Pipelines seem more popular amid Trump’s threats. But does it make sense to build new ones?
When the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion opened on May 1, 2024, carrying oil from Alberta to the B.C coast, there was no grand opening ceremony. The federal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which had bought the project and spent over $34 billion — making the pipeline one of the largest infrastructure projects ever built in Canada — said almost nothing about it.
“This was a thing that the Liberal government did right for the oil sector … and they didn’t celebrate it at all. There was no ribbon cutting ceremony,” said Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, an oil market research service.
Even Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, a major Trudeau antagonist, thanked the federal Liberals for finishing the pipeline, saying that it would be a “game-changer” for Alberta’s oil industry and hailing it as an example of federal-provincial cooperation.
But the Liberals were heavily criticized for the pipeline from climate advocates, who saw it as the government betraying its emissions reduction goals and giving the oil and gas industry — Canada’s largest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases — a massive boost.
That all seemed like a distant memory at the Liberal Party’s leadership debates this week. In both the French and English language debates, leadership frontrunner candidates expressed warmer sentiments towards pipelines.
“A project like Energy East is possible. It’s a fact it’s possible to build a pipeline to Quebec, to the Maritimes from Alberta.… I think it’s an opportunity for us that we should seize,” said former central banker Mark Carney in the French debate on Monday.
“I am very proud to be the minister that got access for our energy to the Pacific. That diversification is so valuable today. It gives us an alternative to the United States. We need that more than ever,” said former finance minister Chrystia Freeland at the English debate on Tuesday.
All this comes as Canada faces U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51st state and to slap tariffs on Canadian exports — which could bring down Canada’s export-dependent economy — have led to newfound interest in shoring up Canada’s economic and energy independence, pipelines included.
But even if the political climate becomes more favourable to new pipeline projects, they still face the ongoing transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy.
That means building new pipelines might make sense for Canada’s energy security and politicians looking for leverage as they face down Trump, but it may not be very appealing for private companies trying to make a profit.
What do Canadians think of new pipelines?
An online Angus Reid survey of 2,012 Canadians taken in late January suggests an uptick in pipeline support.
Energy East, the west-to-east pipeline proposal that was cancelled in 2017, has seen its support increase from 58 to 65 per cent since 2019, the poll suggests. Support for the pipeline has reached 47 per cent even in Quebec, where there was a mass movement against the project when it was proposed over environmental concerns.
A little over half of Canadians seem to also support Northern Gateway, a proposed pipeline that would bring Alberta oil to the B.C. coast but was cancelled by the Trudeau government in 2016.
In B.C, the poll found 55 per cent of those surveyed support Northern Gateway, which was originally opposed by many Indigenous and environmental groups for potential spills along its route through the province, and in the waters off of Northern B.C.
“People are kind of casting around right now for alternatives. You know, how do we decouple our economy from the U.S?” said Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
He said this turn back toward pipelines shows a lack of political imagination, and Canada should use the moment to boost other industries — like clean electricity or manufacturing with a more certain future in a world turning away from fossil fuels.
“There’s this huge risk of stranded assets here that we’re continuing to double down on, infrastructure that we aren’t going to need in the next few decades,” he said.
“Instead of building new infrastructure that’s going to last us for 100 years.”
Matto Mildenberger, a political science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, who studies climate change policy and politics in North America, said that while the political tensions with the U.S. had opened up space to talk about pipelines, he still expected any future Liberal government to stay focused on the energy transition, something that’s been the party’s key priority for nearly a decade.
“I don’t view any of the messaging that we’re hearing from the Freeland and Carney campaigns as indicating as a de-prioritization of climate as an issue,” he said.
What lessons have been learned from Trans Mountain?
The Trans Mountain project and its eye-watering cost overruns loom over any future Canadian pipeline proposals.
Texas-based Kinder Morgan first proposed expanding the pipeline in 2012. The pipeline carries oil from Alberta to ports and refineries on the West Coast, and the company wanted to more than double its capacity and bring in opportunities for Alberta oil companies to export to markets in Asia and elsewhere.
But the project faced significant protests and legal challenges from environmental groups, First Nations along the route and the B.C. government itself. In 2018, Kinder Morgan suspended the project and said it may have to abandon it completely because of all the opposition.
The Trudeau government then stepped in to finish it, buying the pipeline for $4.5 billion and spending billions more to build the expansion.
“Even if it was grievously over budget, and even if the pipeline itself never actually breaks even as a standalone project, the benefit of the Crown being the one to build it is that the federal government can take a far broader economic picture for whether or not it’s worthwhile,” Johnston said.
He said that means the government can take into account the long-term benefits for Alberta, for oil industry workers, and now for having a way to export oil without being completely reliant on the U.S — even if the pipeline itself doesn’t succeed as a business based on how expensive it was to build.
As part of the process to set tolls for companies using the pipeline, the federal energy regulator is going to review why the project ended up costing so much.
“I think if we’re serious about this kind of nation building project, we need to understand what went wrong with Trans Mountain,” Johnston said, pointing out some of the cost was likely having to drill through mountains, or bad luck, like flooding. Other pipelines may not necessarily have such expensive obstacles, he said.
After more than a decade of delays and division, oil is now flowing through Canada’s expanded $34-billion Trans Mountain pipeline. Reporter Erin Collins and a CBC News team travelled the entire route to uncover how the pipeline is changing lives in the communities it runs through.
What about the clean energy transition?
Since 2021, the International Energy Agency, which advises industrialized countries on energy markets and projections, has been clear: to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, which are already more frequent and severe, the world needs to work toward net-zero emissions by 2050.
That, the IEA says, means no new long-term oil and gas projects should be built.
Last June, it forecast that global oil demand will peak by 2029 as power generation moves to renewable sources and electric cars become more popular.
“If the world is successful in bringing down fossil demand quickly enough to reach net zero emissions by 2050, new projects would face major commercial risks,” the agency warns, because the world would have moved on to renewable energy and there wouldn’t be enough demand for fossil fuels.
“I think that Canadians are going to have to grapple with the probably declining role of fossil fuels in the global economy as the energy transition proceeds. And that’s going to mean that the Canadian economy can’t be rooted in fossil fuel extraction for very much longer,” Mildenberger said.
“I think that a better approach to thinking about the disruption that the current American administration is creating is to think about other ways in which Canada can become energy independent in a way that also meets the needs of the climate.”
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