed by U.S. refineries.”

“Uniquely vulnerable”: Canada’s oil and natural gas production is setting records and generating 25 percent of the country’s overall export earnings; a 10-20 percent U.S. import tariff could wreak catastrophic damage. (Sources: (graph) CAPP; (left photo) MikoFox, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (right photo) Green Energy Futures, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

But is the threat of such a tariff imminent – or even credible? The evidence to date – partial and indirect though it may be – suggests not. More profoundly, the logic of U.S. self-interest and of Trump’s stated policy objectives points away from tariffs on Canadian oil and natural gas.

First the evidence. Trump had barely been declared victor in the November 5 Presidential election before voices on both sides of the border began talking about creating a tariff “exemption” for Canadian fossil fuels. Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce in Trump’s first term, called fears of such a tariff “overblown” and said he “can’t imagine” his former boss imposing them. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith also said she was “not worried”. Then again, she also wrangled for herself invitations to key events such as next month’s meeting of the Western Governors’ Association, as well as Trump’s Inauguration in January, to make sure Alberta’s message gets through.

Similar views have been expressed by other knowledgeable sources from industry, trade and investment organizations. They note that Trump has done this very thing before; the renegotiated U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement of 2019 notably excused oil and natural gas flows from any tariffs. A further favourable indication is Alberta’s recent admission to the U.S. Governors’ Coalition for Energy Security, a group of 12 states that have banded together to cooperate on policies that promote reliable and affordable energy.

Guys who get it: Among Trump’s Cabinet nominees are North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (left) and Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright (right), both known for their vigorous support of oil and natural gas development and free North American trade in energy products. (Sources of photos: (left) Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; (right) Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Another positive sign is that alongside Trump’s pro-tariff Cabinet picks have come nominations of individuals with a deep understanding of North America’s petroleum sector. Douglas Burgum, a successful software entrepreneur and currently Governor of North Dakota, is slated to become Secretary of the Interior, chairman of the newly created National Energy Council and a member of the U.S. National Security Council. Burgum’s primary mandate is to promote innovation and investment by cutting through the thicket of new restrictions on oil and gas development that President Joe Biden had imposed. Chris Wright, founder of Liberty Energy and an unashamed industry booster, has been nominated to become what one U.S. commentator describes as “the most knowledgable secretary of energy the nation has ever had.” Lee Zeldin, another pro-industry figure, has been tapped to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

The fundamental objective underlying all of Trump’s trade policy is to strengthen American manufacturing. It is something he has articulated since before entering politics in 2015; it can accordingly be regarded as sincere.

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Equally noteworthy is that, in contrast to the widespread and bipartisan clamouring for tariffs on Chinese imports, nobody in the U.S. is demanding that Trump target Canadian energy. Even Bernie Sanders, the avowedly socialist Senator from Vermont who wants a “windfall tax” and higher government royalties imposed on all oil producers, appears indifferent to import tariffs. And while U.S. environmental groups don’t like any free trade in oil and gas, they devote most of their energy to pushing their government towards restrictive European/Canadian-style climate-change policies or a new UN “climate damages tax.” The American fossil fuel sector, meanwhile, is not only in favour of tariff-free trade in energy products – including with Canada – it opposes tariffs on anything.

The evidence to date, however hopeful it may seem, remains inconclusive. Trump prides himself on his unconventional and unpredictable nature. This is what causes America’s adversaries – most notably Communist China – the greatest consternation. Regardless of his previous decisions on trade issues, if Trump thinks imposing tariffs on Canadian energy imports make sense now, he will do so.

“Manufacturing superpower”: The fundamental objective underlying Trump’s trade policy is to reverse the long slide of American industry through decades of globalization – mainly by targeting offshore manufacturing. Shown at top and middle, Trump at campaign event at Dane Manufacturing in Waunakee, Wisconsin, October 2024; at bottom, an assembly line for automobile engines. (Sources of photos: (top and middle) AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall; (bottom) Alliance Employment Services)

Logic and self-interest, however, also point away from such tariffs. The fundamental objective underlying all of Trump’s trade policy is to strengthen American manufacturing. It is something he has articulated since before entering politics in 2015; it can accordingly be regarded as sincere. Trump wants to halt and if possible reverse that sector’s long slide through decades of offshoring and globalization that crippled or wiped out whole industries all over the U.S., especially in the Midwest heartland. These are the places Trump promised to help, this lies at the core of his slogan “Make America Great Again”, and these are many of the people who sent him to the White House the first time and stuck by him through the depths of his ignominy following his second, failed Presidential run. This year, Trump ran on a platform to transform his country back into “it’s my favorite word.”.

