Carney says right things about LNG; will he follow through?

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Seems there is a business case for selling Canadian liquefied natural gas to Europe after all.

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The Mark Carney government, unlike the Justin Trudeau government before it, said this week that it is willing to consider — possibly, maybe down the road, in the medium term — selling LNG to Europe.

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In 2022, when then-German chancellor Olaf Scholz came to Canada and asked to buy Canadian LNG, Trudeau famously said there has “never been a strong business case” for exporting LNG to Europe. Those comments were made in August 2022, when Germany, like many other European nations, was desperately looking to diversify away from its reliance on Russian natural gas.

Despite his public statements in support of Ukraine, despite Russia funding its war on Ukraine with oil and gas exports, Trudeau refused to change course.

Japan, Greece and other countries asked to buy our product. There were several proposals on the table to export LNG when Trudeau took office and several more came online after he became prime minister, but he rejected or ignored them all.

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LNG Canada, an export facility in Kitimat, B.C., recently opened after years of delays, but that’s a project that goes back to the Stephen Harper years. Outside of that, we have dropped the ball as Europe and Asia have scanned the world for reliable and clean sources of fuel.

During his European trip this week, Carney spoke of a desire to look at exporting LNG from Canada. Perhaps he should dust off proposals rejected by his predecessor, such as Energie Saguenay, which proposed to extend a natural gas pipeline from Ontario to Quebec’s Saguenay region for export purposes.

There are many similar projects like this that the Trudeau Liberals either rejected or let languish for so long that the businesses behind them walked away.

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Now Carney is talking about reopening the Port of Churchill in Manitoba on the coast of Hudson Bay. He sees that as a possible export terminal that won’t have to deal with protests in Ontario or Quebec as the Manitoba government under Premier Wab Kinew is open to the project.

Right now, a lot of Canadian natural gas is being exported to Europe, it’s just being exported through the United States, which seized on this opportunity while we decided to be “green” and take a pass. And so Canadian natural gas is sold to the United States at a discount and then sold to the Europeans by the Americans at a premium.

How do you like that business case?

In a speech this week to a business group in Berlin, Energy Minister Tim Hodgson said that the stance of the previous Trudeau government was the wrong one.

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“Unlike the previous Canadian government, which closed the door to LNG exports, Prime Minister Carney’s government has opened it,” Hodgson said.

Hodgson said that Canadian natural gas would be clean and efficient, it would not be turned off over politics – unlike Russian gas – and that Canada would be a reliable partner. He also said something that is a sea change in Canada’s positioning on this.

“The new Canadian federal government has made a conscious choice to re-centre energy and critical minerals in how we think about not only our domestic affairs, but Canada’s place in the world,” Hodgson said.

Energy, including oil, LNG and nuclear power, is now part of Canada’s foreign policy considerations.

Those are welcome words, but as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pointed out, don’t confuse activity with achievement. The Carney Liberals are still saying many of the right things, as they have done for months, but they haven’t delivered yet.

On that front, and whether they will deliver on all of this, we are still at the wait-and-see stage of this relationship.

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