Canadian Energy Companies Look South For Growth

Enbridge’s announcement in September that it was acquiring three U.S.-based utilities for USD$14 billion saw Canada’s largest energy company also become North America’s largest gas utility. The deal is significant not only on its own merits, but as part of a bigger trend: Canadian energy companies that are looking for growth prospects are finding them south of the border.

The trend is not new. In 2016, Canadian utilities went on an American shopping spree. Fortis acquired ITC for USD$11.3 billion; Ontario-based Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp acquired Missouri-based Empire District Electric Company for USD$2.4 billion; and Nova Scotia-based Emera acquired Florida-based TECO in a USD$10.4 billion deal.

Pipelines were in the mix too, with TC Energy acquiring Columbia Pipeline Group, a gas transmission network, that year for USD$13 billion.

In 2017, Hydro One purchased U.S. power supplier Avista for USD $3.4 billion, and AltaGas took over WGL Holdings (which supplies natural gas to the White House) for USD $4.6 billion. More recently, TriSummit acquired the Alaska gas distribution, transmission, and storage assets of SEMCO Energy for US$800 million in March.

As such, the Enbridge utility megadeal can be seen less as a harbinger and more of a culmination.

What is behind this Canadian appetite for American utilities and pipelines? At one level, it is a response to the inherent limitations of the Canadian utilities sector, which is heavily regulated and often provincially owned. Add in Ottawa’s torrent of climate policies aiming to cut growth in Canadian oil and gas, and pastures look greener elsewhere.

But it also speaks to the confidence the sector’s biggest players have in the long term prospects for natural gas. The Dominion deal adjusts Enbridge’s earnings from a 60-40 mix between crude oil & liquids, and natural gas & renewable energy respectively, to something closer to a 50-50 split. Enbridge, like many energy companies, is betting on natural gas being a bridge fuel in the energy transition rather than being phased out. And whatever fuel mix we use in the future, it will require pipelines and distribution, whether in the form of natural gas, renewable natural gas (RNG), hydrogen or otherwise.

“…it also speaks to the confidence the sector’s biggest players have in the long term prospects for natural gas.”

Two phenomena are worth emphasizing here. The first is that the United States is seen as a jurisdiction for growth; Canada, not so much. Our biggest energy companies are expanding to the south, but the reverse is not true. Enbridge and TC Energy are leading the way, but Cenovus, Cameco, Hydro-Québec and others are also making moves, on top of the long list of utilities above.

This is not just anecdotal. According to the U.S. State Department,¹ Canadian foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States was about 26% higher than their reciprocal FDI in 2022, or USD$528 billion compared to their USD$406 billion. This is part of a broader trend that has been worsening since 2014. In that year, Canadian investment abroad was only about CAD$100 billion more than foreign investment in Canada. By 2022 the imbalance had grown to a whopping CAD$725 billion.² Canadian companies are generating wealth; they are just generating a smaller proportion of it at home.

The second is that the Canadian and American energy markets are highly interdependent, and growing more so. In fact, 2022 saw record energy trade between our two countries, reaching USD$190 billion, almost triple what it was in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, and beating the last high water mark of USD$178 billion in 2008. From natural gas and liquids pipelines to refineries and electricity grids, fundamentally we have a single North American energy system.

As such, we should be developing and coordinating energy and climate policy much more closely. It is inefficient, not to mention painful for the energy sector, when Canada and the United States – and many provinces and states on top of that – propose substantially different standards, goals, and regulations. Energy is an area that needs closer policy collaboration and alignment between our two nations in order to achieve sustainability, reliability and affordability of supply.

This need is manifesting itself in a growing Canadian presence in the US capital. In the past year or so, TC Energy has established a policy team in Washington DC, and Cenovus and the Business Council of Canada have opened up offices there (as has my own think tank, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute). As entreaties to Ottawa fall on deaf ears, businesses are looking for reception elsewhere.

The Canadian energy sector is betting big on natural gas, be it through retail, pipeline transportation or LNG exports. Where possible, it’s betting on Canada too. But the United States and other markets are where growth is on offer.

We should all celebrate the success of Canadian companies abroad. But we should be creating a policy and business environment that allows them to grow in our own back yard too.

Heather Exner-Pirot is the Director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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Worst kept secret—red tape strangling Canada’s economy

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

In the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S.

