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William Watson: Wexit, Quebec and the bitumen that binds us

Atlantic Canada would love to buy more Canadian oil, but we in Quebec won’t allow new pipelines, though we clearly benefit from them ourselves

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After 40 days of listening to campaigning politicians I found myself ravenous for true facts and, with all the post-election talk about Wexit (Western Canadian separation), in need of acquainting myself with Canada’s energy sector — even if Britain’s three years of Brexit hell should give any Exit-eer pause. After six decades of separation strife, we Quebecers should understand that. Yet here we are again with 32 quasi-separatist MPs devoted only to their provincial interest and federal pensions.

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I soon learned — I should have known — that what used to be called the National Energy Board and is now “Canada Energy Regulator” runs an excellent website, “Market Snapshots,” which is a virtual gusher of interesting information. (Note that it’s not “Canada’s Energy Regulator” or the “Canadian Energy Regulator” but, in Germanic style, three nouns in a row, “Canada Energy Regulator.”)

Anyway. Crude oil exports by marine tanker, 2018Q4: West coast of Canada, 56,900 barrels per day. East coast of Canada, 194,400 barrels per day. Almost four times as much. In some recent quarters (2016Q2, for instance), the ratio has been as high as 20 to 1, East to West. Which certainly does not reflect the attention each has been paid in recent years. Of course, as the website explains, East coast crude is loaded directly onto tankers from offshore drilling platforms. So it’s not so easy to protest. And the geography that would be harmed by spills is not old growth forest but bleak seascape sitting on no one’s sacred land.

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Speaking of seascape, Wexit would not actually guarantee Alberta bitumen access to tidewater. There would still be B.C. politics to contend with, although a new Western country free of us Laurentians would have a different and maybe easier politics.

How do tanker exports compare to pipeline exports? They’re, as you might say, a drop in the ocean. In 2018 three million barrels a day, representing 86 per cent of exports, went by pipeline. An additional 150,000 or so went by rail. So tanker trade was well under a tenth of total exports.

“Quebec’s gasoline market is one of the largest in Canada,” another Market Snapshot tells us. Outside of Alberta, Quebec has “the second highest refining capacity in Canada.” We Quebecers consumed 165,000 barrels per day of gasoline in 2018, or 21 per cent of Canada’s total consumption, which despite our pious talk about fossil fuels is not far off our share of the country’s population (22.6 per cent).

Where does the petroleum we Quebecers consume come from? From dictators and despots, you might think — I did think — but in fact in 2018 most of it (52 per cent) came from the U.S., another five per cent from assorted other countries, and the remaining 43 per cent from Western Canada, much of it through, ahem, a pipeline. After the Lac-Mégantic disaster of 2013, with 47 dead, we Quebecers should be permanently inoculated against shipping petroleum products by rail but for some reason we aren’t. The Liberals just elected a fervent anti-pipeliner in the person of star environmentalist Steven Guilbeault, the new MP for Laurier-Sainte-Marie.

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Canada does still import oil from undemocratic places. But not nearly so much as we used to. In 2010 we imported 772,000 barrels per day from overseas but by 2018 this was down to 215,000. Imports declined a little overall but the big change was that imports from the U.S. were up from 47,000 barrels per day to 378,000. Thanks to its fracking revolution the U.S. is now a net exporter of petroleum. Though in Quebec we continue to ban fracking — not that we necessarily have lots to frack — we’re happy enough to import what fracking makes possible.

In 2017 Canada did still import crude oil from 14 countries other than the U.S., including Saudi Arabia, Angola and Kazakhstan, but also the U.K., Norway and Trinidad and Tobago. The area of the country most dependent on tanker-borne oil from far away is Atlantic Canada, New Brunswick especially. Atlantic Canadians would love to buy more Canadian oil, and pipeline companies are interested in building them more capacity, but we in Quebec won’t allow new pipeline construction, even though we clearly benefit from pipelines ourselves.

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Quebecers’ view, I suppose, is that we don’t want to create new dependencies on fuels whose best-before date is approaching. It may be approaching but it’s also likely a long way away — probably longer away than the life of a new pipeline, though that’s a bet for pipeline companies and their shareholders to make. In any case, a final Market Snapshot shows that greenhouse gases from transportation — one of the most important uses of fossil fuels — were up 28 per cent in Quebec from 1990 to 2016. That’s less than the Canadian average of 43 per cent, but it’s a long way from extinction.

Even from our strictly provincialist view we may need Western Canada yet.

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