Heather-Exner Pirot of the Business Council of Canada and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute spoke with Resource Works about the transition to Donald Trump’s energy policy, hopes for Keystone XL’s revival, EVs, and more.
Do you think it is accurate to say that Trump’s energy policy will be the complete opposite of Joe Biden’s? Or will it be more nuanced than that?
It’s more nuanced than that. US oil and gas production did grow under Biden, as it did under Obama. It’s actually at record levels right now. The US is producing the most oil and gas per day that any nation has ever produced in the history of the world.
That said, the federal government in the US has imposed relatively little control over production. In the absence of restrictive emissions and climate policies that we have in Canada, most of the oil production decisions have been made based on market forces. With prices where they’re at currently, there’s not a lot of shareholder appetite to grow that significantly.
The few areas you can expect change: leasing more federal lands and off shore areas for oil and gas development; rescinding the pause in LNG export permits; eliminating the new methane fee; and removing Biden’s ambitious vehicle fuel efficiency standards, which would subsequently maintain gas demand.
I would say on nuclear energy, there won’t be a reversal, as that file has earned bipartisan support. If anything, a Trump Admin would push regulators to approve SMRs models and projects faster. They want more of all kinds of energy.
Is Keystone XL a dead letter, or is there enough planning and infrastructure still in-place to restart that project?
I haven’t heard any appetite in the private sector to restart that in the short term. I know Alberta is pushing it. I do think it makes sense for North American energy security – energy dominance, as the Trump Admin calls – and I believe there is a market for more Canadian oil in the USA; it makes economic sense. But it’s still looked at as too politically risky for investors.
To have it move forward I think you would need some government support to derisk it. A TMX model, even. And clear evidence of social license and bipartisan support so it can survive the next election on both sides of the border.
Frankly, Northern Gateway is the better project for Canada to restart, under a Conservative government.
Keystone XL was cancelled by Biden prior to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Do you think that the reshoring/friendshoring of the energy supply is a far bigger priority now?
It absolutely is a bigger priority. But it’s also a smaller threat. You need to appreciate that North America has become much more energy independent and secure than it has ever been. Both US and Canada are producing at record levels. Combined, we now produce more than the Middle East (41 million boe/d vs 38 million boe/d). And Canada has taken a growing share of US imports (now 60%) even as their import levels have declined.
But there are two risks on the horizon: the first is that oil is a non renewable resource and the US is expected to reach a peak in shale oil production in the next few years. No one wants to go back to the days when OPEC + had dominant market power. I think there will be a lot of demand for Canadian oil to fill the gap left by any decline in US oil production. And Norway’s production is expected to peak imminently as well.
The second is the need from our allies for LNG. Europe is still dependent on Russia for natural gas, energy demand is growing in Asia, and high industrial energy costs are weighing on both. More and cheaper LNG from North America is highly important for the energy security of our allies, and thus the western alliance as it faces a challenge from Russia, China and Iran.
Canada has little choice but to follow the US lead on many issues such as EVs and tariffs on China. Regarding energy policy, does Canada’s relative strength in the oil and gas sector give it a stronger hand when it comes to having an independent energy policy?
I don’t think we want an independent energy policy. I would argue we both benefit from alignment and interdependence. And we’ve built up that interdependence on the infrastructure side over decades: pipelines, refineries, transmission, everything.
That interdependence gives us a stronger hand in other areas of the economy. Any tariffs on Canadian energy would absolutely not be in American’s interests in terms of their energy dominance agenda. Trump wants to drop energy costs, not hike them.
I think we can leverage tariff exemptions in energy to other sectors, such as manufacturing, which is more vulnerable. But you have to make the case for why that makes sense for US, not just Canada. And that’s because we need as much industrial capacity in the west as we can muster to counter China and Russia. America First is fine, but this is not the time for America Alone.
Do you see provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan being more on-side with the US than the federal government when it comes to energy?
Of course. The North American capital that is threatening their economic interests is not Washington DC; it’s Ottawa.
I think you are seeing some recognition – much belated and fast on the heels of an emissions cap that could shut in over 2 million boe of production! – that what makes Canada important to the United States and in the world is our oil and gas and uranium and critical minerals and agricultural products.
We’ve spent almost a decade constraining those sectors. There is no doubt a Trump Admin will be complicated, but at the very least it’s clarified how important those sectors are to our soft and hard power.
It’s not too late for Canada to flex its muscles on the world stage and use its resources to advance our national interests, and our allies’ interests. In fact, it’s absolutely critical that we do so.
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The U.S. Senate voted Thursday to overturn a Biden-era policy that restricted oil and gas drilling in most of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge’s Coastal Plain, advancing a Trump administration effort to open the area to energy development.
In a 49-45 vote, the Senate passed a resolution overturning a 2024 Interior Department plan that would have limited oil and gas lease sales to about 400,000 acres within the 1.56-million-acre Arctic Wildlife Refuge. One Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, voted with Democrats to oppose the resolution. The legislation is now on the president’s desk awaiting signature.
