Alberta Premier Danielle Smith isn’t holding back when it comes to defending the province’s oil and gas sector—and blaming Ottawa for suppressing the industry.
Speaking remotely to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development (ENVI) in the Canadian House of Commons, Smith said Canada lost $20 billion in oil and gas capital investment to the United States over the past 120 days, blaming “a host of bad laws” and “investment killers” for the capital flight.
“We do need to decouple and eliminate a host of bad laws introduced by the Trudeau government over the past 10 years,” she said.
“The most egregious of those investment killers include the oil and gas emissions cap, the unconstitutional Bill C-69—or what we call the No New Pipelines Act — Bill C-48, the oil tanker ban, and the clean electricity regs, which penalize Alberta’s power sector and will drive up energy prices for Canadians and make natural gas a disadvantaged feedstock.”
Smith said Alberta is on a path to doubling oil and gas production, despite the extreme challenge of getting a new pipeline to the West Coast. With a lack of cooperation from British Columbia, Smith indicated recently she’s willing to do more energy business with the U.S.
In the meantime, she’s calling out Ottawa.
“The regulations and draft policies have resulted in economic stagnation and one of the single greatest acts of self-harm in Canada’s economic history,” she said.
“And as a result of these policies — and there are more of them that I listed in the last 120 days — Canadian-based companies have announced more than $20 billion in capital investment in the United States. Canada can be a global energy powerhouse. We can provide our people and the world with clean, reliable energy and eliminate energy poverty for billions of people.”
Smith added: “We can act, and we must act to enable investments in every major resource sector and to deliver revenues and economic activity in support of this great country. Canadians have been clear in recent polling they endorse a new pipeline to export our oil to Asia. We need the federal government to do the right thing and eliminate these bad laws.”
Alberta has 1.8 trillion barrels of oil in ground and 1.36 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas.