David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data, told me that Trump is now the second-most important issue facing Canadians, behind only the cost of living, and the top issue in Quebec. When voters focus on Trump, they overwhelmingly prefer Carney and the Liberals to Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives.

That helps explain Carney’s sustained popularity.

Coletto says perceptions of how the prime minister is managing the Canada-U.S. relationship are by far the strongest driver of his approval. Even when negotiations break down and tariffs escalate, voters continue to blame Trump rather than Carney.

The more consequential finding is how Canadians are responding to the economic threat. Seventy per cent expect U.S. tariffs to hurt their local economy. Yet only 18 per cent favour making concessions to Washington.

Coletto describes the public mood as something resembling a wartime psychology: people understand there may be costs, but many believe those costs could be worth paying if Canada becomes more independent and less vulnerable to American pressure.

That is why Carney’s language about economic sovereignty matters. Canadians appear increasingly uncomfortable with how dependent the economy has become on the United States. Coletto says half of Canadians even reject the idea of simply continuing to sell resources and minerals to the Americans under an otherwise beneficial trading arrangement.

The shift creates a profound problem for Conservatives.

Coletto sees their coalition divided roughly between voters who dislike Trump and want Canada to stand up to him, and a populist base more sympathetic to Trump, opposed to retaliation and more open to concessions. Appealing to one side risks alienating the other.

And this may outlast Trump.

Coletto’s ‘divorce’ analogy is useful: Canadians increasingly believe the United States has changed. Even if the two countries eventually reach an accommodation, the old assumption that the relationship will simply return to normal may be gone.

That would make this more than a polling story. It would mean Trump is helping reorder Canadian politics - and perhaps Canada’s economic strategy - for years to come.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

Donald Trump’s latest attacks on Canada can look petty, impulsive, and disconnected from any coherent strategy. A young British Columbia cadet becomes the target of an insult. Lake Ontario is renamed “Lake America” for U.S. audiences. Canada walks away from trade negotiations, and the 51st-state rhetoric suddenly returns.

Political scientist Stewart Prest argues that these episodes make more sense when viewed through a single lens: dominance theatre.

For Trump and the political culture around him, Prest says, almost every encounter is structured as a contest with a winner and a loser.

Trump must be the dominant actor. He keeps pushing, asking and escalating until somebody finally says no. If an opponent gives ground, the reward is rarely stability. It is another demand.

That framework helps explain the extraordinary deterioration in Canada-U.S. relations.

Prime Minister Mark Carney spent months trying to find a workable agreement with Washington. When the Americans made demands Canada could not accept, Carney walked away. Prest argues that the act of refusing to bend was itself the offence: it challenged Trump’s expectation of dominance.

The lesson for Canada is uncomfortable.

Ottawa cannot simply ignore provocations because silence can look like consent. But matching Trump’s rhetoric risks escalation in a relationship where Canada remains the more dependent partner. Prest’s prescription is disciplined pushback: call out the behaviour, refuse unacceptable demands, and defend Canadian sovereignty without turning every provocation into a shouting match.

More importantly, Canada should stop assuming the relationship will soon return to normal.

Prest argues that Trumpism has become embedded in American political culture, conservative media, state politics and institutions. Even after Trump leaves office, the habits and resentments his movement has cultivated are likely to persist.

That means Canada is not managing a temporary disruption. It may be learning how to live beside a different United States.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

Donald Trump’s Venezuela oil deal is significant enough on its own. The agreement gives a Pentagon-backed partnership access to enormous Venezuelan reserves. It is explicitly being sold by Washington as a way to strengthen U.S. energy security while reducing the influence of China and Russia.

But oil may be only the most visible piece of a much bigger story.

In my interview with William Vogt, we step back from the immediate headlines and look at Venezuela through the longer history of U.S. power in Latin America. Vogt points to the Trump administration’s so-called “Donroe Doctrine,” a play on the 19th century Monroe Doctrine that asserted American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, and asks what happens when that old idea of an American sphere of influence is combined with the populist, strongman political tradition that has shaped much of modern Latin America.

That is where this gets particularly interesting.

Trump is often presented as an American political anomaly. Vogt suggests there are echoes of the caudillo, the dominant leader or “man on horseback” familiar in Latin American political history. In other words, the United States may be trying to reassert traditional hemispheric dominance using a political style that Latin Americans know very well.

China complicates the picture. Beijing has spent years building commercial and political relationships throughout the region through infrastructure, technology, energy, and resource investments.

Vogt argues that Brazil deserves much more attention than it usually receives in North American coverage. The country is a large market, a major resource producer, an important Chinese economic partner ,and the dominant power in South America. Its October 4 presidential election arrives just as Venezuela is entering a new political and economic era.

Vogt is careful not to claim that Washington has a perfectly coherent strategy. In fact, one of the most useful parts of our discussion is his skepticism about whether the Trump administration’s actions amount to sustained strategic competition with China at all.

That uncertainty may be the point. Venezuela is becoming a test of what Trump’s Western Hemisphere policy actually is: an energy grab, an attempt to exclude China, a revival of the Monroe Doctrine, or some combination of all three.

And to understand what happens next, Vogt says, keep your eyes on Brazil. Its election could become a hinge point between Washington and Beijing, while decisions about energy, infrastructure and technology will show how much room Latin American governments believe they have to hedge between the two powers.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

“BREAKING NEWS: The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” - U.S. President Donald Trump, Truth Social, August 28, 2026

“Venezuela supplies the oil, its industry and the experience of its workers accumulated over more than 100 years. The United States supplies the capital and technology needed to restore and develop those assets. In return, Venezuela receives production, employment, investment in infrastructure, increased government revenues and productive linkages for its domestic industry.” - Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodríguez, from her televised address to the country on August 29.

The U.S. Government is now in the oil business.

Washington and Venezuela signed a strategic agreement on Friday that includes 65 billion barrels of heavy crude, the grade of oil that competes directly with Alberta oil. The documents have not been released, and details are scarce. But it appears that the agreement contemplates up to $100 billion of investment to restore more than 1.5 million barrels per day (b/d) of production.

But unlike conventional foreign investment, Washington itself will take a direct economic interest in the company developing the oil and secure preferential access to part of its production at cost.

And that changes the story. Trump isn’t simply opening Venezuela to American oil companies after years of sanctions and neglect. His government is attempting to become an oil-market player itself—using American political, financial and military power to secure foreign crude for American refiners and American energy security. For Alberta, which sends roughly 3.9 million b/d of crude to the United States and depends heavily on the same Gulf Coast refineries that can process Venezuela’s extra-heavy oil, the implications are impossible to ignore.

What We Know About the U.S.-Venezuela Agreement

Start with the scale.

The agreement covers 17 oilfields containing an estimated 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, roughly one-fifth of Venezuela’s enormous oil endowment, and sets a target of more than 1.5 million b/d of production. Rodríguez says the agreement could attract more than $100 billion in investment and generate $209 billion in revenues for Venezuela.

But this is where things get murky. The agreement itself remains secret, and even basic details are disputed, including whether the development rights run for 25 years or 100 years.

What is clear is that this isn’t just another production agreement between Venezuela and foreign oil companies. The United States government itself is in the deal.

The United States Government Is Now in the Oil Business

The reported structure would give the U.S. government a 35 per cent passive interest in the company developing the fields, plus preferential rights to buy 20 per cent of its production at cost.

The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital would reportedly obtain that interest through “penny warrants,” allowing Washington to acquire equity without putting up a large amount of money at the outset. The government would share in the upside if the venture succeeds while limiting its initial exposure, and the at-cost purchase rights would give the United States privileged access to Venezuelan heavy crude.

There is one significant wrinkle: Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told Reuters that the office is legally restricted to loans, loan guarantees and technical assistance and “does not take equity stakes in private companies.” Exactly how Trump intends to structure the government’s participation remains unclear.

The Venezuela Perspective

For Venezuela, the bargain is straightforward: it has the oil but desperately needs the capital and technology to produce it.

Rodríguez says the agreement will bring more than $100 billion of investment into an industry hollowed out by years of underinvestment, sanctions and deteriorating infrastructure. In return for opening 17 fields to development, Venezuela expects higher production, thousands of jobs, new infrastructure, increased government revenues and new business for domestic suppliers.

Rodríguez estimates the agreement could generate $209 billion in revenue for Venezuela. Her pitch to Venezuelans is essentially that the country retains ownership of its oil while American money and technology provide the means to get far more of it out of the ground and into the market.

A Textbook Neo-Mercantilist Bargain

Military force removed former president Nicolás Maduro, political coercion secured access to Venezuelan resources, American capital and technology will develop them, and the resulting crude will serve American refiners, military requirements and energy security.

That is about as close to textbook neo-mercantilism as the 21st century is likely to get.

The powerful industrial metropolis secures privileged access to the hinterland’s resources, then supplies the capital and technology required to develop them while capturing a significant share of the economic benefit.

Professor Andrew Nurse of Mount Allison University described Trump’s strategy in a recent Energi Media interview as concentrating “advanced manufacturing, investment, and high-value industrial production” inside the United States while securing privileged access to the strategic resources of Canada, Mexico and Latin America.

Venezuela now looks remarkably like the model put into practice. And Trump has something the mercantilists of old would recognize immediately: overwhelming power over the weaker party.

University of Toronto professor Drew Fagan told me that Washington is putting pressure on Canada to “serve them first” because the enormous imbalance of power allows the United States to take advantage. University of Houston economist Ed Hirs was blunter, describing Trump’s approach as a “colonial type of projection of power.”

Venezuela illustrates what that projection of power can look like at its most extreme.

Washington used military power to change the government, then negotiated an arrangement giving the United States a direct economic interest in developing the country’s most important resource and privileged access to the oil it produces. Trump calls it the biggest oil deal in history.

It may also be the clearest example yet of the economic order he is trying to build in the Western Hemisphere.

Venezuela Is the Warning for Canada

Trump’s treatment of Venezuela suggests that his administration views the Western Hemisphere as an American-controlled resource hinterland—and Canada’s oil, gas, hydroelectricity and critical minerals are all part of the same strategy.

That is essentially the economic expression of Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which declares that the United States must remain “preeminent in the Western Hemisphere” and prevent outside powers from gaining control of strategically important assets and resources.

Venezuela shows what that doctrine looks like in practice: exclude China and Russia, bring strategic resources firmly inside the American sphere, and use U.S. power to determine how they are developed and where they flow.

Canada is obviously not Venezuela.

But we sit inside the same hemisphere with vastly more economic integration and many of the strategic resources Washington says it needs. Trump does not have to send soldiers to secure them. He has the enormous American market, tariffs, investment, pipelines, and Canada’s extraordinary dependence on the United States as leverage.

The means might be different. But the underlying logic of the 2025 National Security Strategy is the same: the Western Hemisphere is America’s strategic domain, and its resources should serve American interests first.

That is why Canadians should pay very close attention to Trump’s “biggest oil deal in world history.”

Washington is demonstrating in Venezuela what an America First resource policy looks like when the United States holds nearly all the cards.

The hinterland supplies the oil. American capital and technology develop it. American refiners get privileged access. American strategic interests determine the terms. Now consider Trump’s demands that Canada guarantee supplies of oil and gas, give Washington preferential access to critical minerals, and align our trade relationships with American strategic interests.

Different country, different tactics, same organizing principle: Canada has the resources. Trump wants the leverage.

Endnotes

1. Reuters, “Trump says U.S. to take partial control of 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil,” Aug. 29, 2026. Overview of the agreement, including 65 billion barrels, 17 fields, investment and revenue projections. Reuters coverage of the U.S.-Venezuela agreement

2. The Wall Street Journal, “Inside Trump’s Plan to Give the Pentagon a Stake in Venezuela’s Oil Riches,” Aug. 29, 2026. Details of the proposed 35 per cent U.S. government interest, 20 per cent at-cost purchase rights and Pentagon involvement through “penny warrants.” Read the Wall Street Journal report

3. Associated Press, “Trump says U.S. has entered deal with Venezuela to take control of 65 billion barrels of oil reserves,” Aug. 28, 2026. Initial reporting on the agreement and Trump’s announcement. Read the Associated Press report

4. Financial Times, “Trump says U.S. to take control of 65bn barrels of Venezuelan oil,” Aug. 29, 2026. Reporting on the structure, scale and disputed legitimacy of the agreement. Read the Financial Times report

5. Financial Times, “Controversial Venezuelan executive courts investors after Trump oil deal,” Aug. 30, 2026. Reporting on North American Blue Energy Partners, Alejandro Betancourt, the 17 fields and Pentagon financial support. Read the Financial Times report

6. Financial Times, “Alejandro Betancourt: the man who would be Trump’s ‘viceroy’ in Venezuela,” Aug. 31, 2026. Background on Betancourt and his role in the agreement. Read the Financial Times profile

7. Financial Times, “US oil deal denounced by both sides of Venezuelan politics,” Aug. 30, 2026. Reporting on opposition to the agreement, its disputed duration, PDVSA and transparency concerns. Read the Financial Times report

8. U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Venezuela Country Analysis Brief.” Background on Venezuela’s approximately 303 billion barrels of proven reserves, extra-heavy Orinoco crude and the technical and investment challenges involved in increasing production. Read the EIA Venezuela analysis

9. Luisa Palacios, Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, “New Venezuelan Oil Regulations Offer Promise, But Politics and Quake Recovery Threaten Investment,” July 27, 2026. Analysis of Venezuela’s new petroleum regime, private investment and prospects for increasing production. Read the Columbia CGEP analysis

10. U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Lower crude oil prices reduced U.S.-Canada energy trade value in 2025,” July 29, 2026. Reports that U.S. crude imports from Canada averaged approximately 3.9 million b/d in 2025. Read the EIA Canada-U.S. trade analysis

11. Canada Energy Regulator, “Market Snapshot: Overview of 2025 Canada-U.S. Energy Trade,” May 27, 2026. Canadian data on crude oil, natural gas and electricity trade with the United States. Read the CER market snapshot

12. Alvarez & Marsal, “Beyond the Venezuela Conjecture: Strategic Moves to Build Enduring Advantage for Canada’s Energy Companies,” March 2, 2026. Analysis of renewed Venezuelan heavy-oil competition with Canadian crude, particularly in the U.S. Gulf Coast. Read the Alvarez & Marsal analysis

13. White House, Executive Order 14373, “Safeguarding Venezuelan Oil Revenue for the Good of the American and Venezuelan People,” Jan. 9, 2026. Establishes the U.S. government framework governing Venezuelan petroleum revenues held in designated accounts. Read Executive Order 14373

14. White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, November 2025. Declares that the United States “must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere,” calls for limiting adversarial outside influence and identifies strategic resources in the hemisphere for protection and joint development. Read the relevant National Security Strategy passage

15. Energi Media interview with Professor Andrew Nurse, Mount Allison University, 2026. Nurse argues that Trump’s neo-mercantilist strategy seeks to concentrate advanced manufacturing and investment in the United States while securing privileged access to the strategic resources of Canada, Mexico and Latin America.

16. Energi Media interview with Professor Drew Fagan, University of Toronto, 2026. Fagan argues that Washington is using its enormous economic power to pressure Canada to “serve them first.”

17. Energi Media interview with Ed Hirs, University of Houston, 2026. Hirs characterizes Trump’s pressure on Canada and other countries as a “colonial type of projection of power.”

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

“This means de-escalating and doubling down on diplomacy with members of the United States Congress and with governors and both parties to ensure that they understand how destructive these tariffs are for the American people and how we will be there to help as soon as the tariffs are reversed. Basically, it means being more Canadian, too friendly, kind, and helpful to resist [emphasis added].” - Danielle Smith press conference, August 26, 2026

Is the Alberta premier really this naive? The last line in that quote, given the context, is grotesque. It’s outright appeasement. Rolling over and showing your belly to the world. Donald Trump started this trade war to force concessions from Canada. Smith’s answer is to make the fight as painless as possible for him. Smiling at the bully doesn’t stop the bullying.

Prominent American political scientist Robert Pape argues that Smith badly misunderstands what is driving Trump. His trade war isn’t really about trade at all. It’s about MAGA politics.

Trump’s base is overwhelmingly blue-collar, non-college-educated Americans who believe globalization robbed them of the good-paying manufacturing jobs their fathers enjoyed and shipped them overseas to China, Mexico and, yes, Canada. In their telling, they’ve been getting screwed for 30 years while Canadian workers prospered at their expense.

Trump understands that anger. His strategy is punishment: hurt the countries MAGA blames, force them to give something back, then parade the punishment before his supporters as proof that he’s fighting for them.

As Pape puts it, “They want punishment. They want payback.”

With the midterms approaching, punishing Canada also lets Trump tell MAGA voters, “I got your back.” Being “too friendly, kind, and helpful to resist” isn’t going to satisfy that political need. Trump needs Canada to lose.

Smith thinks Trump’s motivation will change after the November midterms: “Time is our friend. We must give our people and our businesses the resources they need to survive and give the American people and their leaders the time they need to reverse these terrible policies after the November midterms.”

What a dreadful misreading of American politics. Totally clueless. In fact, given what’s at stake, Canadians are entitled to ask: how can someone so tied into the American MAGA culture and its politics be this oblivious?

Smith’s Misplaced Loyalties

“She has clearly demonstrated that her loyalty is to Donald Trump. She is very much a MAGA Republican, even though she happens to be the premier of Alberta,” Thomas Lukaszuk, former Conservative deputy premier of Alberta and current head of the #ForeverCanadian movement, told me recently in an interview.

Smith’s MAGA connections are hardly a secret. She travelled to Mar-a-Lago in January 2025 to meet Trump and members of his inner circle. She regularly travels to Washington for the National Prayer Breakfast and other gatherings where she mixes with the MAGA political world.

The connections extend into her cabinet. Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen actually worked on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, travelling through 28 states, spending time with Ivanka Trump and celebrating election night wearing a MAGA hat.

And Smith herself has made no secret of her admiration for Trump and the movement he leads.

Does this prove her disloyalty to Canada? When Trump attacks Canada and Smith consistently argues for the response that asks the least of Alberta and puts the least pressure on Trump, the evidence suggests that she is more loyal to an American ideology than she is to her own country.

Then there is the Alberta oil and gas industry. Here, the evidence is even harder to explain away.

Before becoming premier, Smith was president of the Alberta Enterprise Group and a registered lobbyist for the organization, whose members included some of Alberta’s biggest oil and gas companies. She lobbied the provincial government on oilpatch issues, including a proposal called RStar that would give energy companies royalty credits for cleaning up old wells they were already legally responsible for cleaning up.

Then Smith became premier and almost immediately put the same idea into her energy minister’s mandate letter. When RStar proved to be extremely unpopular with Albertans, she turned it into a “pilot project.” Then she commissioned a trusted advisor to develop the Mature Asset Strategy, which is just RStar in a different package.

Over the past five years, she has been a shrill shill for the industry’s interests.

Danielle Smith’s Convenient Boogeyman

Smith spent much of the Trudeau years raging against federal climate policies, portraying them as an attack on Alberta oil and gas. The proposed emissions cap wasn’t about cutting emissions; according to Smith, it was about cutting production. Federal climate policy wasn’t climate policy; it was Ottawa deliberately kneecapping Alberta.

Eventually she boiled the whole Trudeau record down to one outrageous claim that she still repeats: Justin Trudeau tried to “kill” the oil and gas industry. Except the industry stubbornly refused to die.

Canadian oil production reached record levels. Exports increased. And the federal government spent $34 billion buying and expanding the Trans Mountain pipeline when the private sector walked away. Somehow, in Smith’s version of history, all of that adds up to an attempt to kill the industry.

Then Mark Carney arrived, and Smith went shopping.

The Canada-Alberta MOU signed last November gave her most of what she had been demanding and then some. The federal oil and gas emissions cap was gone. Ottawa agreed to suspend the Clean Electricity Regulations in Alberta. A new million-barrel-a-day bitumen pipeline to the West Coast became a national priority, along with another 300,000 to 400,000 barrels a day of expansion on Trans Mountain. Ottawa agreed to work with Alberta on the Pathways carbon capture project and speed up approvals for major energy projects.

Alberta made commitments of its own, but there is no mistaking who walked away smiling. After years of complaining that Ottawa wouldn’t get out of the oilpatch’s way, Smith finally had a prime minister prepared to help Alberta produce and export a lot more oil.

Now Canada is in a trade war with the United States and suddenly that enormously important industry must be swaddled in bubble wrap. Oil and gas is Alberta’s mighty economic engine when Smith wants something from Ottawa. When Canada needs something from Alberta, apparently it’s too fragile to touch.

Smith has drawn one very clear line: Alberta oil and gas must be protected. Everybody else can take a hit. The oil patch cannot.

The Cherry On The Sundae

My latest interview with Mount Royal University professor Duane Bratt neatly summarises Smith. Her position on Trump, he says, comes down to “a combination of economic self-interest in the province of Alberta” and “her ideological alignment with Donald Trump.”

Smith condemns tariffs and trade wars, but somehow never gets around to condemning the man who started this one. “She never, ever criticizes Donald Trump,” Bratt told me. “This is his trade war.”

Why the silence? Because on almost everything except trade, Smith and Trump are fellow travellers. Bratt points to attacks on courts, trans rights, and school boards, among other issues.

“There is a pro-Trump wing of the United Conservative Party,” he says. “It may be small, but it exists.” Its members look south at what Trump is doing and say, “we want more of that.” Then Bratt delivers the money line: “And I would put her in that category.”

This matters because Smith isn’t some poor premier being dragged around by the MAGA wing of her party. “She’s not just responding,” says Bratt. “I think she is part of that.” At the same time, she is trying to keep the separatists inside her political tent, another “balancing act,” as Bratt calls it.

And Alberta has been largely spared Trump’s tariffs because the Americans need our oil. Bratt says that fact “fundamentally explains a lot of Smith’s behaviour.”

Compare her with Doug Ford. Trump is hammering Ontario autos and steel, so Ford is furious and fighting back. Alberta oil is largely protected, so Smith counsels patience, diplomacy and no retaliation.

“If the shoe is on the other foot, if autos were being exempted and oil wasn’t,” Bratt says, “I think you’d see a dramatic shift in the positions of Danielle Smith and of Doug Ford.” His conclusion could have been written for this essay: “Where you stand depends upon where you sit.”

And where does Danielle Smith sit?

With an oil and gas industry she once lobbied for and has spent years defending. With a separatist movement she dare not seriously confront. With a MAGA movement whose politics she shares. And with Donald Trump, whom she still cannot bring herself to blame for Donald Trump’s own trade war.

Put all of that together, and her refusal to use Alberta oil as leverage suddenly isn’t mysterious at all. Danielle Smith is protecting Team Smith’s ideology, her extreme populist political base, and the Alberta oil and gas industry that once signed her paycheques.

And Canada?

Her loyalty to her country comes well down the list. If it makes the list at all. She should be roundly condemned, not coddled by the national news media and treated with kid gloves by Prime Minister Mark Carney.

If you agree, write your Member of Parliament. If you live in Alberta, write your Member of the Legislative Assembly and the Premier herself.

Someone has to stand up for Canada. It may as well be you because it certainly isn’t Danielle Smith,

Endnotes and Sources

1. Danielle Smith, press conference on U.S. tariffs, Aug. 26, 2026. Smith argued Canada should de-escalate the trade dispute, intensify diplomacy with Congress and state governors, and become “too friendly, kind, and helpful to resist.” In the same press conference she argued that threatening or taxing Alberta oil exports could trigger severe U.S. retaliation, fuel shortages in Central Canada and efforts by American refiners to replace Canadian heavy crude. Energi Media transcript of Smith press conference, Aug. 26, 2026.

2. Robert Pape, interview with Energi Media, Aug. 2026. Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, argues that Donald Trump’s basic strategy is punishment: threaten or impose costs in order to extract immediate concessions. Pape argues that Trump’s tariff policy is also deeply rooted in MAGA domestic politics, particularly anger among blue-collar, non-college-educated Americans who believe globalization destroyed good-paying American jobs. Pape told Energi Media that Trump’s supporters “want punishment” and “want payback,” and that punishing Canada allows Trump to tell his political base, “I got your back.” Pape also warned against conceding to coercion: “Once you give a dime, you’re in for a dollar.”

3. Thomas Lukaszuk, interview with Energi Media, Aug. 2026. Lukaszuk is a former Alberta Progressive Conservative cabinet minister and deputy premier and founder of the Forever Canadian movement. He argues that Trump’s trade actions should be understood as economic warfare and that Alberta should fully participate in a Team Canada response, including allowing Alberta energy exports to be considered as negotiating leverage. Lukaszuk has also argued that Canada weakens its negotiating position by promising Washington in advance that it will never use “the biggest hammer, which is oil and gas.”

4. Danielle Smith and Donald Trump. Smith met Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Jan. 11, 2025, and again at his golf club the following morning. Smith described their conversation as “friendly and constructive” and said she also spoke with several “key allies of the incoming administration.” CBC News also reported and documented Smith’s Mar-a-Lago visit.

5. Devin Dreeshen and the Trump campaign. Before entering Alberta provincial politics, Dreeshen volunteered with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for approximately eight months. He travelled through 28 states and spent time shadowing Ivanka Trump. Vice subsequently reported on Dreeshen’s campaign work and a photograph of him at Trump’s election-night celebration wearing a red MAGA hat.

6. Danielle Smith and the Alberta Enterprise Group. Smith registered as a lobbyist for the Alberta Enterprise Group in June 2019 and later became its president. The organization represented approximately 100 companies and included significant Alberta energy interests among its membership. Smith continued to be registered as an AEG lobbyist into 2022, the year she became UCP leader and premier. The Canadian Press examined her lobbying history shortly after she took office.

7. RStar and oil-well cleanup. Before becoming premier, Smith advocated a proposal generally known as RStar, under which oil and gas companies could receive royalty credits in connection with cleaning up inactive wells. Oil and gas companies already have a legal obligation to clean up their sites. After Smith became premier, her government developed a $100-million pilot, renamed the Liability Management Incentive Program, that would have offered royalty credits to companies fulfilling those cleanup obligations. Scotiabank criticized the proposal on the grounds that private companies should remain responsible for liabilities they willingly assumed.

8. RStar after the 2023 election. Following intense criticism, the proposed $100-million Liability Management Incentive Program pilot was shelved. Smith nevertheless directed her energy minister after the 2023 election to develop incentives for reclamation of inactive legacy oil and gas sites, language critics noted echoed RStar.

9. Mature Asset Strategy. Smith subsequently appointed longtime oil and gas industry figure David Yager as a special adviser. Yager chaired the process that produced Alberta’s Mature Asset Strategy, which recommends changes to the way Alberta manages aging oil and gas properties and their liabilities. Critics, including landowners and environmental-law researchers, argue that elements of the strategy would shift additional risks or costs associated with mature oil and gas assets away from industry.

10. Trudeau, Canadian oil production and Trans Mountain. Despite Smith’s repeated portrayal of the Trudeau government’s climate policies as an existential threat to Alberta oil and gas, Canadian oil production reached record levels during Trudeau’s tenure and expanded pipeline capacity allowed exports to increase. The Trudeau government also purchased the Trans Mountain pipeline in 2018 after Kinder Morgan suspended further spending on its expansion and subsequently financed completion of the expansion. [Statistics Canada, Canada Energy Regulator and Trans Mountain Corporation are the appropriate primary sources for production, export and project-cost figures.]

11. Canada-Alberta Memorandum of Understanding, Nov. 27, 2025. Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Smith signed an energy agreement providing for substantial expansion of Alberta oil production and export capacity while also containing climate commitments by Alberta. The agreement made a privately financed West Coast pipeline carrying at least one million barrels per day of Alberta bitumen a national priority. It also contemplated an additional 300,000 to 400,000 barrels per day of capacity on Trans Mountain and advancement of the Pathways carbon capture project.

12. Under the same Canada-Alberta MOU, Ottawa committed not to implement the federal oil and gas emissions cap, immediately suspended application of the Clean Electricity Regulations in Alberta pending a new carbon-pricing agreement, committed to an efficient approval process for the proposed West Coast pipeline and agreed to work with Alberta on Pathways. Alberta, in return, made significant commitments of its own, including stronger industrial carbon pricing, methane reductions and the Pathways emissions-reduction project. A May 2026 implementation agreement reaffirmed the pipeline, Pathways and electricity commitments.

13. The federal government’s current energy strategy explicitly contemplates growth in Alberta oil production. The July 2026 Pathways Plus agreement states that production growth is “essential” to underpin both the proposed West Coast Oil Pipeline and Trans Mountain expansion and confirms that Ottawa is pursuing an additional estimated 300,000 to 400,000 barrels per day of Trans Mountain capacity.