To accomplish that dramatic – some would say grandiose if not unachievable – objective, Trump intends to punish countries that use subsidies, favouritism and other policies to unfairly advantage their own industries and flood the U.S. with underpriced goods, harming domestic producers and preventing new ones from starting up. China may be hit with tariffs as high as 60 percent. He will also target imports believed to threaten U.S. national security (such as electric vehicles vulnerable to hacking by foreign enemies) while working to reduce dependence on imports of strategic materials or components critical in wartime. And he wants to close loopholes allowing China to bypass U.S. tariffs by locating production in proxy countries – especially the two countries adjoining the U.S.

Mexico has gone quite far down the road of partnering with Chinese companies, and Trump’s key advisors have warned that Mexico will be held to account for it. Canada is certain to be scrutinized as well, but can probably allay similar U.S. concerns by avoiding becoming a backdoor and way-station for Chinese goods, something Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland already promised last week. This will require several key policy commitments, as well as competent, rigorous enforcement (always a questionable assumption for this Liberal government). It will also be necessary to continue matching U.S. tariff-related moves against China, as Canada did earlier this fall in imposing tariffs on Chinese EVs and aluminum.

Closing the back door: Trump is determined to eliminate loopholes allowing China to bypass U.S. tariffs through “transshipment”, i.e., locating assembly plants in Mexico or Canada. Shown at top, Chinese company setting up facility in northern Mexico; at bottom, transshipment occurring in Texas. (Sources of photos: (top) Kosuke Shimizu/Nikkei; (bottom) T. Hammonds MSW, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In addition to tariffs, Trump’s critical policies in restoring American manufacturing competitiveness will be reducing taxes, lifting the regulatory burden and, as his campaign platform puts it, ensuring the flow of “Reliable and Abundant Low Cost Energy”. By “energy” one should mainly read “crude oil and natural gas” – something Trump describes over and over as “liquid gold”. (Ending the demonization of coal is also a part; as well there is likely to be a modest revival in nuclear power.) In addition to supporting American industry, cheap energy is intended to help ease inflation and improve the lot of hard-pressed consumers, homeowners and wage-earners.

Among the associated promises and policies Trump has mentioned are to cancel the Biden Administration’s planned pro-electric vehicle policies (similar in effect to Canada’s outright mandate) and its moratorium on new LNG export facilities, end permitting of offshore wind turbines, reopen offshore areas to oil and gas drilling, unlock Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, reopen federal lands to drilling and hydraulic fracturing, pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord (for the second time, in Trump’s case) and otherwise end the Biden-era’s “Green New Deal”, which Trump derides as a “green new scam”.

During his election-night acceptance speech, Trump pointedly told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., his pick to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and formerly a vocal anti-oil activist, to keep his nose completely out of energy issues. Chris Wright, his recently announced nominee to be Secretary of Energy, has written a 180-page paper which contends that “Zero Energy Poverty by 2050 is a better goal than Net Zero 2050.”

Trump’s energy policy includes cancelling President Joe Biden’s moratorium on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities, reopening offshore areas to oil and gas drilling and unlocking Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. Shown at left, Trump visits the Cameron LNG liquefaction terminal in Hackberry, Louisiana, 2019; at middle, an oil drilling platform at Green Canyon in the Gulf of Mexico; at right, the National Petroleum Reserve. (Source of right photo: mypubliclands, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Trump’s energy policy, in short, is “drill, baby, drill” – often written in all-caps. Where might Canadian-produced oil and natural gas fit into this picture? Right in the middle, as it turns out – figuratively and literally.

It cannot be said often or loudly enough: inexpensive, reliable and plentiful energy is essential to economic competitiveness, national prosperity and modern civilization. But many Western governments – Canada’s among them – act as if it is optional. Right now, industries in authoritarian China use low-cost coal-fired electricity to produce the pricey solar panels and wind turbines that are exported to Western countries where they produce exorbitantly expensive electricity that in turn renders their domestic industries uncompetitive. Industrial users in Great Britain, for example, currently pay five-and-a-half times as much for electricity as those in the U.S., while German industry pays more than three times as much. Both countries are seeing their industrial base evaporate before their eyes. If Canada remains on its current policy path, it will be next.

Oil and natural gas are critical inputs that make American manufacturers more competitive, reduce the operating costs of nearly any business and allow American consumers to pay less to fuel their vehicles and heat/cool their homes. Canadian oil and natural gas not only do not undermine Trump’s economic and trade policies, they strengthen and advance them.

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Trump is unshakeably determined to avoid that for his country – and this is where Canadian energy enters the picture. Crucially, Canadian fossil fuels are not manufactured goods except in the narrowest technical sense. Unlike cars, smartphones, toys, shoes or furniture, they are commodities rather than finished products. They aren’t produced with unfair subsidies. They don’t contain secret chips enabling the Chinese to spy on U.S. military bases. They don’t threaten to displace or bankrupt age-old American companies, throw thousands of employees out of work or transform once-thriving cities into ghostly husks.

