Carney was iffy on a pipeline. Now his government’s building one itself. Here’s what changed his mind

When Prime Minister Mark Carney stood alongside Alberta’s premier earlier this month to herald a plan for a new oil export pipeline, the news came with a massive taxpayer-funded caveat.

In the absence of a private firm to build the proposed oil corridor, the pair confirmed, the federally owned Trans Mountain Corp. would lead the roughly $40-billion project.

For Carney, the announcement marked a sharp pivot in strategy for getting the proposal over the finish line, with Ottawa letting go of its insistence just five months earlier that the pipeline be funded by private capital.

“The tone had changed quite a bit,” said a senior Alberta government official who spoke about the negotiations on the condition of not being named. “This wasn’t a ‘nice to have’ anymore. This was: ‘let’s get this done; this is important to the economy in a pretty profound way.'”

Observers told National Post that a confluence of factors, from U.S. tariffs to Iran’s seizure of the Strait of Hormuz in early 2026, had sharply exposed fragilities in global trade and energy security, prompting the Carney government to recalibrate its thinking toward the potential new pipeline. At the same time, there was worry about growing anger in Alberta, fuelled largely by years of seeing Ottawa as antagonistic to its oil industry that saw support for separatism in the province reach its highest level in decades early this year.

In a matter of months, the pipeline proposal had shifted from a mere economic priority to a highly political one. That brought a new level of urgency to negotiations between Alberta and Ottawa starting in May, according to one person familiar with the talks, with government officials on both sides clocking 15-hour days as they rushed to finalize a deal ahead of the July announcement.

Under the Alberta and federal governments’ pipeline proposal, Trans Mountain will assume responsibility for the planning and construction of the pipeline from Bruderheim, Alta., to a proposed large-tanker port in Roberts Bank, B.C., just south of Vancouver, in hopes of expanding oil exports to Asia. Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline has so far agreed to take a minority 10 per cent private stake in the development, while the publicly owned Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission is also a proponent.

The proposed development is a substantial undertaking for the Crown corporation. According to its project description, Trans Mountain will be tasked with connecting 1,200 kilometres of pipeline, as well as installing 11 pump stations along the route that would draw more than 440 megawatts of power. It will have to reinforce a 260-hectare site at the Roberts Bank terminal capable of housing 6.5-million barrels of oil storage and build a power substation, pipe racks and an emergency fire system, among other things. Perhaps most complex of all, Trans Mountain and government representatives will have to consult with 23 First Nations in Alberta and another 85 in B.C. in order to secure the pipeline’s right-of-way.

It’s a far cry from Carney’s comments in April 2025, when he told a Quebec talk show that he wasn’t even sure Canada should prioritize an oil pipeline as a major project of national interest. “We have to choose a few major projects, not necessarily pipelines, but maybe pipelines: we’ll see,” he said on the popular show Tout le monde en parle.

In November he signed a memorandum of understanding with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith agreeing to work towards a pipeline to diversity exports to Asia. But, as he told a Calgary Chamber of Commerce event that month, “the Asian pipeline will be a private sector project.” In order to attract private capital, the prime minister at the time said he favoured “de-risking” the pipeline by, for example, removing regulatory burdens such as the proposed oil and gas emissions cap, or helping First Nations take direct financial stakes in the project through loan guarantees.

What prompted such a dramatic over such a short period included the outbreak of a Persian Gulf war in February 2026, which eventually led to Iran blockading the Strait of Hormuz, a major shipping channel for Saudi Arabia and other major Middle East producers, stranding oil exports and driving up prices.

As the first U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran hit in February, Carney was arriving in India as part of a major diplomatic reset, which included high-level meetings between his government and Indian industry executives who said that they wanted Canada to supply them with more energy, including oil. On the prime minister’s next stop in Japan in early March, he heard much the same message, as officials representing the island nation said they wanted to diversify their energy supplies through greater imports from Canada.

In January, Carney had been in China, embarking on another high-stakes diplomatic reset with Chinese President Xi Jinping, where energy trade was a central theme. Days after that, he declared Canada an “energy superpower” at the World Economic Forum.