14. Duane Bratt, interview with Energi Media, Aug. 2026. Bratt, professor of political science at Mount Royal University, described Smith’s position toward Trump as combining Alberta’s “economic self-interest” with her “ideological alignment with Donald Trump.” Bratt said Smith “never, ever criticizes Donald Trump,” described a pro-Trump faction within the United Conservative Party whose members look at Trump’s politics and say “we want more of that,” and added of Smith: “I would put her in that category.” Energi Media interview transcript, Aug. 2026.

15. In the same interview, Bratt rejected the idea that Smith is simply responding to pressure from the MAGA-oriented elements of her political coalition: “She’s not just responding. I think she is part of that.” He also described Smith’s management of separatist sentiment within the UCP as a political “balancing act.” Energi Media interview transcript, Aug. 2026.

16. Bratt also argued that Alberta’s relative protection from Trump’s tariffs “fundamentally explains a lot of Smith’s behaviour.” Comparing Smith with Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whose province is heavily exposed through autos, steel and other manufacturing, Bratt said: “If the shoe is on the other foot, if autos were being exempted and oil wasn’t, I think you’d see a dramatic shift in the positions of Danielle Smith and of Doug Ford.” His summary: “Where you stand depends upon where you sit.” Energi Media interview transcript, Aug. 2026.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

Donald Trump looks chaotic because he jumps from one fight to another. Canada this week. Iran before that. Law firms and universities at home. Allies, rivals and enemies abroad. The issues change so quickly that the obvious conclusion is that there is no coherent strategy at all.

University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape thinks that conclusion is wrong. Trump has a strategy, he argues, and it is remarkably consistent: punishment. Threaten an opponent with pain, apply maximum pressure if necessary, and expect the target to surrender something tangible and immediate in return.

That distinction matters enormously for Canada. If Ottawa treats the dispute as a conventional trade negotiation, it will keep trying to solve the wrong problem.

Pape argues that Trump’s tariffs are not primarily rooted in international economics. They are rooted in MAGA domestic politics, particularly the anger of blue-collar Americans who believe globalization stripped away the well-paid manufacturing jobs their parents and grandparents once held.

Seen through that lens, the targeting of Canadian autos, electrical equipment and other advanced manufacturing is no mystery. Those are precisely the industries MAGA voters believe should be rebuilt in the United States. Punishing Canada is therefore both an instrument of coercion and a political message to Trump’s base: I am fighting to bring your jobs back.

There is a weakness in the strategy.

Pape says punishment fails far more often than it succeeds, especially between countries. A target that gives in today has no guarantee Trump will not return tomorrow demanding more. That creates a powerful incentive to resist the bully rather than reward the threat.

Which helps explain Prime Minister Mark Carney’s response.

Canada is retaliating where necessary, but the deeper strategy is to reduce the vulnerability that gives Washington leverage in the first place: diversify trade, defend targeted industries and develop new markets. Pape thinks that is the right response, even if the economic rupture makes both countries poorer.

The most sobering part of our conversation is that Pape does not think this ends with Trump.

The punishment strategy is connected to a larger political realignment inside the United States. MAGA is overwhelmingly blue-collar, and the Republican Party has increasingly organized itself around those voters and their grievances.

If Pape is right, Canadians should stop waiting for America to return to normal. The more useful question is how Canada prepares for an American political system in which economic coercion may outlive the man who perfected its current form.

But our conversation quickly moved beyond the size of the latest tariff package to a more important question: what is the Trump administration trying to accomplish?

Canada’s concern is that the pressure is increasingly concentrated on the parts of the economy that matter most for long-term industrial capacity — autos, advanced manufacturing, electronics and electrical equipment — while Washington simultaneously seeks greater influence over where Canada trades and where its natural resources are sold.

That is why the debate in Canada has shifted from ordinary tariff retaliation toward the language of neo-mercantilism: a system in which the dominant power captures high-value production while the weaker country is pushed toward the role of resource supplier.

On that point, Hirs becomes much less equivocal. He describes the American approach as a “colonial type of projection of power” and says no sovereign country should tolerate it. He also argues that Canada has a strong case for diversifying its customers — not only for oil, but for automobiles and manufactured goods — rather than remaining overwhelmingly dependent on a single market.

The interview is also a reminder that Trump’s trade policy imposes costs inside the United States. Hirs points to inflation, pressure on agriculture and weaker conditions for parts of the U.S. oil sector, while criticizing an administration he sees as driven more by loyalty than coherent economic analysis.

That leaves Canada with a difficult but increasingly clear strategic choice. The immediate tariff numbers matter. The larger issue is whether Canada accepts deeper economic dependence on the United States or uses this crisis to build a more diversified, resilient and sovereign economy.

The policy challenge is therefore bigger than retaliation: Canada has to protect vulnerable industrial capacity while building new markets that reduce the leverage created by dependence on one dominant customer. That will require deliberate industrial policy, investment and patience.

Hirs’s advice to Carney is concise: stand your ground.

You also have to understand water, geology, government, science, and the institutions built over more than a century to turn land into economically useful resources.

That is what makes Landlocked: Water, Energy, and Planetary Politics in Alberta especially interesting. Schmidt is less interested in another argument over whether oil and gas are good or bad than in asking a more fundamental question: How did a particular way of extracting value from the land become embedded in the way Alberta organizes its economy and understands itself?

The technical history matters.

Oil sands bitumen existed long before Alberta possessed what financial markets would recognize as a massive petroleum reserve. Turning that bitumen into a reserve required scientific knowledge, engineering, government investment and decades of experimentation.

Schmidt argues that state geoscientists were central to that process. Alberta had to learn its geology before industry could exploit it at modern scale.

That relationship between knowledge and extraction runs through the book. So does water. Water enabled agriculture and settlement in southern Alberta. It later became essential to oil sands production. Today, water quantity and quality are becoming increasingly contentious as irrigation, oil and gas, coal development, municipalities and new industries such as data centres place competing demands on a changing hydrological system.

Schmidt’s history also raises uncomfortable questions about how technical information becomes public knowledge. In our interview, he describes a 2013 bitumen release near Cold Lake where highly sophisticated geoscientific analysis existed alongside remarkably crude methods for determining contamination on the ground. Government records, company estimates and practical field judgments eventually become numbers that regulators and the public treat as authoritative.

That is a useful reminder for energy journalism. Numbers do not arrive from nowhere. Reserves, spills, water use, environmental liabilities and forecasts are produced through institutions, technologies and assumptions that deserve examination themselves.

Schmidt calls the larger phenomenon “landlocked thought”: becoming locked into particular relationships with land and particular ways of knowing it. Understanding how that thinking developed may be the first step toward imagining something different.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

Oil demand is being hammered. War, disrupted supplies, and high prices are forcing consumers and businesses to use less oil, the classic “demand destruction” that has followed every major oil shock since the 1970s. But something different is happening this time. Two demand-destruction processes are underway at the same time. While expensive oil temporarily suppresses consumption, electric transportation is permanently eliminating some of it.

When the latest oil shock passes, demand will bounce back. The big question is: how much of it will be left to bounce back?

This is a critical question for Canada. Both Ottawa and the provinces are convinced that oil demand will expand until 2050 and perhaps beyond. This assumption, which neither government nor the oil industry has publicly supported with data and analysis, underpins plans to build new pipelines and expand Alberta oil sands production.

Initially, this major infrastructure build-out was to be led by and financed by the private sector. That was an explicit condition set out in last November's Canada-Alberta memorandum of understanding. In June, that condition was blown to bits. The government announced that a pipeline to the West Coast would be 90% owned by Ottawa and Alberta, with only 10 per cent private ownership. Furthermore, government money would subsidise oil sands expansion and decarbonization.

This is why the question of global peak oil demand is critical to Canadians. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of billions of their tax dollars will be at risk.

The Old-Fashioned Oil Shock

The global oil market is taking a beating.

The war with Iran has disrupted supplies, driven up prices and forced consumers and businesses to use less oil. Economists call that “demand destruction.”

There’s nothing particularly unusual about it. Oil shocks have been destroying demand since at least the 1970s. Prices spike, consumers conserve, economies adjust and eventually demand recovers. That’s essentially what the International Energy Agency expects to happen this time.

Global oil demand will fall sharply this year, it thinks, including a stunning 4.9 million barrels per day in the second quarter, before returning to growth late in 2026 and rebounding strongly next year.

In other words, much of the missing demand hasn’t disappeared. It has been deferred. Once the war ends, the Strait of Hormuz fully reopens, and oil prices fall, consumers will drive and fly more, factories will ramp up production, and those missing barrels will return.

That’s how oil shocks have traditionally worked.

Norwegian risk management firm DNV thinks that assumption deserves another look. The longer oil prices remain high, it argues, the greater the chance that temporary changes in behaviour become permanent changes in how energy is consumed.

We’ve seen this movie before. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 didn't just persuade people to drive less for a few months. They prompted tougher fuel-efficiency standards and accelerated the replacement of oil-fired power generation, permanently destroying demand that never returned when prices eventually fell.

This Time There Is a Substitute

The difference today is that consumers have far more choices. An oil shock in the 1970s could persuade you to buy a smaller car or drive it less, but you still burned gasoline.

In 2026, high oil prices can push a family toward an electric vehicle, a trucking company toward an electric or LNG truck, or a city toward electric buses and rail. Those decisions matter because they survive the crisis.

When oil prices eventually fall, the EV owner doesn’t rip out the battery and reinstall an internal combustion engine. The oil demand is gone.

Unlike previous oil shocks, consumers now have increasingly competitive technologies that allow them to abandon oil altogether, as EVs, batteries and clean electricity turn transportation from a market for petroleum molecules into a market for electrons.

Energy think tank EmberEnergy describes this transition: “renewables replace fossil electricity; electrification replaces fossil molecules.”

China Shows What Demand Destruction Looks Like

China shows what that looks like at scale.