They are the very opposite: critical inputs that, by being priced competitively, make American manufacturers more competitive, reduce the operating costs of nearly any business and allow American consumers to pay less to fuel their vehicles and heat/cool their homes. Canadian oil and natural gas not only do not undermine Trump’s economic and trade policies, they strengthen and advance them.

Integrated system: Western Canada’s producing region supplies the U.S. heartland with crude oil and natural gas, where it can be refined and distributed, meeting the Trump test of (as his campaign platform puts it) “Reliable and Abundant Low Cost Energy”. Shown at top, an oil refinery in Rosemount, Minnesota. (Sources: (photo) Pexels; (map) CAPP)

This beneficial role is accentuated by some geographical quirks. Although North America’s vast interlinked system of energy pipelines is a near-miracle of technology, operating efficiency and reliability, it is not perfect or seamless. Major consuming regions tend to get most of their oil, natural gas and liquids from the nearest producing region; why ship the stuff farther than you must? Consequently, the U.S. Midwest and portions of the “near South” and northeast are heavily supplied from Canada.

If this supply were to be curtailed or disrupted by tariffs or other measures, manufacturers in these dependant regions would suffer immediately as wholesale and consumer prices jumped substantially. Regional oil refineries, gas/liquids facilities and petrochemical plants would pay more for their feedstock, face shortages as Canadian producers “shut in” no-longer-profitable production, and/or would operate below capacity or inefficiently as they sourced sub-optimal feedstock from elsewhere.

Even a 10 percent tariff would raise the average retail gasoline price across the U.S. by 5 percent, according to commodity pricing analysts at Montreal-based BCA Research. But the regional effects would be much greater. Regional prices not only for gasoline and heating fuel, but on any goods related to oil and natural gas, would rise far more than is implied by a mere 10-20 percent import tariff. And keep in mind, much of this region is MAGA country. Over time, some pipelines that currently ship product out of the Midwest might need to be “reversed”, no longer exporting to the Gulf of Mexico and Northeast regions but drawing energy from them. The U.S. might even need to increase imports from geopolitical adversaries like Venezuela or dodgy and corrupt African states.

All of this would be damaging not only to American consumers, business and manufacturing industries, but to U.S. foreign policy and even to the U.S. energy industry itself, the ostensible “competitor” that one might intuitively think stands to benefit from import tariffs. It hardly needs to be said that this would run counter to the new Administration’s objectives.

Despite being dubbed “dirty oil”, “unsustainable” and a “sunset industry”, the energy sector has led America’s productivity gains over the last decade while providing well-paying jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans – including Hispanics, Blacks and American Indians. (Source of bottom photo: Sahara Group)

In addition to its roles in supporting manufacturing and consumers, America’s oil and gas industry is seen by Trump and key members of his nascent Administration as a competitive advantage for the economy as a whole, as a major source of wealth-creation in its own right and as a geopolitical weapon. For this to make sense, one needs to know a few things about this industry. In contrast to its image as “dirty oil”, “unsustainable” or a “sunset industry”, oil and natural gas is among the most technologically advanced, innovative, entrepreneurial and dynamic industries in the economy. This sector led the entire American economy in productivity gains over the previous decade, as the accompanying graph indicates.

The million or more jobs it provides across the continent are by turns technically intricate, dangerous, physically hard, intellectually stimulating – and very lucrative. Just as more and more Canadian First Nations are becoming proponents of natural resource development because they recognize the benefits to themselves, the U.S. industry provides jobs to hundreds of thousands of Hispanics, Blacks and American Indians – an impressive number of whom just voted for Trump.

This is all thanks to one of the most remarkable industrial turnarounds in history: America’s transformation from an insatiable importer of oil and natural gas, its domestic production sagging by the year towards apparent oblivion, its producing sector increasingly demoralized and decrepit, into a country that’s not only energy self-sufficient but has leapfrogged to a net exporter. All in the dizzying time-frame of barely a dozen years, starting in 2008, the year U.S. crude oil production reached its nadir of a mere 5 million barrels per day. (Not long after, just as U.S. oil production was showing sparks of revival, President Barack Obama contemptuously declared that, “Anybody who tells you that we can drill our way out of this problem doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or just isn’t telling you the truth.”)

