Max Fawcett's beef with Poilievre (and me)

"The energy transition is moving far more quickly than I think most Canadians understand"

Pierre Poilievre during my March interview with him

My March podcast interview with Pierre Poilievre drew a lot of attention, but one of the sharpest responses came from Max Fawcett, an award-winning Calgary journalist who’s been sharply critical of the notion that the West’s resource sector is singled out for mistreatment. Max just flat cancelled his subscription to this newsletter, and tore a strip off me on Bluesky for swallowing Poilievre’s claims of federal Liberal stonewalling on LNG projects without challenge. That’s one way to get my attention, although for the record it’s not one I recommend. Once I saw what he wrote, I wrote to Fawcett to invite him to make his case here.

Fawcett maintains that it’s global markets, not Liberal obtuseness, that have limited LNG development in Canada in recent years. In the spirit of the debate he wishes I’d offered, here’s his case. I’m pleased to say that after I wrote him, he renewed his subscription. - pw

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Pierre Poilievre is nothing if not consistent. For all of his recent tactical shifts, ones that had him talking to more mainstream journalists like Peter Mansbridge and, yes, Paul Wells, his message remained the same: blame Canada. Nowhere was that more clear, or more wrong, than on the issue of LNG exports.

“Natural gas is the most hilarious example of reverse protectionism,” he said in his interview with Wells. “The Germans are saying, ‘Please sell us your natural gas,’ and we’re saying no, or at least the Liberal government was saying that. And so they’re getting 95% of their natural gas now from the United States because we, our government, blocked 16 LNG plants from happening over the last 10 years.”

For what it’s worth, almost none of this is true. The federal government has never blocked an LNG project. It did concur with the decision by the Quebec government — the conservative Quebec government, to be clear — rejecting the Saguenay LNG project in 2021, but that was more about respecting provincial jurisdiction than overriding an approval. On west coast LNG projects, the federal record is clear: multiple approvals, including duty waivers for LNG Canada worth nearly $1 billion, and zero rejections. As it happens, the federal government just approved a new $4 billion gas pipeline that will help feed — you guessed it — LNG projects on the west coast.

This isn’t the story that Poilievre and his fellow Conservatives are telling Canadians, though. Instead, they’re blaming the federal government for every project, no matter how half-baked or economically dubious, that didn’t get built. Most were proposed during the frenzy in the early 2010s, when the combination of $100-plus global oil prices (LNG contracts were generally linked to oil prices at the time) and abundant domestic gas reserves made the economics incredibly appealing.

Then, of course, the OPEC cartel decided to flood the market in 2014 and crash prices in order to bring soaring production from the United States and Canada to heel. You will, I hope, note the timing on that. It has nothing to do with the election of a different federal government in late 2015, as I’ve tried to point out any number of times to people drawing that conclusion. The same is true of upstream investment in oil and gas, which fell off a cliff in Canada and everywhere else beginning in 2014.

Conservative politicians in Canada have been dining out on this spurious correlation ever since. Social media is absolutely littered with people carrying that message forward, often with charts and graphs that clearly (and deliberately?) misrepresent the timing of the 2015 election.

Here’s an example.

Here’s what it should actually look like.

As to the notion that the federal government is responsible for the cancellation of all the LNG projects that were on the books in the early 2010s by their proponents? I’ve pulled that apart as well, at length and with receipts.

And yes, Germany and other LNG-importing countries have expressed an interest in Canada increasing its LNG exports, just as they would about any other country. The reason is simple: they’re buyers, and more supply, all things being equal, lowers the price they would pay. None of these countries have expressed a willingness to lock in the sort of long-term pricing that would make an east coast LNG project economically viable. None of them have pledged the sort of capital required to build one. For all the caterwauling about former prime minister Justin Trudeau saying that there wasn’t a business case for an east coast LNG facility, he was right then — and he’s still right today.

That’s because while the joint US-Israel war with Iran has crippled energy markets, removing a significant volume of near-term LNG supply and spiking prices, it’s also strengthening the resolve of importing countries — hello, France! Come on down, Great Britain! — to more rapidly remove their reliance on volatile fossil fuel imports. As International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol told The Guardian, “their perception of risk and reliability will change. Governments will review their energy strategies. There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future.”

For all of my apparent interest in re-litigating what happened over the last decade, this is the conversation we need to be having in Canada right now. We need to better understand the opportunities and risks associated with a more rapidly electrifying global economy, especially in places like China, India, and the global south. But if we don’t have an accurate picture of what happened in the recent past, we aren’t going to be equipped to understand what’s about to happen in the near future. That’s why I think journalists need to be better prepared to interrogate the sort of bad-faith arguments and weaponized spurious correlations around energy policy that have unfortunately become the Conservative Party of Canada’s stock in trade. As I said on Bluesky, “it sure would be nice if the folks interviewing him had some modicum of interest (and expertise) in the details around energy markets and policy.”

I genuinely appreciate Paul’s willingness to let me unspool some of my frustrations here. I do understand why most journalists don’t want to get into the weeds on this stuff, and why they let Poilievre’s revisionist history of it pass unchallenged. Very few people are as passionate, or as pedantic, about this stuff as I am. Meanwhile, Poilievre has done a very good job of raising the price on public disagreement, and it’s one many people would rather not pay.

But if we can’t have a more honest conversation in this country about energy policy, past and present, we are going to get absolutely walloped by the future. The energy transition is moving far more quickly than I think most Canadians understand, and it has real consequences for both our economy and our politics. I am happy — well, okay, not happy — to keep pushing this particular rock up the hill. But I would certainly appreciate more help.

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Max Fawcett is lead columnist for Canada’s National Observer, where he writes the Receipts newsletter, which you can read and subscribe to here. His Substack newsletter is here.