Its economy grew by roughly 20 per cent between 2021 and 2025, growth that historically would have produced a sizeable increase in oil consumption. Instead, transport oil demand barely moved. Electric cars have flooded Chinese roads, electric and LNG trucks are displacing diesel, and an enormous high-speed rail network provides an alternative to cars and airplanes.

Economic growth and transport oil demand, joined at the hip for decades, are beginning to separate.

Electric vehicles alone displaced roughly one million barrels per day of Chinese oil demand in 2025, according to the IEA. Put another way, road transport would have consumed about 15 per cent more oil without them.

And the displacement is accelerating. The IEA expects Chinese EVs to eliminate 2.7 million barrels per day of oil demand by 2030 and more than four million by 2035. Those barrels aren’t waiting for cheaper gasoline before returning to the market. They have been replaced by electrons.

The Rest of the World Is Following

China matters because it is not alone.

The same technologies that transformed the Chinese auto market are getting cheaper and spreading into developing economies where the oil industry expects most future demand growth to occur.

India is a good example. EV sales increased elevenfold between fiscal 2020 and 2025, from roughly 175,000 vehicles to 1.9 million. Electric four-wheel passenger vehicles are growing even faster. A market that barely existed five years ago is beginning to scale.

That creates a problem for long-term oil forecasts.

The conventional story has been that falling gasoline and diesel consumption in China, Europe, and eventually North America will be offset by hundreds of millions of new middle-class consumers buying cars in India and other emerging economies. But what if they increasingly buy EVs instead?

Developing countries don’t have to repeat the West’s century-long dependence on petroleum transportation. Just as many skipped landline telephones and went straight to mobile, they can increasingly skip gasoline cars and go straight to electric.

That’s another chunk of expected future oil demand that never arrives.

IEA vs. DNV: Does the Oil Come Back?

That leaves us with the big question: how much of today’s missing oil demand comes back?

The IEA thinks quite a lot. It forecasts global demand falling sharply in 2026 as high prices and disrupted supplies hammer consumption, then rebounding by roughly 2.4 million barrels per day in 2027 as the crisis eases. In the IEA’s telling, this is still mostly an old-fashioned oil shock.

Demand is being suppressed, not permanently destroyed. DNV sees a much greater risk of permanent destruction.

Every additional month of high prices strengthens the economic case for switching away from oil, while giving consumers and businesses another reason to make that switch sooner. Some will buy EVs. Trucking companies will reconsider diesel fleets. Governments worried about energy security will accelerate electrification. The longer the shock lasts, the more those individual decisions accumulate.

And when oil prices finally come down, some of the demand the IEA expects to come roaring back won’t be there.

Economic Security Morphs Into Economic Sovereignty

Oil shocks have always been about economic security: how do countries protect themselves from high prices and unreliable suppliers? Electrification changes the question.

A country that replaces imported oil with domestically generated electricity isn’t simply insulating consumers from the next price spike. It is taking control of a larger share of its own energy system. Wind, solar, hydro and nuclear power aren’t shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, priced by OPEC+ or vulnerable to a tanker war in the Persian Gulf.

That turns electrification into something much bigger than climate policy. It becomes economic sovereignty. Economic sovereignty is the ability of a country to control the energy on which its economy depends instead of relying on foreign suppliers, volatile commodity markets, and vulnerable shipping routes.

That matters enormously to emerging economies, especially in Asia, which import much of the oil and gas required to support rapidly growing economies.

Every imported barrel exposes them to events they cannot control: wars in the Middle East, OPEC+ production decisions, sanctions, tanker disruptions, and sudden price spikes that drain foreign exchange and feed domestic inflation. Producing more energy at home—whether from solar, wind, hydro, nuclear or other domestic sources—keeps more money inside the economy while reducing that vulnerability.

For countries like India, electrification is therefore about much more than cutting emissions. It is a development strategy, an energy-security strategy and, increasingly, an assertion of economic sovereignty.

The World’s ‘A Changing - Fast

Assumptions about peak oil demand have changed dramatically in a remarkably short time.

Electrification is moving faster than expected, China’s transport oil demand has already flattened, and emerging economies are beginning to follow. Then along comes another oil shock to accelerate the very technologies that destroy petroleum demand.

Yet Ottawa and Alberta are planning billions of dollars of new pipelines and oil sands production as though none of this has happened.

That would be risky enough if private companies were putting their own capital on the line. Increasingly, they aren’t. Governments are preparing to assume much of the financial risk for infrastructure that will operate for decades in an oil market changing almost by the month.

Get the demand forecast wrong, and Canadians could be paying for that mistake long after the assumptions that produced it have been proven wrong.

None of this proves that global oil demand has peaked. Maybe the IEA is right and much of the demand destroyed in 2026 comes roaring back. Maybe Ottawa and Alberta are right, and the world will need growing volumes of Canadian oil for decades.

But those are assumptions, not facts.

And given how much has changed, Canadians should demand more than assurances before governments wager tens or even hundreds of billions of their dollars. Federal and provincial politicians should publish credible, independent analysis that supports their oil demand forecasts, stress-test those forecasts against much faster electrification, and explain what happens to taxpayers if they are wrong.

If the investment case is as strong as governments claim, that shouldn’t be difficult. If they can’t make the case, Canadians have every reason to ask why they are being asked to take the risk.

Got it. You mean a proper source endnote for the essay.

Endnote

Sources used in this essay include:

• International Energy Agency, Global EV Outlook 2026, especially its analysis of oil displacement from electric vehicles. The IEA estimates EVs displaced about 1.7 million barrels per day of oil demand in 2025, including roughly 1 million barrels per day in China, rising to around 5 million barrels per day globally by 2030. (IEA)
  IEA — Global EV Outlook 2026

• International Energy Agency, Global Energy Review 2026: Oil. The report finds that Chinese transport oil demand has plateaued despite strong economic growth, with rapid EV adoption, natural-gas trucks and high-speed rail offsetting what would historically have been substantial growth in fuel use. (IEA)
  IEA — Global Energy Review 2026: Oil

• International Energy Agency, Oil Market Report — August 2026. The IEA forecasts world oil demand declining by 1.6 million barrels per day in 2026, including contractions of 4.9 million barrels per day in the second quarter and 2.8 million in the third quarter, before returning to growth late in the year. (IEA)
  IEA — Oil Market Report, August 2026

• DNV, “The growing tail of oil demand destruction,” Aug. 26, 2026. DNV challenges the assumption that current demand losses will simply reverse, arguing that prolonged high oil prices increase the probability that temporary behavioural changes become permanent structural demand destruction, particularly through faster EV adoption. (DNV)
  DNV — The growing tail of oil demand destruction

• BloombergNEF, “Have Oil Prices Already Peaked? Three Things to Know,” June 10, 2026. BNEF argues that slowing oil demand growth looks increasingly structural, pointing to efficiency gains, electrification and evidence that Chinese gasoline demand has already peaked. (BloombergNEF)
  BloombergNEF — Have Oil Prices Already Peaked?

• BloombergNEF, Electric Vehicle Outlook 2026. BNEF expects global road-transport oil demand to peak in 2029 and estimates that electrification and fuel-efficiency gains will avoid 25.8 million barrels per day of potential road-fuel demand by 2040. (BloombergNEF)
  BloombergNEF — Electric Vehicle Outlook 2026

• Ember, The Electrotech Revolution and From Fossil to Flexible: Advancing India’s Road Transport Electrification. Ember’s work supports the structural argument that electrification replaces fossil-fuel molecules with electricity and shows how rapidly EV adoption is spreading into major emerging markets such as India.
  Ember — From Fossil to Flexible

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

Note: This op-ed is courtesy of DNV, a global risk management firm. I’ve interviewed their energy specialists over the years. They’re very good. Keep in mind, this isn’t Greenpeace. If DNV says peak oil is here or will be soon, that’s the opinion of dour, data-crunching Norwegian risk professionals, and Canada should consider what they have to say. This might not be the best time for governments to build $44 billion pipelines to the West Coast with taxpayer dollars.

By Sverre Alvik, VP and Energy Transition Outlook director, DNV

Shortly after the US and Israeli strikes on Iran, a consensus formed: It was widely thought that, after a short war and a sharp spike, the cost of a barrel of oil would soon return to near pre-war levels, and demand would resume its previous growth pattern once the Strait of Hormuz reopened.

Most mainstream energy forecasters have followed the lead of the International Energy Agency. Every month, the IEA publishes its Oil Market Report, and as stated in its August report: [global oil] demand is projected to contract by 4.9 mb/d in 2Q26 and 2.8 mb/d in 3Q26, before flipping to growth of 580 kb/d in 4Q26. Until now, we in the DNV Energy Transition Outlook team have also been operating under this presumption, as have leaders in business and government.

It is time to acknowledge that we could all be wrong. Oil prices have not come down. The likelihood of a long conflict seemed slim in late February. Now, in August, not only has the conflict lasted for half a year, but there is also no clear indication that oil exports from the region will be normalized any time soon.

Global oil production, prices and demand are significantly influenced by the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil producers outside the Gulf can, to some extent, increase their production, and some oil from Saudi Arabia and the UAE can be rerouted to other ports. Global oil inventories are huge and are an important buffer against the shortfall in supply. The Strait of Hormuz is not entirely closed, but it is also not open. Global supply is nevertheless down by more than 5 mb/d (million barrels per day) relative to pre-war levels. Demand is also down by more than 3 mb/d at the time of writing, which is approximately the equivalent of the oil consumption of Japan.