By last year the average rate had soared to 12.9 million barrels per day which, the U.S. Energy Information Administration recently pointed out, represented “more crude oil than any country, ever.” U.S. production isn’t just higher than Saudi Arabia and Russia’s – it’s nearly 30 percent higher. How this came about is its own story. But suffice it to say that Canadian visionaries and companies played an important role. So, interestingly, did prospective energy secretary Wright and his company, Liberty Energy, which helped pioneer the development of formerly inaccessible shale reservoirs by using horizontally drilled wells completed with multiple hydraulic fractures. In short, this transformation has fundamentally changed the energy game for the U.S., domestically and internationally.

Since its nadir at 5 million barrels per day (mmbpd) in 2008, U.S. crude oil production has soared to an average of 12.9 mmbpd in 2023 – more than any other country in history and trumping Saudi Arabia and Russia. Concurrently, exports of liquefied natural gas have zoomed from zero a decade ago to 12 billion cubic feet per day. (Sources of graphics: (top) eia.gov; (bottom) S&P Global, retrieved from The New York Times)

Here again, imported Canadian energy is neither a competitive threat nor a hindrance – but a source of economic value. The quirks of geography combined with the refusal of successive Canadian governments to ensure that Canada’s oil and natural gas could access global markets have created what amounts to a gargantuan, continent-spanning arbitrage mechanism that enriches American companies, investors and governments. In brief, cheap Canadian crude oil, natural gas and liquids are drawn into the U.S. from the north, enabling domestically produced crude oil, natural gas, liquids, refined fuels and petrochemicals to be exported from the vast Gulf of Mexico energy complex to hungry global markets, where they access premium international prices.

This has become a multi-hundred-billion-dollar opportunity that American entrepreneurs and financiers have exploited with alacrity. Vast investments in LNG export facilities have taken the U.S. from zero LNG as recently as 2014 to approximately 12 billion cubic feet per day this year, a figure forecast to zoom to 20 billion cubic feet per day within two years (the U.S. will thus be exporting more gas than Canada produces in its entirety). U.S. net exports of refined fuels (much more valuable than crude oil) are generating more than US$60 billion annually. The associated processing and export facilities themselves employ thousands.

Trump’s ‘liquid gold’ will soothe American consumers, grease the skids of American manufacturing, fill the financial tanks of American investors and set economic bonfires upon America’s enemies.

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Clearly, the more Canadian oil and natural gas can be imported from the north, the more American energy – including value-added refined/processed products – can flow from the Gulf of Mexico outward to the world. Indeed, Trump himself has said he would like to reinstate the federal permit for the much-fought-over, 800,000-barrel-per-day Keystone XL pipeline, which he approved early in his first term but was then cancelled by Biden.

The stunning U.S. energy turnaround in barely 15 years plus the current prospect of enormous further growth enable Trump and his policymakers to credibly talk about elevating the U.S. to global “energy dominance”. That is to say, an America liberated from dependency on imported oil not only can act unconstrained by the need to placate oil-producing nations that don’t share U.S. interests, but can use its own energy exports to enrich itself and support allied countries. It can also stare down oil-producing adversaries like Iran and Russia, leaving them weaker, contained and less able to fund wars, terrorism and other foreign mischief. Trump’s stated policy to curtail oil production misused by dictatorships in Iran and Venezuela also implies that Canadian energy exports will be more highly sought-after than ever. More Canadian energy strengthens U.S. energy dominance and weakens its enemies by helping to hold down international commodity prices.

Golden opportunity: The Trump Administration’s stated goal of global “energy dominance” appears achievable, weakening its oil-producing adversaries while holding open the door to Canada – if Canada’s political leadership is intelligent enough to seize the moment. Shown, Trump shakes hands with UFC Champion Jon Jones at Madison Square Garden, New York, 11 days after his election victory. (Source of photo: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The U.S. is already the world’s energy giant. Its goal of “energy dominance” is therefore serious and realistic. Standing atop it all will be Trump, the energy dominator: his “liquid gold” will soothe American consumers, grease the skids of American manufacturing, fill the financial tanks of American investors and set economic bonfires upon America’s enemies. That simply does not sound like an Administration about to place tariffs on the very imports that will help it make this happen. Far more likely, the 47^th President’s energy policy will offer Canada a golden opportunity to play a supportive role as a neighbour, friend, trading partner and ally – and to profit greatly from doing so.

George Koch is Editor-in-Chief of C2C Journal.

Source of main image: heritage.org.

C2C Journal

Drinking by the Numbers: What Statistics Canada Doesn’t Want You to Know

Published on November 15, 2024

Todayville

From the C2C Journal

By Peter Shawn Taylor

“The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify,” cautioned journalist Darrell Huff in his famous 1954 book How to Lie with Statistics. It’s still useful advice, although Canadians might hope such a warning isn’t required for the work of Statistics Canada. In an exclusive C2C investigation, Peter Shawn Taylor takes apart a recent Statcan study to reveal its use of controversial, woke and unscientific methods to confuse what should be the straightforward task of reporting on the drinking habits of Canadians in various demographic groups. He also uncovers data the statistical agency wants to keep hidden for reasons of “historical/cultural or other contexts”.