Federal lease sales in Alaska will now revert to a framework developed in 2020 by the Trump administration that had opened most of the Coastal Plain to oil and gas development. In October, the Interior Department said it would move to restore lease sales to the entire Coastal Plain as part of Trump’s U.S. energy dominance agenda.
The president’s One Big Beautiful Bill, passed in July, includes provisions mandating six oil and gas lease sales in the Cook Inlet Planning Area in Alaska’s federal waters between 2026 and 2032, compared to two auctions covering the same area during the Biden administration.
Alaska’s all-Republican congressional delegation introduced and cosponsored the legislation. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said after the vote that a return to “balanced management” on the Coastal Plain will support U.S. energy independence.
Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, a group formed in 1988 by Alaska Natives opposed to oil drilling on the Coastal Plain, said the Senate vote ignored local concerns. The group has said the Coastal Plain is a critical habitat for Porcupine caribou.
“This action from DC ignores years of consultation and communication with our Gwich’in communities that rely on this landscape for not only our subsistence and survival, but also our culture and spiritual health and well-being,” Moreland said on the group’s website. “We stand united in our opposition to any oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge and will continue to fight this effort from the Trump administration and decision-makers who ignore our voices.”
Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, also said the vote prioritizes energy production over wildlife protections.
Groups supporting the push to open the Refuge to energy production include Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, whose members include leaders living in the North Slope region; Kaktovik Iñupiat Corp, the village corporation for Kaktovik, the only community located within the coastal plain; and North Slope Borough, a local government organization in Alaska that supports resource development to fund essential services like schools, infrastructure and emergency services.
As mandated by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by Congress in 2017, the first-ever lease sale of tracts in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge occurred on Jan. 6, 2021.
Seven of the nine bids accepted at the 2021 auction went to the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state-owned corporation, but those leases were canceled by the Biden administration in September 2023.
In March 2025, a U.S. District Court judge ruled the Biden administration had failed to follow the congressionally mandated procedure before canceling the leases, and ordered the Interior Department to vacate the cancelation.
For years, a conservation NGO supported by major foreign foundations has taken on the guise of Indigenous governance authority on British Columbia’s north coast. Meanwhile, rights-holding First Nations with an economic agenda are reshaping the region, yet their equal weight is overlooked. A clash of values has resulted.
For more than a decade, British Columbians have been told — mostly by well-meaning journalists and various pressure groups — that an organization called Coastal First Nations speaks with authority for the entire coast. The name sounds official. It sounds governmental. It sounds like a coalition of Indigenous governments with jurisdiction over marine waters.
It isn’t any of those things.
Coastal First Nations (CFN) is a non-governmental organization, incorporated under the BC Societies Act as The Great Bear Initiative Society. It doesn’t hold Indigenous rights or title. It has no legislated role to provide benefits or services to First Nations members. It has no jurisdiction over shipping, marine safety, forestry, fisheries, energy development, or environmental regulation. Yet its statements are frequently treated as if they carry the weight of sovereign authority.
It’s time to say out loud what many leaders — municipal, Indigenous, and industry — already know: CFN is an advocacy group, not a government. Case in point, a recent news story with the following lede: “B.C.’s Coastal First Nations say they will use ‘every tool in their toolbox’ to keep oil tankers out of the northern coastal waters.” A spokesperson claimed to represent “the Rights and Title Holders of the Central and North Coast and Haida Gwaii,” yet notwithstanding the rights of any individual First Nation, CFN does not hold any formal authority.
Here’s why this matters. The truth is, Alberta has already struck its grand bargain with the rest of Canada. Now it’s time to confront the uncomfortable truth that the country is still one bargain short of a functioning national deal.
In 2026, with Canadians increasingly alert to who is shaping national conversations, there is a reasonable expectation that debates affecting our economic future should be led and conducted by Canadians — not by foreign foundations, not by out-of-country campaign strategists, and not by NGOs built to advance someone else’s policy objectives.
Where the confusion came from
CFN’s rise in public visibility traces back to the “Great Bear Rainforest” era, when U.S. philanthropic foundations poured large sums of money into environmental campaigns in British Columbia. A Senate of Canada committee document notes that the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation alone provided approximately $25 million directly to Coastal First Nations, delivered as twenty-five nearly $1 million installments.
CFN also played a central role in the Great Bear Rainforest negotiations, which were financed by a coalition of foreign philanthropies including the Packard Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Nature Conservancy/Nature United, and Tides Canada Foundation. These foundations collectively contributed tens of millions of dollars to the “conservation financing” model that anchored CFN’s operating environment.
This history isn’t speculative. It’s well documented in foundation reports, Canadian Parliamentary evidence, and the publicly disclosed financial architecture behind the Great Bear Rainforest. For a generation, well-funded U.S. environmental campaigns have worked to make Canadians afraid of their own shadow by seeding doubt, stoking paralysis, and teaching a resource nation to second-guess the very wealth that built it.