According to a new Statistics Canada report, government regulation has grown over the years and it’s hurting Canada’s economy. The report, which uses a regulatory burden measure devised by KPMG and Transport Canada, shows government regulatory requirements increased 2.1 per cent annually from 2006 to 2021, with the effect of reducing the business sector’s GDP, employment, labour productivity and investment.

Specifically, the growth in regulation over these years cut business-sector investment by an estimated nine per cent and “reduced business start-ups and business dynamism,” cut GDP in the business sector by 1.7 percentage points, cut employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity by 0.4 percentage points.

While the report only covered regulatory growth through 2021, in the past four years an avalanche of new regulations has made the already existing problem of overregulation worse.

The Trudeau government in particular has intensified its regulatory assault on the extraction sector with a greenhouse gas emissions cap, new fuel regulations and new methane emissions regulations. In the last few years, federal diktats and expansions of bureaucratic control have swept the auto industry, child care, supermarkets and many other sectors.

Again, the negative results are evident. Over the past nine years, Canada’s cumulative real growth in per-person GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) has been a paltry 1.7 per cent and trending downward, compared to 18.6 per cent and trending upward in the United States. Put differently, if the Canadian economy had tracked with the U.S. economy over the past nine years, average incomes in Canada would be much higher today.

Also in the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S., and only about two-thirds as much new capital (on average) as workers in other developed countries.

Consequently, Canada is mired in an economic growth crisis—a fact that even the Trudeau government does not deny. “We have more work to do,” said Anita Anand, then-president of the Treasury Board, last August, “to examine the causes of low productivity levels.” The Statistics Canada report, if nothing else, confirms what economists and the business community already knew—the regulatory burden is much of the problem.

Of course, regulation is not the only factor hurting Canada’s economy. Higher federal carbon taxes, higher payroll taxes and higher top marginal income tax rates are also weakening Canada’s productivity, GDP, business investment and entrepreneurship.

Finally, while the Statistics Canada report shows significant economic costs of regulation, the authors note that their estimate of the effect of regulatory accumulation on GDP is “much smaller” than the effect estimated in an American study published several years ago in the Review of Economic Dynamics. In other words, the negative effects of regulation in Canada may be even higher than StatsCan suggests.

Whether Statistics Canada has underestimated the economic costs of regulation or not, one thing is clear: reducing regulation and reversing the policy course of recent years would help get Canada out of its current economic rut. The country is effectively in a recession even if, as a result of rapid population growth fuelled by record levels of immigration, the GDP statistics do not meet the technical definition of a recession.

With dismal GDP and business investment numbers, a turnaround—both in policy and outcomes—can’t come quickly enough for Canadians.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

Business

‘Out and out fraud’: DOGE questions $2 billion Biden grant to left-wing ‘green energy’ nonprofit`

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The EPA under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a ‘green energy’ group that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a “green energy” nonprofit that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists such as former Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

Founded in 2023 as a coalition of nonprofits, corporations, unions, municipalities, and other groups, Power Forward Communities (PFC) bills itself as “the first national program to finance home energy efficiency upgrades at scale, saving Americans thousands of dollars on their utility bills every year.” It says it “will help homeowners, developers, and renters swap outdated, inefficient appliances with more efficient and modernized options, saving money for years ahead and ensuring our kids can grow up with cleaner, pollutant-free air.”

The organization’s website boasts more than 300 member organizations across 46 states but does not detail actual activities. It does have job postings for three open positions and a form for people to sign up for more information.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, along with new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, are raising questions about the $2 billion grant PFC received from the Biden EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), ostensibly for the “affordable decarbonization of homes and apartments throughout the country, with a particular focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities.”

PFC’s announcement of the grant is the organization’s only press release to date and is alarming given that the organization had somehow reported only $100 in revenue at the end of 2023.

“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word,” Zeldin said. “When we learned about the Biden administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this.” Zeldin previously announced the Biden EPA had deposited the $20 billion in a Citibank account, apparently to make it harder for the next administration to retrieve and review it.

“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been,” he added. “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

Daniel Turner, executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, told the Beacon that in his opinion “for an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant — it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud.”

Prominent among PFC’s insiders is Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader best known for persistent false claims about having the state’s gubernatorial election stolen from her in 2018. Abrams founded two of PFC’s partner organizations (Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count) and serves as lead counsel for a third group (Rewiring America) in the coalition. A longtime advocate of left-wing environmental policies, Abrams is also a member of the national advisory board for advocacy group Climate Power.