Statistics Canada would like to know how much you’ve been drinking.

In October, the federal statistical agency released “A snapshot of alcohol consumption levels in Canada” based on its large-scale 2023 Canadian Community Health Survey that asked Canadians how much they drank in the previous week. The topline number: more than half of those surveyed – 54.4 percent – said they didn’t touch a drop in the past seven days. This is considered “no risk” according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction’s (CCSA) 2023 report Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health, which Statcan uses as its standard. Among those who did imbibe, 15.2 percent said they’d had one or two drinks in the last week, an amount the CCSA guidance considers “low risk”, 15.2 percent said they’d consumed between three and six drinks, considered by CCSA to be “moderate risk”, and the remaining 15.1 percent admitted to seven or more drinks per week, what the CCSA calls “increasingly high risk”.

Statcan then sliced this information several different ways. By gender, men reported being bigger drinkers than women, based on their relative share in the “high risk” category (19.3 percent versus 11.1 percent). By age, the biggest drinkers are those 55-64 years, with 17.4 percent consuming at least one drink per day. Perhaps surprisingly, the 18-22-year-old college-aged group reported the lowest level of “high risk” drinking across all ages, at 8.4 percent, an outcome consistent with other observations that younger generations are becoming more conservative.

Statcan’s data also reveals that Quebeckers are the biggest drinkers in the country with 18.1 percent in the “high risk” category, while Saskatchewan and New Brunswick had the greatest number of teetotalers. Rural residents are bigger drinkers than those living in urban areas. By occupation, those holding male-dominated jobs in the trades, equipment operation and transportation were the most likely to report drinking in the “high risk” category of seven or more per week. Finally, the richest Canadians – those in the top income quintile – said they drink more than Canadians in lower income quintiles, an outcome that seems logical given the cost of a bottle these days.

The demographic detail in Statcan’s alcohol consumption survey is extensive and largely in keeping with general stereotypes. The quintessential drinker appears to be a middle-aged blue-collar male living in rural Quebec. (Although the report notes an enormous discrepancy between self-reported consumption data and national alcohol sales, with self-reported amounts accounting for a mere one-third of actual product sold. This suggests many Canadians are far from truthful when describing how much they drink.)

Despite the apparent surfeit of information, however, several demographic categories are missing from Statistics Canada’s report. And not by accident. According to a “Note to readers” at the bottom of the October report, the survey “included a strategic oversample to improve coverage…for racialized groups, Indigenous people, and persons with disabilities. While this analysis does not contain results for these populations (primarily owing to the need to delve into historical/cultural or other contexts for these groups as it pertains to alcohol consumption), the Canadian Community Health Survey 2023 data is now available to aid researchers looking into health analysis for these populations.”

The demographic detail in Statcan’s alcohol consumption survey is extensive and largely in keeping with general stereotypes. The quintessential drinker appears to be a middle-aged blue-collar male living in rural Quebec.

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The upshot of this word salad: Statcan went to extra lengths to get high-quality information on the alcohol consumption of natives, visible minorities, immigrants and people with disabilities. And then it enshrouded these numbers in a cloak of secrecy, choosing not to release that information publicly because of “historical/cultural or other contexts”. Why is Canada’s statistical agency keeping some of its data hidden?

Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health

Before investigating the missing data, it is necessary to discuss a controversy regarding the alcohol consumption guidelines used by Statcan. As mentioned earlier, its survey is based on new CCSA standards released last year which consider seven or more drinks per week to be “increasingly high risk”. This is the result of recent CCSA research that claims “even a small amount of alcohol can be damaging to health.” By focusing on the incidence of several obscure cancers and other diseases associated with alcohol consumption, the CCSA recommends that Canadians cut back drastically on their drinking. For those who wish to be in the “low risk” group, the CCSA recommends no more than two drinks per week for men and women, and not downing both on the same day.

To your health: The “J-Curve” plots the well-documented relationship between moderate social drinking and a long lifespan, revealing the healthiest level to be around one drink per day, what the new CCSA standards call “high risk”.

Such a parsimonious attitude towards drinking is at sharp odds with earlier CCSA findings. In 2011, the CCSA released “Canada’s Low Risk Alcohol Guidelines”, which defined “low risk” drinking levels very differently. Under this older standard, Canadians were advised to limit their consumption to 15 drinks per week (10 for women) and no more than three per day. It also acknowledged that it was okay to indulge on special occasions, such as birthdays or New Year’s Eve, without fear of any long-term health effects.