Most of the world’s oil is used in transport. In Asia, we are seeing a significant contraction in road transport demand, while the US is also experiencing moderate demand destruction as higher prices lead to reduced driving. More relevant for long-term impact, higher oil prices following the Hormuz crisis appear to be accelerating the shift to electric vehicles. EV sales in “new markets”, i.e. outside China, Europe and North America, jumped 97% in July this year compared with the same month last year. Oil used for petrochemical feedstock production, notably in China, has fallen moderately.

Reduced oil supply and elevated prices over a longer period will amplify these trends. For shipping and aviation, realistic large-scale alternatives are few, but leisure aviation demand is somewhat price sensitive. In the road sector, oversupply of batteries and EV production in China will accelerate the phase-in of EVs in many countries, although electricity infrastructure for charging will remain a challenge in some regions. Oil-to-coal switching in chemical production is already happening in some markets, and that may continue. The reopening of Hormuz would remove an important source of market anxiety, but diesel shortages are now as much an inventory problem as a crude supply problem, suggesting that elevated prices could reverberate through freight and industrial markets for months to come.

History shows us the strong link between sustained supply constraints and permanent demand destruction. This happens in all industries and is sometimes referred to as material replacement. The prime example from the energy industry is the structural demand destruction caused by the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks, with permanent changes introduced through fuel-efficiency standards and the replacement of oil-fired power generation. The more recent 2022 gas crisis in Europe has had a similarly structural effect, accelerating the region’s transition away from imported energy.

The spillover of the strikes against Iran into regional conflict is an ongoing illustration of the vulnerability of regional oil and gas transport routes. For every month the conflict lasts, the probability of permanent demand destruction increases. Ongoing attacks and threats by the Iran-backed Houthi militia against the Bab al-Mandab Strait are exacerbating the situation and making a quick normalization even less likely.

We illustrate the implications of a prolonged crises and ‘higher-for-longer’ oil prices. A short-term price hike leads only to temporary changes in behaviour, such as driving or flying less, or to delayed demand, such as in petrochemical production. If the price hike is sustained, it will create different, structural and permanent changes.

In our Energy Transition Outlook report, to be published in October, we face the challenging task of quantifying and forecasting the most likely development of future oil supply and demand. At the time of writing, this includes a moderately long crisis in the Middle East. In addition, we will discuss the sensitivities of a much longer crisis and more permanent demand destruction.

Our intention in this article is to challenge the consensus. All nations, organizations, companies and individuals should factor in an increased risk of a prolonged Hormuz crisis and an increased probability of permanent oil demand destruction.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

Donald Trump may be doing something Canadian federalists could not: reminding Albertans why Canada matters.

That is the argument Thomas Lukaszuk makes in our latest conversation about Alberta separatism. The former Alberta deputy premier now leads the Forever Canadian movement, which has spent the summer organizing against separation and preparing for the province’s October 19 referendum. Since we last spoke a month ago, the political context has changed dramatically.

Trump’s tariff war has escalated into something Lukaszuk describes as “economic warfare.” In his view, Washington is no longer simply bargaining hard over trade. The United States is using its economic power to pressure Canada’s industrial base, foreign policy and sovereignty.

That matters enormously in Alberta because separatism has long depended on the assumption that an independent province could comfortably tie its economic future to the American market. But what happens to that assumption when the United States itself becomes the source of the threat?

Lukaszuk argues that the contradiction is becoming harder to ignore.

Canada, with more than 40 million people, a G7 economy and considerable natural-resource leverage, is struggling to resist American pressure. An independent Alberta, with a population of roughly five million and an economy heavily dependent on oil and gas exports to the United States, would enter that relationship with far less bargaining power.

At the same time, Forever Canadian appears to be growing.

Lukaszuk says the organization has distributed more than 60,000 lawn signs, recruited more than 18,000 volunteers and recently attracted more than 11,000 people to a live online town hall. He says Trump’s confrontation with Canada is “congealing Canadians together.”

His message to Premier Danielle Smith is becoming more direct. Cancel the October 19 referendum. Join “Team Canada.” Back Prime Minister Mark Carney in the confrontation with Washington. And stop taking Alberta oil and gas off the table as economic leverage.

That last point may become especially contentious. Lukaszuk argues that Alberta cannot demand greater influence within Confederation while refusing to deploy its most powerful economic asset when the country is under pressure.

The autumn campaign will test whether Albertans agree. The separatist movement has proved it can organize. Forever Canadian is proving the same thing on the other side. Trump’s trade war may now determine which argument is more persuasive.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

Oil and gas is not simply another industry in Alberta. It pays for public services, supports high wages, built fortunes and helped transform a once-peripheral western province into one of Canada’s economic powerhouses. Over generations, that success has also made oil part of Alberta’s identity. And criticism of the industry can easily be heard as criticism of the province itself.

That is the starting point for Bob Weber’s first freelance news story for Energi Media. Weber, one of Canada’s most experienced energy and environmental journalists, went looking for the roots of Alberta’s unusually intense relationship with oil. What he found was a much more complicated story about history, western alienation, corporate influence, and the creation of political consensus inside the oil patch.

The most provocative reporting concerns the industry’s internal culture.

Weber spoke with veteran insiders who describe pressure to accept prevailing corporate and political views. Two high-profile sources requested anonymity because they feared professional consequences if they spoke openly.

One described companies going beyond explaining their policy positions and encouraging employees to become ‘good soldiers’ who repeat those messages to friends and family. Another theme runs through the reporting: difficult questions and dissenting views are becoming harder to voice inside an industry that increasingly sees itself under siege.

That matters well beyond Calgary boardrooms.

Alberta’s oil wealth gives the province enormous political leverage, while the industry’s success has become intertwined with long-standing feelings of western exclusion from Canadian political power. Weber argues that those forces help explain the province’s recurring conflicts with Ottawa and why pipelines, sovereignty and grievance remain so central to Alberta politics.

I sat down with Bob to talk about how he reported the story, why he granted anonymity, and what the accounts of his sources tell us about the oilpatch today. We also explore a bigger question: can a culture built around defending a hugely successful industry remain open enough to recognize when the world around it is changing?

The answer matters not only to the future of Alberta oil and gas, but to Alberta itself.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

Donald Trump may have made one of the biggest strategic mistakes of his second presidency when his administration pushed Canada too far at the trade table.

That is the view of former NDP MP Charlie Angus, who joined me for a wide-ranging discussion about the rapidly escalating Canada–U.S. confrontation. Angus argues that the last-minute American demands that prompted Prime Minister Mark Carney to walk away from negotiations were not simply another round of aggressive bargaining. They represented something more fundamental: a refusal to treat Canada as a sovereign country.

That distinction matters. Trade disputes can be settled. Tariffs can be negotiated. But once sovereignty is on the table, Angus argues, the political calculus changes completely. Canada cannot simply return to negotiations and pretend nothing happened. Carney has said talks will not resume until Washington changes its attitude. Angus believes that could mean a prolonged confrontation, because the Trump administration shows little sign of changing course.

What surprised Angus most was Canada’s response. Rather than immediately reaching for its biggest economic weapons—oil, potash or electricity—Ottawa chose highly targeted retaliatory tariffs. Angus calls them “strategic body blows”: measures aimed at specific components, factories and supply chains that could create political pain in Republican states while leaving Canada’s heavier leverage in reserve.

The interview also ranges well beyond tariffs.

We discuss Trump’s neo-mercantilist vision of a U.S.-dominated Western Hemisphere, the contradiction at the heart of “Fortress North America,” China’s rapid technological advance, Alberta’s pipeline ambitions, and the emerging political fight between Jason Kenney and Danielle Smith over separatism and Canada’s response to Washington.

But the most important theme is political.

Angus believes Trump’s pressure campaign is producing the opposite of what MAGA expected. Instead of dividing Canada, it may be strengthening national solidarity. Instead of forcing Ottawa into submission, it may be convincing Canadians that dependence on the United States has become a strategic liability.

His message is simple: buckle up. This is no longer a conventional trade dispute. It is a fight over the terms on which Canada intends to remain an independent country.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

For more than two decades, climate policy asked ordinary people to think about their carbon footprints. Drive less. Turn down the thermostat. Eat differently. Consume less. Pay more for carbon-intensive products and hope that higher prices eventually changed behaviour.

Leah Stokes thinks we have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

The Canadian-born energy and climate policy scholar makes the case in her new book, The Carbon Wave, that transforming an energy system requires something much bigger than millions of people trying to make their individual footprints smaller. It requires people acting collectively to change public policy—and governments using that policy to reshape markets, investment and technology.

“The carbon wave is about joining with other people to try to reshape the energy system,” Stokes told me.

That makes The Carbon Wave particularly timely for Canada.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has essentially declared a new era of Canadian climate policy. His government argues that electrification policy is now climate policy.

Conceptually, Stokes thinks Carney has it right. The formula is surprisingly straightforward: clean up electricity, then use those clean electrons to power as much of the economy as possible—cars, buildings, heating and eventually large parts of industry. The problem is that Canada has barely begun designing policies capable of making that happen at scale.

Our conversation ranges from Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and competition with China to electric vehicles, heat pumps, industrial electrification, energy storage and whether Canada really deserves to call itself an “energy superpower.”

But one theme keeps returning: the economics have changed faster than the political conversation.

Solar, batteries, EVs, heat pumps and other electric technologies have travelled far down their cost curves. Increasingly, electrification isn’t primarily about asking consumers to sacrifice for the climate. It is about replacing combustion technologies with technologies that can be cheaper, more efficient and simply better.

That requires a different kind of public policy.

Biden understood that. His Inflation Reduction Act helped turn American climate policy into industrial policy, stimulating hundreds of clean manufacturing investments across the country. Remarkably, Stokes says much of that industrial infrastructure has survived Donald Trump’s return to power.