Between 2010 and 2018, an independent forensic accounting review by Deloitte Forensic (backed by the Alberta government) found that foreign foundations provided roughly $788.1 million in grants for Canadian environmental initiatives. The largest single category — by a wide margin — was marine-based initiatives, totalling $297.2 million. In Deloitte’s categorization, “marine-based” overwhelmingly refers to coastal campaigns: Great Bear Rainforest–related advocacy, anti-tanker/shipping activism, marine-use regulation campaigns, marine ecological programs, and other coastal political work.
Screenshot of disclosed donations by a Palo Alto, CA foundation to CFN
Land-based initiatives were the second-largest category ($191 million), followed by wildlife preservation ($173 million).
The forensic review also showed that of the $427.2 million that physically entered Canada, 82% — approximately $350.3 million — was spent in British Columbia, with the dominant share directed specifically toward coastal and marine initiatives.
Taken together, these findings confirm that foreign-funded environmental activity in Canada has been geographically concentrated in British Columbia and thematically concentrated on the coast – exactly the domain where CFN has been positioned as a public-facing authority.
The real authority lies with the nations themselves
If British Columbians want to understand who truly governs the coast, they should look to the Indigenous governments that hold rights, title, citizens, and accountability — not NGOs that comment from the sidelines. That means not overlooking:
Haisla Nation, leaders of Cedar LNG
Nisga’a Nation, co-developers of Ksi Lisims LNG
Gitxaala Nation, asserting legal and territorial authority
Kitselas and Kitsumkalum, both shaping regional development
These governments are also coastal First Nations. They negotiate major economic partnerships, steward lands and waters, and make decisions grounded in their own legal orders. Moreover, representation is the key measure of accountability in a democracy: First Nations governing councils are elected by their members. The CFN is not elected. The nations are accountable to their own people — not to U.S. philanthropies or to the strategic objectives of foreign-backed environmental campaigns.
The Haisla Nation once belonged to CFN, but quit in protest in 2012 when the body opposed LNG. The Haisla council went on to fully embrace economic development via liquefied natural gas and own the upcoming Cedar LNG project.
Meanwhile, the central and northern coastal regions where CFN has opposed numerous economic opportunities continue to suffer the worst child poverty in British Columbia.
In the delicate politics of the region’s First Nations alliances, relationships are constantly in motion and governed by inviolable traditions of mutual respect. From these threads, it has to be said that the CFN’s strategy of weaving the appearance of unanimity is truly a fabrication. In point of fact, CFN represents just one half of the story. My data source tells the story, by drawing together the latest available economic and demographic information for 216 British Columbia First Nations:
Status Indian residents of CFN communities on the north coast number 5,484, with a total membership near and far of 20,447.
The pro-development group noted earlier numbers 5,505 living local out of a total membership of 16,830.
In other words, virtually equal. Hence it’s obvious that any media report citing CFN as the singular authority for local First Nations interests is a misleading one. CFN speaks for only a slice of the North Coast, not the whole, and the numbers make that impossible to ignore.
When a CFN motion opposing responsible resource development was adopted by the Assembly of First Nations (see Dec. 2 news), it was further evidence that the deck is stacked against First Nations that are accountable and position themselves as having broad responsibilities, including but not limited to raising the standard of living of their members.
The future belongs to the nations
The politics of LNG on the North Coast can’t be grasped without staring directly at the tanker ban — not as scripture, but as the political curiosity it has become. Anyone who knows these waters understands it’s mostly theatre: it doesn’t question letting Alaska oil tanker ships transit our exclusive economic zone when we cannot, and it doesn’t touch the real risks coastal people actually worry about. Yet waving it away is naïve. The ban behaves like a trickster spirit in our public life — capricious, emotionally loaded, and capable of turning a routine policy debate into a cultural conflagration with barely a flick of its tail.
This is why Coastal First Nations retain such gravitational pull. For years, the ban has served as the moral architecture of their Great Bear Sea campaign. CFN represents a long-game strategy — build legitimacy, occupy the moral high ground, and shape the destiny of a nation by holding the symbolic centre. Their concerns seem genuine and rooted in lived stewardship – yet were shaped by Madison Avenue minds hired by American philanthropists to affect our politics. But a near equal number of coastal nation residents unified by a different outlook also have skin in the game. They are charting futures grounded in prosperity, environmental care, and sovereignty on their own terms, and their authority is the real thing — born of title, law, and accountability to their own people.
And here is the irony worth heeding: the tanker ban’s pageantry masks a solution. It is dragging into daylight a conversation the province has avoided for decades — a conversation that will soon prove inevitable as court rulings unsettle the very foundation of property rights in British Columbia. This is the hinge that the moment turns on.
Canada cannot resolve its growing national contradictions without moving its energy to global markets. Alberta has already made its grand bargain with the country. Now British Columbia must craft its own — harnessing the prosperity of energy development to discharge political debts and finally settle the title question that has defined the province’s modern era.
Stewart Muir
President & CEO @ Resource Works | Co-founder of Tersa Earth | Host of the Power Struggle energy podcast | Founder of the Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase | Expert presenter with Unleashing Canadian Prosperity
