Economy
Canada’s flippant rejection of our generous natural resource inheritance

From the Macdonald Laurier Institute
By David Polansky
The fanaticism of environmental elitists has made people unwilling to discuss the serious human and economic costs of poorly considered environmental policies.
Strategic energy resources have long been associated with some of the world’s most odious regimes. Above the surfaces that cover rich mineral and fossil fuel deposits one finds religious fanatics, brutal tyrants, and corrupt kleptocracies. And yet with one resource rich nation in particular we find not Wahhabism or gangsterism but Mounties and maple syrup.
Canada is the world’s second-largest country and its lands and territorial waters hold some of the world’s most substantial oil and gas reserves. Looking at its energy policies, one might think it was Belgium. Canada’s resource wealth would seem to be a case of the good guys winning for once. Why then does Canada flee in shame from its geological (and geopolitical) situation?
The answer is that Canada’s elites have long ceased to think in terms of its national interests or fiscal priorities but have adopted a naïve environmental dogmatism. Since it ratified the Paris Agreement in 2015, Canada has embraced an ambitious, top-down, international agenda to achieve “net-zero” emissions and limit global climate change.
But the fact is that, despite its size, In absolute terms, its output has risen marginally over the past half century, even as its population has nearly doubled. And embracing this climate agenda is hardly a perfunctory matter: it will continue to result in declining incomes for the average Canadian as well as a weakened trade balance for Canada as a whole. Canada’s economy is being sacrificed on the altar of elite preferences divorced from the realities of how Canadians actually heat our homes or put food on our tables.
An honest assessment of Canada’s flippant rejection of its generous natural resource inheritance looks more like serial masochism than virtue.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the global sanctions it triggered, The irony is that with so much of Russia’s supply coming offline, Canada could have had a remarkable opportunity to fill the vacuum with its own production capacity.
Despite being the world’s sixth-largest producer of natural gas, Canada lacks even a single export terminal for LNG. When critics of Canadian LNG production pointed to the unfeasibility of meeting overseas demand, despite the entreaties of the Germans and other Europeans, they were only technically correct. Canada couldn’t easily meet overseas demand because our regulatory regime has held up the construction of as many as 18 proposed LNG projects over the past decade, largely due to climate concerns.
Ironically, Germany—the continent’s greatest industrial power—needed to reactivate discontinued coal plants to meet its energy demands (hardly an ideal outcome from an environmental standpoint).
Much of the shortfall caused by sanctions on Russia was also made up by LNG contributions from Norway—whose leaders have maintained that reducing LNG output would only cede the market to authoritarian regimes with weaker regulatory controls around their energy industries from both environmental and human rights standpoints. Thankfully, Norway’s government moved forward with LNG production and export despite past pressure from environmentalist in the European Union that attempted to curtail its fossil fuel extraction.
Canada could have followed Norway’s level-headed approach and in that could have helped replace Russian oil in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion. The curtailing of Canada’s energy infrastructure is not imposed by a physical limitation in the world, nor was it commanded from the heavens; it was ordered by the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act of 2021, supplemented by ambitious plans promulgated by Ottawa to reshape the institutions and practices of the entire country in pursuit of this quixotic goal. Not just the oil-and-gas sector, but housing, construction, agriculture, etc. must bend before Net Zero.
One can already hear activist outrage that, “to oppose this agenda is to choose temporary profits over the preservation of human life and the planet that supports it.” This rhetoric has proven effective in advancing environmental policies but it is also a false dichotomy, as it treats the dilemma as one of “good vs. greed” rather than one of complex competing goods.
A society that has signed on to this sort of imposed austerity is one with less money for infrastructure, entrepreneurship, healthcare, and defense. A lack of investment in these sectors also brings serious and immediate human costs. And further, the real issue is not the value of environmental stewardship or of taking steps to moderate consumption—both of which are worthy goals in and of themselves—but of blindly adhering to preselected targets at all costs. These apparently unassailable commitments have deprived Canada of the kind of flexible management of strategic interests that prudent political leadership requires.
Indeed, the unrealism of these climate ideals has produced systemic dissembling across the country’s major institutions, given the pressure to comply regardless of the efficacy of their practices. In other words, the fanaticism of environmental elitists has made people unwilling to debate the issues at hand or to even discuss the serious human and economic costs of poorly considered environmental policies.
The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) model has had the effect of placing certain questions effectively beyond the reach of politics. But questions of policy—as environmental and energy questions surely are—are by their nature political; they have inevitable tradeoffs that should be a matter of debate with an eye to our collective interests.
Instead, we have an intolerant environmental elitism that obstructs the open and honest public deliberation that is the hallmark of democratic politics. A more truthful and practical approach wouldn’t necessarily promote any one policy, but it would allow for public discussion that recognizes the genuine toll that environmental policy takes on Canada’s domestic well-being and our standing in the world.
David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer and political theorist. Read him at strangefrequencies.co or find him on X @polanskydj.
2025 Federal Election
Next federal government should end corporate welfare for forced EV transition