The question hanging over our conversation is whether Mark Carney can learn the same lesson and create a Canadian carbon wave.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

Canadians are furious with Donald Trump, but anger alone does not explain what is happening. The tariff war is being framed as another dispute over trade deficits, fentanyl, dairy quotas and access to the American market. I think that misses the larger strategy: Trump is trying to reorganize the economic relationship between Canada and the United States.

The pattern is increasingly clear.

Washington wants advanced manufacturing, investment, technology and high-value production concentrated inside the United States while Canada continues supplying the oil, natural gas, electricity, uranium, critical minerals and other resources American industry needs.

There is an old term for that economic model: mercantilism. In its modern form, the United States becomes the industrial metropolis while neighbouring countries are pushed toward the role of resource-supplying hinterlands.

That should sound familiar to Canadians.

For centuries, this country has wrestled with the staples trap. The tendency has been to build prosperity around extracting fish, fur, timber, wheat, minerals, oil and gas while too much of the higher-value processing, technology and manufacturing happens elsewhere. Canada spent generations trying to build an industrial economy on top of that resource base.

Trump’s strategy threatens to reverse the process.

This is also why Mark Carney has become such a problem for Washington. His answer is to reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States by deepening economic ties with Europe, Asia and other middle powers. Every alternative market weakens American leverage. Every new alliance gives Canada another option.

But Carney has an Achilles’ heel. Diversifying our customers is not enough if Canada simply sells more oil, LNG, and unprocessed minerals to Asia. That changes the customer without changing the economy.

The more ambitious response is to use Canadian resources as the foundation for advanced manufacturing, technology and higher-value production at home. Imagine Alberta bitumen becoming low-cost carbon fibre for lighter Canadian electric vehicles. Apply the same logic to critical minerals, forestry, agriculture and electricity.

Trump is forcing Canada to answer a question we have dodged for decades: do we want to remain a resource hinterland, or finally build the industrial economy our resources make possible?

That is the real fight behind the tariffs.

They overwhelmingly support Mark Carney’s exit from trade negotiations and cheer when the Prime Minister declares that there will be no more talks until the Americans “change their attitude.” Lost in the national burst of patriotism is why Trump is targeting the Canadian economy in the first place. What does he really want, and why did he start a trade war to get it?

Canadians aren’t going to like the answers.

The current political battle with the United States is not the same old bun fight we’ve had over the years with our southern neighbours. This is different. And most Canadians haven’t yet figured out just how different.

For starters, this is much, much bigger than the mentally unwell octogenarian occupying the Oval Office. Trump is simply leading the parade. Behind him is a cast of characters whose role in re-engineering American economic and trade policy is still opaque. Identifying them is grist for future reporting.

What is clear is that a significant portion of the United States is happy to downgrade Canada—and many other allies—from co-star to a bit player in the supporting cast.

“America First” is not an empty slogan. Trump and his cohorts plan to bulk up the American economy to compete with China. From their zero-sum perspective, for the U.S. to win, others must lose.

Trump’s trade war is not about trade deficits, fentanyl, dairy quotas, or any of the other grievances he routinely cites. It is part of a much larger attempt to reorganize America’s economic relationship with the world.

Starting with Canada.

Trump Revives an Old Imperial Economic Strategy

The United States under Trump has embraced “neo-mercantilism,” a centuries-old approach that builds industrial and manufacturing capacity in the metropolis—the U.S.—while treating less powerful countries such as Canada, Mexico and those in Latin America as resource-supplying hinterlands.

Trump “wants advanced manufacturing, investment, and high-value industrial production concentrated inside the United States, while securing privileged access to the energy, critical minerals, and other strategic resources of Canada, Mexico and Latin America,” argues Professor Andrew Nurse of Mount Allison University.

“At the same time, Washington is trying to limit China’s access to those resources and pressure neighbouring countries to align their trade relationships with American strategic interests.”

The model has deep historical roots. European empires such as Britain and France conquered or controlled colonies partly to secure privileged access to valuable commodities—timber, cotton, sugar, metals, spices and other raw materials. Those resources flowed from the colonial hinterlands to the industrial centre, where capital, technology and manufacturing transformed them into higher-value goods. The finished products could then be sold at home or exported back to colonies and other markets.

The metropolis captured much of the value added, industrial employment, technological development and wealth accumulation, while the hinterland remained disproportionately dependent on extracting and exporting commodities. Mercantilism was more than a trade policy: it was a way of organizing economic relationships to concentrate wealth and productive power at the imperial centre.

Trump’s America First strategy looks remarkably like this old imperial mercantilism adapted to a twenty-first-century economy.

As the Trump administration has made clear, its aim is to use American economic—or, in some cases, military—strength to force economic concessions from allies as a way of redeveloping the U.S. economy. Like mercantilism before it, the strategy also relies on a more naked imperialism to coerce other countries into line or, in the case of Canada and Greenland, potentially extend the boundaries of the United States to lucrative resource-rich regions outside the U.S. proper.

Professor Drew Fagan of the University of Toronto argues that the U.S. is trying to replace the trilateral structure of CUSMA with separate bilateral relationships with Canada and Mexico. This would put Washington at the centre of a hub-and-spoke system where its vastly greater economic power gives it more leverage over each neighbour individually.

“It’s part and parcel, I think, of U.S. putting greater pressure on Canada to serve them first…because of their power to take advantage, simply put,” Fagan said in a recent interview.

Trump does not need colonies in the traditional sense. American economic power—its enormous market, tariffs, investment leverage and control over access to that market—can be used to construct a modern version of the old metropolis-hinterland relationship.

Canada Is the Prize

Canada presents a real opportunity for the neo-mercantilist strategy.

It has many of the resources the United States needs—oil and gas, critical minerals, electricity and other raw materials—but it also has a substantial advanced manufacturing sector that competes with American industry. Trump’s emerging economic order would relocate Canadian industries such as autos south of the border while expanding production of raw resources, like oil and gas, that the U.S. economy cannot do without.

This is the “staples trap” Canada spent centuries trying to escape.

Beginning in the 16th century, our economy grew around a succession of raw materials, or staples: fish, fur, timber, grains, minerals, crude oil and natural gas. Since Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s National Policy of the late 19th century, Canada has slowly built up its industrial economy. Some of that industry adds minimal value to raw materials—turning the spruce forests of British Columbia into lumber, for example. Some of it, though, is much more advanced. The best example is Ontario’s auto sector, with its massive web of assembly plants, 700-plus auto parts manufacturers, numerous small- and medium-sized specialty suppliers and a highly skilled workforce.

Under Trump’s neo-mercantilism, Canada would be left selling its vast natural resources to the very country that forced it to de-industrialize.

Carney Is Trump’s Nemesis

American neo-mercantilism helps explain why Mark Carney has become such a problem for Trump.

The Canadian Prime Minister emerged after his famous Davos speech in January as the leader of global middle powers, a reputation further burnished over the weekend by his repudiation of American trade demands. His vision of shifting trade and security alliances toward like-minded countries is the antithesis of neo-mercantilism and a direct challenge to the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy.

Carney’s strategy threatens the very hierarchy Trump is trying to construct. Trump wants bilateral relationships in which the United States sits at the centre, using access to its enormous market to extract concessions from smaller countries one at a time. Carney is trying to do the opposite: reduce Canada’s dependence on the American market by building stronger economic relationships with Europe, Asia and other middle powers. The more successful Canada becomes at creating alternatives to the United States, the less leverage Washington has to force Ottawa into its preferred role.s

Carney’s leadership shows other middle powers that they are not beholden to the United States. Many negotiated trade deals with Trump, hoping to avoid even more punitive tariffs. All they earned in return was contempt. The more they conceded, the more Trump demanded. The bully who demanded their lunch money on Monday came calling again on Tuesday.

That also helps explain why the dispute with Carney has become about much more than tariffs. A Canada that can choose where it sells its resources, determine its own industrial policies, and deepen economic ties with China and other American competitors is incompatible with Trump’s vision of a U.S.-dominated Western Hemisphere.

Carney’s insistence on Canadian economic sovereignty strikes at the heart of Trump’s neo-mercantilist project. The fight is ultimately over who gets to decide Canada’s place in the emerging global economic order: Washington or Canadians themselves.

Carney’s Achilles’ heel

But Carney’s strategy has its own flaws. As he often says publicly, the plan is to forge new trade and security relationships with Europe and Asia, diversify Canadian trade away from dependence on the United States, and sell Canadian resources to new markets.

Carney is promoting a massive expansion of the Canadian oil and gas industry: one publicly owned oil pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast, with several more being publicly floated by Premier Danielle Smith; a 10-year plan to boost B.C.’s LNG output from 19 mtpa (million tonnes per annum) to 100 mtpa; and taxpayer support to dramatically grow Alberta oil sands extraction, with industry demanding tens of billions to pay for decarbonization. Most of that oil and gas is intended for Asia, including China.

This is a short-sighted mistake, for a variety of reasons.

Global oil and gas demand faces growing pressure from electrification, efficiency and the rapid deployment of clean-energy technologies, particularly in China. Sinopec, the state-owned refiner, said during a recent earnings call that China’s oil demand peaked in 2025. Consumption is expected to begin falling before 2030. Much of Asia is following the China model, which bodes ill for Canadian oil exports to the region.

The deeper problem, however, is Canada’s industrial strategy. The focus seems to be that inputs used by the natural resource sector should be made at home. Using Canadian steel to build pipelines, for example. That’s called a backward linkage: manufacturing the inputs used to extract resources. Capturing backward linkages helped Canada develop domestic manufacturing.

But there are two other linkages—forward and technological—that are key if Canada is to advance further up the value chain.

Forward linkages occur when the output of one industry becomes the input for further processing. For example, turning wheat into breakfast cereal or trees into lumber.

Technology linkages occur when a technology developed for one industry is adapted to another. For example, specialized drilling techniques and equipment used in the oil sands SAG-D sector were adapted by Eavor Technology of Calgary for advanced geothermal electricity generation.