These rules were based on ample medical evidence pointing to substantial health benefits arising from moderate drinking, given that social drinkers tend to live longer than both abstainers and alcoholics – a statistical result that, when placed on a graph, yields what is commonly referred to as the “J-Curve”. These rules also aligned with social norms and hence garnered broad public support.

The dramatic contrast between the 2011 and 2023 CCSA drinking guidelines has attracted strong criticism from many health experts. Dan Malleck is chair of the Department of Health Sciences at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, as well as director of the school’s Centre for Canadian Studies. In an interview, he bluntly calls the new CCSA guidelines “not useful, except as an example of public health over-reach.” Malleck argues the emphasis CCSA now places on the tiny risk of certain cancers associated with alcohol ignores the vast amount of evidence proving moderate drinking confers both physical and social advantages. This, he says, does a disservice to Canadians.

“The opposite of good public health advice”: According to Dan Malleck, chair of Brock University’s Department of Health Sciences, the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction’s (CCSA) 2023 guidelines suggesting alcohol in any amount is a health hazard are unrealistic. (Source of photo: Brock University)

“The Opposite of Good Public Health Advice”

“There are two possible responses” to the CCSA’s new drinking guidelines touting near-abstinence as the preferred course of action, Malleck says. “People will hear the message that no amount of drinking is healthy and simply ignore the recommendations altogether because they’re so restrictive – and so we end up with no effective guidance. Or they’ll take it all at face value and become fearful that having just two beers a week will give them cancer. Creating that sort of anxiety isn’t useful either.” Considering the two alternatives, Malleck says the end result “is the opposite of good public health advice.”

Perhaps surprisingly, it appears Ottawa agrees with this assessment. While the CCSA is a federally-funded research organization, it is not a branch of the civil service. As such, its work does not automatically come with an official imprimatur. Rather, its reports have to be adopted by Health Canada or another department to become government policy. This was the case with its 2011 guidance. It is not the case with CCSA’s new report.

In response to a query from C2C, Yuval Daniel, director of communications for Ya’ara Saks, the federal minister of Mental Health and Addictions, stated that, “The Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse and Addiction’s proposed guidelines have not been adopted by the Government of Canada. Canada’s 2011 low-risk alcohol drinking guidelines remain the official guidance.”

Too strict even for the Liberals: Federal Mental Health and Addictions Minister Ya’ara Saks has chosen not to adopt the CCSA’s 2023 drinking guidelines as official policy – yet Statistics Canada insists on using them to measure Canadians’ drinking habits. (Source of photo: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

It seems the CCSA’s new and abstemious drinking guidelines are too strict even for the federal Liberals. The 2011 standard, which considers anything up to 15 drinks per week to be “low risk”, remains the government’s official advice to Canadians. While this seems like a small victory for common sense, it raises another question: if the federal government has refused to adopt the strict 2023 CCSA drinking standards, why is Statcan using them in its research?

According to Malleck, the appearance of the new, unofficial CCSA alcohol guidance in Statcan’s work “legitimizes” the explicitly-unapproved guidelines. “It further reinforces these seemingly authoritative, government-funded recommendations” and obscures the sensible, official advice contained in the earlier guidelines, he says. It seems a strange state of affairs. But given other odd aspects of Statcan’s alcohol survey, it is in keeping with an emerging pattern of problematic behaviour at the statistical agency. Statcan is no longer merely gathering information and presenting it in an objective way, to be applied as its users see fit; the agency appears to be crafting its own public policy by stealth.

Uncovering the Missing Data

Recall that Statcan’s recent alcohol survey withheld consumption data regarding racial, Indigenous and disabled status for reasons of “historical/cultural or other contexts”. Although the statistical agency collected the relevant numbers, it then restricted access to researchers “looking into health analysis for these populations.” As a media organization, C2C requested this data on the grounds it was public information. After some back-and-forth that included the threat of a $95-per-hour charge to assemble the figures, Statcan eventually provided the once-redacted numbers for free. With the data in hand, it seems obvious which numbers were withheld and why.

The only category that seems worthy of any comment is that of Indigenous Canadians. At 20.1 percent, aboriginals display one of the highest shares of ‘high risk’ drinkers in the country.

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Nothing about alcohol consumption by immigrant status or race appears newsworthy. Immigrants are revealed to be very modest drinkers, with 68 percent reporting no alcohol consumed in the past week, and only 7 percent admitting to being in the “high risk” seven-drinks-per-week category. Similar results hold for race; Arab and Filipino populations, for example, display extremely high rates of abstinence, at 88 percent and 80 percent, respectively. Disabled Canadians are also very modest drinkers.