Such pronouncements shifted the onus for building new energy infrastructure from Canadian oil producers onto government, said Heather Exner-Pirot, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Major Canadian oilsands companies like Suncor Energy, Canadian Natural Resources and Cenovus Energy long ago adapted to an unwelcoming environment where the industry was unable to build major new export pipelines because of roadblocks from regulators and some First Nations groups and anti-oil activists. That led them to focus instead over the last decade on improving the efficiency and profitability of their existing production, delivering growth to shareholders without additional pipelines.

“Ottawa needs this pipeline more than industry,” she said.

Indeed, as Financial Post reported this week, Alberta has even promised “financial supports” to oilsands producers as incentives to expand oil production to fill the proposed pipeline as part of the federal-provincial proposal.

Canadian producers are also less motivated than Ottawa is to shift their exports away from the U.S., said George Vegh, former chair of the Canada Energy Regulator. While U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on some Canadian products have created broader trade uncertainty, the two countries’ energy sectors remain highly integrated and deeply co-dependent.

“If you’re a government, (diversifying trade) may be an important political objective,” Vegh said. “But if you’re in the private sector, that’s not really your mandate. Your mandate is to provide shareholder returns.”

Finding a company willing to sign onto Alberta’s pipeline push became the key challenge faced by Smith, its most prominent champion, and by Ottawa. Leads had gone cold after nearly a decade of policies under former prime minister Justin Trudeau that exuded hostility to Alberta’s resources. Among them: the cancellation of the previously approved Northern Gateway pipeline plan at a massive loss for Enbridge Inc.; onerous new approvals processes for major pipelines; a tanker moratorium off the northwest Pacific Coast; and resistance to the proposed Energy East pipeline to New Brunswick.

In fact, the government had ended up buying Trans Mountain in 2018 after the private owners had said they were abandoning their TMX pipeline expansion project after enduring years of political and legal challenges.

“That’s the environment we’re finding ourselves in,” Smith said in defence of the public sector taking such an oversized role in the proposal in July.

Neither Carney nor Smith had previously showed any indication, at least in public, that a government-led option was on the table. During a parliamentary committee testimony in April, Natural Resources and Energy Minister Tim Hodgson only said that “there could be scenarios” where taxpayer money would flow to fund Indigenous ownership in a pipeline through its loan guarantee program. But ministers had long avoided committing to directly fund such a project.

Internally, however, federal officials came to acknowledge that deploying Trans Mountain on yet another government-backed project — following roughly the same route as TMX — was the fastest way to get another million barrels per day of crude to tidewater.

Provincial officials were seemingly less convinced: Around the same time as Hodgson’s comments, former Alberta energy minister Sonya Savage predicted governments would need to provide some form of “backstop” to attract a private sector proponent to the project, suggesting that removing some regulatory hurdles would not have been enough.

The project still needs to clear a long list of regulatory and permitting approvals before construction can begin. And officials in both Ottawa and Alberta have not provided a breakdown for who will pay what in the estimated $35 billion to $43 billion the new pipeline will cost.

Smith, for her part, said she hopes to attract more private sector interest for getting involved as the path to getting it built becomes more certain.

It’s not clear industry will answer the call. Last week, Enbridge CEO Greg Ebel, who advised Alberta on its pipeline proposal, suggested there is no rush on the part of the private sector to make any decisions, particularly given that construction is not slated to be finished by 2032 even under the most optimistic timelines.

“There will be plenty of time for the private sector to get into this,” he recently told the podcast, In the Money.

His company, for its part, has some $40 billion worth of projects already in the works, he said, and is particularly focused on expanding its investments in the U.S. Gulf Coast, where new developments face far fewer regulatory or political hurdles.

The Carney-Smith pipeline announcement exemplifies how differently the Canadian scene has evolved after a decade of Trudeau’s policies.

Traditionally, oil producers are the ones who drive demand for a new pipeline so they can expand their output, Ebel pointed out. But the incentives in this country have been turned on their heads.

“There’s been a lot of focus on the pipes, and that’s kind of ass-backwards.”

National Post

jsnyder@postmedia.com