Backward linkages are important, and Canada has done a good job capturing them in the past. It has done a fair job of exploiting technology linkages, but a poor job of adding value to raw resources through forward linkages. A truly muscular industrial strategy would strategically capture as many backward, forward and technology linkages as possible from all of Canada’s resource sectors.

Take non-combustion uses for oil sands bitumen, which can be used to manufacture advanced materials like carbon fibre. Alberta Innovates, the provincial agency that developed the process, estimates that bitumen-based carbon fibre would cost about half of current prices. It could be used to strengthen construction materials. Or, perhaps most intriguingly, the weight of electric vehicles could be reduced by replacing steel in the body. This could be a significant competitive advantage for a re-engineered Ontario auto sector.

Instead, at the very moment Trump is using American power to pull advanced manufacturing and investment into the U.S., Canada intends to spend enormous amounts of public money to expand its traditional role as an exporter of largely unprocessed resources.

Instead of escaping the staples trap, Ottawa risks digging it deeper.

Trump Is Attacking Canada’s Economic Model

The confrontation between Trump and Carney is bigger than tariffs or a failed trade negotiation. It is a struggle over what kind of economy Canada will become and how much economic sovereignty Canada will retain.

Trump’s neo-mercantilism represents more than a trade threat.

It is a challenge to Canada’s economic model. If Washington succeeds in concentrating advanced manufacturing and high-value production in the United States while securing Canadian energy, minerals and other strategic inputs, Canada could emerge from this confrontation with more pipelines, more mines and more commodity exports, but less industry, less technological capacity, and less control over its economic future.

Carney is right that Canada must diversify away from its overwhelming dependence on the United States. But diversification alone is not enough if all Canada does is find new customers for the same staples economy. Selling more raw oil, LNG, and unprocessed minerals to Asia may change the destination of Canadian exports without changing Canada’s place in the global value chain.

The real answer to Trump is to build the economy his strategy is trying to deny us: one that uses Canada’s resources, clean electricity, engineering talent, and technological capacity to move aggressively into advanced manufacturing, electrification, and higher-value production.

Canada should not respond to an American strategy designed to turn it into a resource hinterland by becoming a better resource hinterland.

It should use this crisis to finally escape the staples trap forever.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

For decades, British Columbia could treat the United States as something close to a permanent feature of the economic landscape: its biggest nearby market, a security partner and the anchor of a North American trading system whose rules could usually be counted on. Donald Trump has shattered that assumption.

That is the political reality confronting Premier David Eby after Canada-U.S. trade negotiations collapsed Friday evening.

Eby has returned to the front ranks of the provincial premiers arguing that Canada has to stand its ground. Political scientist Stuart Prest told me that Eby and Ontario Premier Doug Ford appear more comfortable in this position than they did while Ottawa was still trying to salvage a deal. The reason is simple: there is a growing realization that “normal isn’t coming back.”

That realization matters enormously for British Columbia.

Prest says the new 50 per cent U.S. tariffs could hit B.C. especially hard. Softwood lumber is already a longstanding source of conflict. B.C. also faces the possibility that, if another agreement is eventually negotiated, its priorities could receive less attention than politically powerful sectors such as Ontario auto manufacturing.

Yet Prest argues that the response is becoming broader than a dispute over individual tariffs. B.C. businesses still want a return to the predictable, mutually beneficial trading relationship they knew. Labour wants jobs and communities protected. But both are being forced to confront the same problem: the deal they want may simply not be available from Washington.

For Prest, the core issue is sovereignty.

Canadians have grown accustomed to integrating their economy with the United States on the assumption that agreed rules would be respected. That confidence can no longer be taken for granted. Canada must diversify trade, defence procurement, intelligence relationships, and even the infrastructure of the digital economy.

He describes the pressure Canada faced last week as a form of “interstate extortion.” Reducing that vulnerability will cost money and sacrifice some economic efficiency. But, he argues, redundancy is now the price of remaining “masters in our own home.”

The uncomfortable implication is that this problem may outlast Trump. Prest says Republican opinion toward Canada is cooling, meaning the old relationship may not simply snap back after the next U.S. election.

British Columbia is facing both a short-term economic shock and a much longer-term strategic challenge.

Smith’s problem is political.

Since Trump began attacking Canada, the Alberta premier has repeated the same message: tariffs are bad, retaliation is bad, trade wars are bad, and everyone should get back to the negotiating table. Yet, as Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt points out in our latest interview, there is one thing Smith almost never says.

She does not blame Trump for starting the trade war. That omission matters.

Bratt argues that Smith is balancing two powerful forces.

The first is Alberta’s economic self-interest. Smith says only about $1.5 billion of the province’s roughly $188 billion in U.S. trade is affected by the latest tariffs. Compare that with Ontario, where Trump is openly targeting autos and steel. Doug Ford is furious because his province has much more to lose.

Where you stand, Bratt says, depends on where you sit.

The second force is ideological. A pro-Trump constituency exists inside the United Conservative Party and the Alberta separatist movement. Some supporters do not merely tolerate Trump; they admire his politics and want more of it in Canada. Smith has significant overlap with that worldview on issues well beyond trade.

But Trump’s attack on Canada may be creating a problem for Alberta separatists. Bratt believes softer separatist voters — people attracted to separation mainly as a way to send Ottawa a message — may be reconsidering. The trade war is demonstrating something separatist rhetoric has trouble answering: Canada has far more leverage against Washington than Alberta would have on its own.

That tension will sharpen this fall. Alberta’s government is preparing to release an economic study of separation, a Calgary byelection could become a test of Smith’s support, and the October referendum will force Albertans to choose between grievance politics and the practical realities of sovereignty.

Trump may yet accomplish something few Canadian politicians could: remind Albertans why Canada matters.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

For much of the past decade, the clean-energy story was told primarily through climate policy. Governments set emissions targets, subsidized new technologies and tried to push companies and consumers toward lower-carbon choices. That story is is old news.

Chris Robinson, a senior director at Lux Research, says energy innovation is entering a more pragmatic phase tied to dollars and sense.

Companies are under pressure to produce nearer-term returns. Higher interest rates, geopolitical risk and volatile policy have reduced the appetite for long-horizon bets. Oil and gas companies, for example, have pulled back from some ambitious hydrogen, renewable power, and diversification strategies.

But that does not mean the energy transition has stopped.

In some important areas, the opposite is happening because the technology has become economically compelling. Robinson says that for a new power-generation project, solar paired with battery storage is now often the first option developers consider. Lithium-ion batteries are so cheap and abundant that competing storage technologies are struggling to find room in the market.

The more important shift may be why people are buying these technologies.

Robinson points to batteries, solar, and electric vehicles increasingly being sold on affordability, reliability, resilience and energy security rather than emissions reductions. Europe’s response to disruptions in fossil-fuel supplies illustrates the change: electrification can reduce exposure to volatile global commodity markets whether or not climate is the political priority of the moment.

China remains the crucial player. Robinson describes North America and Europe as strong at taking technologies from zero to one, while China excels at taking them from one to 100. Chinese scale drove down the cost of solar and batteries and may do the same for electrolyzers and other emerging technologies.

North America faces another problem: policy durability.

Robinson says the reversal of long-term U.S. incentives has shaken industry confidence in government promises. If a program advertised as a decade-long commitment can be weakened or reversed after an election, companies have to price political uncertainty into major factories and infrastructure projects. That makes long-lived investment harder precisely when industrial competition is intensifying.

For Canada, that matters enormously. The country remains a major producer of oil, gas and electricity, but the global energy system is steadily becoming more electrified. The challenge is no longer simply whether Canada participates in that transition.

It is whether Canadian companies and governments can move quickly enough as technology, economics and industrial competition reshape the energy system around them.

YouTube Channel: Video energy news
Substack Essays: Thoughtful Energy Journalism
Energi Talks Audio Podcast
Website: Energy news

Canadians may not yet appreciate the scale of the moment they are living through. For most of the postwar period, Canada could afford to treat geopolitics as somebody else’s problem. The United States provided security, anchored the continental economy, and supplied much of the strategic framework through which Canadian governments viewed the world.

Donald Trump has blown up that bargain.

That is the starting point for my latest conversation with historian and geopolitical scholar Jack Cunningham. His argument is larger than the immediate trade confrontation with Washington.

Canada, he says, has spent decades underinvesting in its own capacity to think strategically about the world. We outsourced not only much of our defence to the United States, but much of our strategic thinking as well.

Now Canada is being forced to grow up quickly.

Cunningham believes Prime Minister Mark Carney understands the magnitude of the change and has begun to emerge as an unusually important international figure. He compares Carney, cautiously, with previous Canadian leaders such as Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, leaders whose influence extended well beyond Canada because they understood the international system and knew how to operate inside it.

Carney’s emerging response is straightforward: diversify Canadian trade, deepen security and economic cooperation with like-minded democracies, build more infrastructure at home, and reduce the country’s dangerous dependence on the United States.

But Cunningham emphasizes the part of the strategy Canadians may like least: it will hurt.

That may ultimately be the defining difference between Carney and Trump. Trump promises easy victories. Carney is beginning to tell Canadians that preserving sovereignty will require sacrifice.

Cunningham draws an important lesson from both trade wars and shooting wars: victory is not determined only by who can inflict the most damage. It can be determined by who can absorb pain and keep going. The United States is vastly more powerful than Canada.

But power does not automatically translate into political endurance.

That turns the confrontation with Trump into something much bigger than another dispute over tariffs. The coming years will test Carney’s leadership, but they will also test Canadians themselves.

Are we prepared to pay an economic price to become less dependent, more strategically capable, and more genuinely sovereign?

That is the question at the heart of this interview.