The only category that seems worthy of any comment is that of Indigenous Canadians. At 20.1 percent, aboriginals display one of the highest shares of “high risk” drinkers in the country.

Out of sight, out of mind: Statcan’s recent report on alcohol consumption deliberately withholds data on Indigenous Canadians for reasons of “historical/cultural and other contexts”. (Source of photo: AP Photo/William Lauer, File)

According to Malleck, Statcan’s reference to “historical/cultural or other contexts” in withholding some drinking data is a clear signal the move was meant to avoid bringing attention to Indigenous people and their problematic relationship with alcohol. “A lot of people will now err on the side of caution when it comes to this kind of information [about Indigenous people],” he says. This is a phenomenon that has been building for some time. Nearly a decade ago, the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action made numerous demands about how governments and universities deal with Indigenous knowledge and history. “I can see the people at Statcan saying that this [new data] will play into the so-called ‘firewater myth’ and be too damaging culturally to justify its inclusion,” Malleck adds.

“The Unmentioned Demon”

It is certainly true that Canada’s native population has been greatly damaged by alcohol since the beginning of white settlement in North America. As early as 1713 the Hudson’s Bay Company told its staff at Fort Albany, in what is now northern Ontario, to “Trade as little brandy as possible to the Indians, we being informed it has destroyed several of them.”

Later, the pre-Confederation era featured many legislative efforts to limit native access to alcoholic spirits. Further, one of the purposes behind the creation of Canada’s North West Mounted Police (NWMP) was to interdict American whiskey traders at the U.S. border to prevent them from selling their wares to Canadian tribes, who were suffering catastrophically under alcohol. The NWMP were notably successful in that mission, earning the fervent gratitude of prominent Indigenous chiefs on the Prairies. More recently, the topic of alcoholism on native reserves has been the subject of several books, including former Saskatchewan Crown prosecutor Harold Johnson’s powerful 2016 work Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing my People (and Yours).

Canada’s native community has struggled with alcohol abuse ever since white settlement began. Many federal policies have attempted to address this, including the creation of Canada’s North West Mounted Police (NWMP) in 1873. Shown, NWMP officer with members of the Blackfoot First Nation outside Fort Calgary, 1878.

With all this as background, it should not come as a surprise that Indigenous communities continue to struggle with high rates of alcohol use and abuse. In fact, such detail is easily accessible from other government sources. The federal First Nations Information Governance Centre, for example, reveals that the rate of binge drinking (five drinks or more in a day, at least once per month) among Indigenous Canadians is more than twice the rate of the general population – 34.9 percent vs. 15.6 percent. Reserves and Inuit communities also display extremely high rates of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder(FASD), which is caused when pregnant mothers drink. Some research shows FASD rates are 10 to 100 times higher among Indigenous populations than the general Canadian population. This C2C story calls FASD “the unmentioned demon that haunts the native experience throughout Canada.”

Given all this readily available information, it makes little sense for Statcan to collect and then withhold data about Indigenous drinking. Such an effort will not make the problem go away, nor change public perceptions. Indeed, the only way to reduce alcoholism on reserves and among urban native communities is to confront the situation head-on. The first step in Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step recovery program is, notably, admitting to the existence of the problem itself.

With regard to sensitivity about identity, Statcan showed no qualms about labelling Quebeckers as being the thirstiest drinkers in the country. Or that men employed in the trades, equipment operation and transportation tend to kick back with a beer more than twice a week. Further, Indigenous Canadians are not even the country’s biggest imbibers. That distinction belongs to the top quintile of income-earners, with 21.5 percent of Canada’s highest earners in the “high risk” category.

Habs fans at work: While Statcan appears unwilling to publish data revealing that Indigenous Canadians are among the biggest drinkers in Canada, it has no such qualms about identifying Quebec as Canada’s thirstiest province. (Source of photo: CTV News Montreal)

This effort to spare Indigenous Canadians the ignominy of being recognized as among the country’s biggest drinkers, even after devoting more time and effort to researching their habits, follows a 2021 federal Liberal directive that requires Statcan to spend more resources on certain targeted groups. The $172 million, five-year Disaggregated Data Action Plan (DDAP), which is referenced in the alcohol report’s footnotes, is an effort to collect more detailed data about Indigenous people, women, visible minorities and the disabled “to allow for intersectional analyses, and support government and societal efforts to address known inequities and promote fair and inclusive decision-making.”

Setting aside the tedious terminology of the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) movement, it may well be a reasonable policy goal to collect more and better information about underprivileged groups. With better information comes greater knowledge and, it can be hoped, an improved ability to plan. But such efforts are for naught if this additional data is then hidden from public view because it might cast favoured groups in a bad light.

