Loading...
Canada deserves to know.
Loading...
Tag
3 articles
Canada produced about 6.1 million barrels of oil per day in 2025. Its 14 refineries can process about 1.9 million barrels per day and ran at roughly 90% of that capacity. The arithmetic gap defines the system: roughly 4 million barrels a day leave the country as crude, 98% of it to the United States (2024), where Gulf Coast and Midwest refineries — built specifically to process heavy oil — capture the refining margin. During the 2025-26 trade war, the United States imposed a 10% tariff on Canadian crude, taxing the very flow Canada depends on. Meanwhile Canada re-imports refined products, and Ontario and Quebec refineries now source their imported crude almost entirely (99%+) from the United States. The most vivid loop is British Columbia's: Alberta crude moves via Trans Mountain to Washington State refineries (BP Cherry Point runs substantially on Alaskan and Canadian crude), and the largest share of Washington's exported refined product ships right back to B.C. — a figure documented at roughly 145,000 barrels per day of crude south and gasoline/jet fuel north in the mid-2010s. No major Canadian refinery has been built since 1984; the one attempt, Alberta's Sturgeon Refinery (2017-2020), ballooned from $5.7 billion to roughly $10 billion for just ~80,000 barrels per day, with Alberta taxpayers absorbing a 50% stake plus $25 billion in 30-year processing commitments. Economists like Trevor Tombe argue the market is signalling Canada has no comparative advantage in marginal refining; sovereignty advocates answer that the trade war has repriced the risk of refining dependence on a single foreign customer. The carbon argument the operator class often makes — that the round trip burns extra emissions — is real but modest: transport is a small share of oil's lifecycle emissions compared to extraction and combustion. The harder documented cost is economic: the value-added margin, and the Western Canadian Select discount, surrendered every day at the border. Both major federal leaders now propose versions of an answer — Carney's "energy superpower" agenda and Alberta pipeline memorandum aimed at Asian markets, Poilievre's Canada First National Energy Corridor — and both, notably, are about moving more crude, not refining it.
The Oil Tanker Moratorium Act (Bill C-48), passed by Parliament in June 2019, bans crude oil tankers carrying more than 12,500 metric tonnes from stopping, loading, or unloading at ports along the northern coast of British Columbia — specifically the waters from the northern tip of Vancouver Island (50°28′N) to the Alaska border. The geography it covers includes Hecate Strait, Dixon Entrance, and the waters surrounding Haida Gwaii. The Act killed the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline (Enbridge) and the Eagle Spirit pipeline (an Indigenous-led proposal led by 35 First Nations along the proposed route). It does not apply to tankers below the 12,500-tonne threshold (smaller fuel deliveries to coastal communities are exempt) and it does not apply to U.S. tankers transiting between Alaska and the continental United States. Those U.S. tankers operate under the 1985 voluntary Tanker Exclusion Zone (TEZ), which keeps them offshore from BC's coast but allows them to pass. In Atlantic Canada, the situation is the inverse: the largest refinery in Canada — Irving Oil's 320,000-barrel-per-day facility in Saint John, New Brunswick — runs in part on imported crude, with Saudi Arabia historically supplying between 63,000 and 127,000 barrels per day. Canada imports approximately 10.7% of its crude oil supply from Saudi Arabia (2023), with additional volumes from the United States, Nigeria, and other suppliers. The Alberta-to-New-Brunswick pipeline that would have replaced much of this — the 4,500 km, 1.1 million bpd Energy East project — was cancelled by TransCanada in October 2017, citing regulatory delays and changed market conditions. The pieces are connected: Canada has constrained where Canadian oil can move within its own borders, while continuing to import equivalent oil from foreign suppliers via tankers that, for the most part, are not Canadian-flagged.
On May 2, 2026, signature collection closed on a citizen-initiative petition under Alberta’s Citizen Initiative Act asking whether the province should leave Canada. The petition’s organizer, Mitch Sylvestre of the Alberta Prosperity Project / Stay Free Alberta, reported approximately 302,000 signatures submitted to Elections Alberta. The threshold required to trigger a referendum was 177,732 signatures, or 10% of the 2023 provincial-vote count. Verification by the Chief Electoral Officer is currently on hold pending an Alberta Court of King’s Bench review of a treaty-rights challenge brought by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the Piikani Nation, the Siksika Nation, and the Blood Tribe. The two Quebec sovereignty referendums (1980 and 1995) were initiated by sitting Parti Québécois governments — René Lévesque’s and Jacques Parizeau’s respectively — not by citizen petitions. Alberta’s petition would, if certified, oblige the legislature to either pass legislation responsive to the question or hold a binding referendum.