From the Fraser Institute
By Tegan Hill and Jake Fuss
Corporate welfare simply shifts jobs and investment away from other firms and industries—which are more productive, as they don’t require government funding to be economically viable—to the governments’ preferred industries and firms, circumventing the preferences of consumers and investors. And since politicians spend other people’s money, they have little incentive to be careful investors.
General Motors recently announced the temporary closure of its electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing plant in Ontario, laying off 500 people because its new EV isn’t selling. The plant will shut down for six months despite hundreds of millions in government subsides financed by taxpayers. This is just one more example of corporate welfare—when governments subsidize favoured industries and companies—and it’s time for the provinces and the next federal government to eliminate it.
Between the federal government and Ontario government, GM received about $500 million to help fund its EV transition. But this is just one example of corporate welfare in the auto sector. Stellantis and Volkswagen will receive about $28 billion in government subsidies while Honda is promised $5 billion.
More broadly, from 2007 to 2019, the last pre-COVID year of data, the federal government spent an estimated $84.6 billion (adjusted for inflation) on corporate welfare while provincial and local governments spent another $302.9 billion. And crucially, these numbers exclude other forms of government support such as loan guarantees, direct investments and regulatory privileges, so the actual cost of corporate welfare during this period was much higher.
Of course, politicians claim that corporate welfare benefits workers. Yet according to a significant body of research, corporate welfare fails to generate widespread economic benefit. Think of it this way—if the businesses that received subsidies were viable to begin with, they wouldn’t need government support. So unprofitable companies are kept in business through governments’ support, which can prevent resources, including investment and workers, from moving to profitable companies, hurting overall economic growth.
Put differently, rather than fuelling economic growth, corporate welfare simply shifts jobs and investment away from other firms and industries—which are more productive, as they don’t require government funding to be economically viable—to the governments’ preferred industries and firms, circumventing the preferences of consumers and investors. And since politicians spend other people’s money, they have little incentive to be careful investors.
Governments also must impose higher tax rates on everyone else to pay for corporate welfare. In turn, higher tax rates discourage entrepreneurship and business investment—again, which fuels economic growth. And the higher the tax rates, the more economic activity they discourage.
GM’s EV plant shut down once again proves that when governments try to engineer the economy with corporate welfare, workers will ultimately lose. It’s time for the provinces and the next federal government—whoever it may be—to finally put an end to this costly and ineffective policy approach.
Bjorn Lomborg
Net zero’s cost-benefit ratio is CRAZY high

From the Fraser Institute
The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.
Canada has made a legal commitment to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. Back in 2015, then-Prime Minister Trudeau promised that climate action will “create jobs and economic growth” and the federal government insists it will create a “strong economy.” The truth is that the net zero policy generates vast costs and very little benefit—and Canada would be better off changing direction.
Achieving net zero carbon emissions is far more daunting than politicians have ever admitted. Canada is nowhere near on track. Annual Canadian CO₂ emissions have increased 20 per cent since 1990. In the time that Trudeau was prime minister, fossil fuel energy supply actually increased over 11 per cent. Similarly, the share of fossil fuels in Canada’s total energy supply (not just electricity) increased from 75 per cent in 2015 to 77 per cent in 2023.
Over the same period, the switch from coal to gas, and a tiny 0.4 percentage point increase in the energy from solar and wind, has reduced annual CO₂ emissions by less than three per cent. On that trend, getting to zero won’t take 25 years as the Liberal government promised, but more than 160 years. One study shows that the government’s current plan which won’t even reach net-zero will cost Canada a quarter of a million jobs, seven per cent lower GDP and wages on average $8,000 lower.
Globally, achieving net-zero will be even harder. Remember, Canada makes up about 1.5 per cent of global CO₂ emissions, and while Canada is already rich with plenty of energy, the world’s poor want much more energy.
In order to achieve global net-zero by 2050, by 2030 we would already need to achieve the equivalent of removing the combined emissions of China and the United States — every year. This is in the realm of science fiction.
The painful Covid lockdowns of 2020 only reduced global emissions by about six per cent. To achieve net zero, the UN points out that we would need to have doubled those reductions in 2021, tripled them in 2022, quadrupled them in 2023, and so on. This year they would need to be sextupled, and by 2030 increased 11-fold. So far, the world hasn’t even managed to start reducing global carbon emissions, which last year hit a new record.
Data from both the International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration give added cause for skepticism. Both organizations foresee the world getting more energy from renewables: an increase from today’s 16 per cent to between one-quarter to one-third of all primary energy by 2050. But that is far from a transition. On an optimistically linear trend, this means we’re a century or two away from achieving 100 percent renewables.
Politicians like to blithely suggest the shift away from fossil fuels isn’t unprecedented, because in the past we transitioned from wood to coal, from coal to oil, and from oil to gas. The truth is, humanity hasn’t made a real energy transition even once. Coal didn’t replace wood but mostly added to global energy, just like oil and gas have added further additional energy. As in the past, solar and wind are now mostly adding to our global energy output, rather than replacing fossil fuels.
Indeed, it’s worth remembering that even after two centuries, humanity’s transition away from wood is not over. More than two billion mostly poor people still depend on wood for cooking and heating, and it still provides about 5 per cent of global energy.
Like Canada, the world remains fossil fuel-based, as it delivers more than four-fifths of energy. Over the last half century, our dependence has declined only slightly from 87 per cent to 82 per cent, but in absolute terms we have increased our fossil fuel use by more than 150 per cent. On the trajectory since 1971, we will reach zero fossil fuel use some nine centuries from now, and even the fastest period of recent decline from 2014 would see us taking over three centuries.
Global warming will create more problems than benefits, so achieving net-zero would see real benefits. Over the century, the average person would experience benefits worth $700 (CAD) each year.
But net zero policies will be much more expensive. The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.
Every year over the 21st century, costs would vastly outweigh benefits, and global costs would exceed benefits by over CAD 32 trillion each year.
We would see much higher transport costs, higher electricity costs, higher heating and cooling costs and — as businesses would also have to pay for all this — drastic increases in the price of food and all other necessities. Just one example: net-zero targets would likely increase gas costs some two-to-four times even by 2030, costing consumers up to $US52.6 trillion. All that makes it a policy that just doesn’t make sense—for Canada and for the world.
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