Ottawa’s $172 million Disaggregated Data Action Plan (DDAP), unveiled in 2021, is meant to collect and distribute more detailed data on targeted groups including women, Indigenous people and the disabled. It doesn’t always work as promised.

Canada’s Statistical Agency Goes Random

The apparent data damage arising from the new DDAP is not limited to hiding results about Indigenous Canadians. It is also affecting results by gender. Recall that the October alcohol consumption report reveals a clear male/female split in drinking habits, with men drinking substantially more than women. On closer inspection, however, this distinction refers only to self-reported gender identity – not to biological sex. As a result of a separate 2018 directive, the statistical agency is now forbidden from asking Canadians about their sex “assigned” at birth.

This is in keeping with woke ideology favoured by the federal Liberals that regards gender as a social construct separate from biology. But such a policy entails several significant problems from a statistical point of view. For starters, it makes it difficult to compare results with previous years, when gender was defined differently. According to Statcan, this is no big deal: “Historical comparability with previous years is not in itself a valid reason to be asking sex at birth.” These days, ideology matters more than statistical relevance, even to those who once held sacred the objective gathering of high-quality data.

As its work becomes more overtly political and ideological following nearly a decade under the Justin Trudeau government, Statistics Canada is endangering its own reputation as a reliable and impartial source of data.

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This new policy also means that in situations where biological sex is crucial to interpreting the data – health issues, for example – the results are now muddied by the conflation of gender with sex. This is particularly relevant when it comes to self-identified transgender or non-binary individuals. In following the new rules set out by the DDAP, Statcan now takes all transgender and non-binary responses and shuffles them arbitrarily between the male and female categories – what have since been renamed as Men+ and Women+. As Statcan itself reports, this data is “derived by randomly distributing non-binary people into the Men+ or Women+ category; data on sex at birth is not used in any steps of this process.”

Anti-scientific: As a result of the DDAP, Statcan now randomly distributes responses from people who self-identify as transgender or non-binary into its Men+ and Women+ categories, making a mockery of good statistical practice. (Source of photo: Shutterstock)

In other words, Statcan is now randomly allocating the responses it receives from anyone who says they are transgender or non-binary into the Men+ and Women+ categories. Transgender women who remain biological men may thus be included together with other biological women. Doing so is, of course, entirely unscientific. Randomizing data points that have been carefully collected undermines the entire statistical process and weakens the usefulness of any results. Taken to the extreme, such a policy could produce such medical data absurdities as rising rates of prostate cancer among Women+ or a baby boom birthed by Men+. Consider it a triumph of wokeness over basic science and math.

Statistical Irrelevance in Three Easy Steps

As its work becomes more overtly political and ideological following nearly a decade under the Justin Trudeau government, Statistics Canada is endangering its own reputation as a reliable and impartial source of data. The October survey on alcohol consumption contains three examples of this lamentable slide into incoherence which, if not halted promptly, will lead to growing irrelevance.

First is the presentation of controversial new CCSA alcohol consumption guidelines as an official standard by which Canadians should measure their alcohol use. In fact, these guidelines have no federal standing whatsoever; the actual official standards are much more permissive. It is not clear why Statcan would promote these unofficial and scientifically dubious recommendations. In effect, the agency has teamed up with a temperance-minded organization that seems determined to convince Canadians they are drinking too much booze.

This party can’t last forever: Statcan’s recent survey on Canadians’ drinking habits reveals the many ways in which the statistical agency is becoming increasingly ideological in how it collects (and hides) data. If left unchecked, this will eventually lead to its irrelevance as a source of reliable information. (Source of photo: CanadaVisit.org)

Second, Statcan wants to prevent Canadians from having ready access to information about alcohol consumption by Indigenous Canadians. This may be the result of some misconstrued sense of sympathy or obligation towards native groups. In doing so, however, the statistical agency is hiding an important public policy imperative from the rest of the country. It should be the job of Canada’s statistical agency to collect and distribute high-quality data that is relevant to the Canadian condition regardless of whether the resulting inferences are for good or ill. While the $172 million DDAP program was promoted as the means to shine a brighter light on issues of concern for marginalized groups, it now appears to be working in reverse – hiding from public view issues that should concern all Canadians.

Finally, Statcan’s gender-based data collection policy is doing similar damage – and could do vastly more in the future as long-term datasets become ever-more degraded. Also based on the Liberals’ Disaggregated Data Action Plan, the agency now collects responses from Canadians who identify as transgender and non-binary and then randomly allocates these between its Men+ and Women+ categories, undermining the quality and reliability of its own work. While the actual numbers for nonbinary Canadians may be perishingly small, such a flaw should be a big deal for anyone who cares about rigorous statistical validity. And surely Statistics Canada should care.

Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor at C2C Journal. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.

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