We’re suckers. Look at oil exports

If you haven’t been reading the business pages, you might not know that Canadian ingenuity has developed a stunning new business model: producing expensive oil and giving it away cheap.

The gap between Canadian and U.S. oil is nudging US$50 a barrel. Alberta gets around US$26 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate is in the neighbourhood of US$72. The discount is so juicy that China has started switching away from Venezuela toward bargain-basement Canada. That tells you something — even claptrap, broken down, corruption-riddled Venezuela can’t undersell Canada’s sadsack inability to peddle its oil.

If the brainy entrepreneurs who figured out how to extract a valuable commodity from Alberta’s challenging oilsands had known the result would be treated like a loss-leader at Walmart, they might have directed their creativity elsewhere. Most countries recognize that natural limits on resource supplies dictate that they be husbanded carefully, for maximum advantage. Not Canada: we might as well hand out free oil at roadside stands with every 50-cent glass of lemonade. The next time Chrystia Freeland takes to lecturing Russia or Iran on their failings, the obvious comeback is easy: “And how much do you get for YOUR oil, Miss Bossypants?”

The reason for the price gap is no secret: Canada can’t ship the stuff because of inadequate pipeline space. The shortfall is due to politics. A plan to build a pipeline to New Brunswick couldn’t get past premiers in Ontario and Quebec. A proposal for a pipeline across northern British Columbia was scuppered by the Trudeau government.

Construction on the Keystone XL line through the U.S. may start next year after delays caused by relentless obstructionism. And the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline, now owned by the federal government, may or may not ever be built.

The political monkey business might make sense if something was being gained. We could all pat ourselves on the back if, by voluntarily depriving ourselves of a hefty profit, we were serving the environment and the greater good of a sustainable Earth. But no, we’re not. What we’re doing is penalizing ourselves for the sheer joy of doing so. Apparently that makes us feel good as Canadians.

The inability to build pipelines hasn’t slowed production at the oilsands, much as activist zealots might wish otherwise. Far from it: one contributing factor to the price gap is the growth in supply. By 2035, Canadian oil output is expected to increase 33 per cent. Rather than send it through pipelines that can be carefully monitored, we’re pumping it into massive strings of rail cars to go rumbling across the prairie. Since 2012 oil-by-rail has grown from 30,000 barrels a day to 200,000 barrels a day. Gee, what could go wrong with mile-long stretches of tanker cars snaking across the landscape? Ask the people of LacMégantic. Pipeline spills can be cleaned up; exploding rail cars risk human lives.

The cost is not just in safety, but in social disadvantage as well. Every $1 of the price gap costs Alberta’s treasury $210 million. At $50 a barrel that’s more than $10 billion. Think Alberta’s New Democratic government would like to have an extra $10 billion for the schools, hospitals, jobs, wages and other benefits it has promised the province’s four million people? Environmentalists, activists and progressives usually champion left-wing leaders like Premier Rachel Notley, but for some reason, when it comes to Alberta, they can’t see past their prejudices.

As a result, Notley is very likely to be replaced by the sort of person the progressive crowd loathes: Jason Kenney and his reborn, feisty, stuffyour-carbon-tax Conservatives. If activists devoted their next 37 communal planning sessions to damaging their own cause, they probably couldn’t do better. Kenney isn’t even premier yet and he’s already deep in planning with like-minded premiers from Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario to foil Ottawa from imposing the carbon tax it’s been waving at voters like a rolled up newspaper.

Here’s the situation with the carbon tax: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose close friend and chief aide is a noted environmentalist, figured he had a trade-off with Alberta. He’d help build a pipeline and they wouldn’t go bonkers over the carbon tax. But then the courts blocked the pipeline — not least because of Ottawa’s bumbling policies and ill-directed assumptions — eliminating the benefit to Alberta while retaining the pain. Unless the Liberals can overcome the court’s objections, and fast, Trudeau will go into next year’s election pledged to a tax on carbon, but with no pipeline in sight. All Canadians will pay the price of the tax, while the benefit goes to Chinese buyers snapping up cheap oil.

Canadians are already out $4.5 billion for the non-existent Trans Mountain expansion. We’re losing almost $1 billion a month in revenue due to the price gap. We’re shipping crude across the country in railway cars even though we know the potential damage from exploding tankers. None of it is benefiting anyone in any way: the economy is losing out, social programs are being shortchanged, jobs are being lost, and there’s no climate gain to speak of. British Columbia’s government, which is adamantly opposed to another oil pipeline, meanwhile hosts the continent’s biggest coal export terminal and all but danced a jig when a $40-billion liquefied natural gas plant was announced for Kitimat, the same town that refused to consider serving as the Kinder Morgan end point. Guess where the gas will come from: northern B.C. and Alberta. By pipeline. Across two mountain ranges.

No wonder the U.S. assumed it could bamboozle us over a new trade deal. Any country that puts so much effort into defeating its own interests must look like easy pickings.