Canada Moving Towards Becoming a Petro-State Due to “Ethical Oil” Requests

The current Russia-Ukraine conflict has pushed fossil fuels and geopolitics to the public eye. To avoid the economic sanctions, Russia has weaponized its energy exports.

After sanctions were placed on Russia, President Vladimir Putin said that he expects those “unfriendly” countries to pay for gas in rubbles, the official currency of Russia. Last month, the Russian government cut off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria after the countries refused to pay in the currency.

Calls for Canadian oil and gas production and exports have been revived as Europe’s energy supply is threatened by the rising crisis.

The term petro-state was first proposed by political scientist Terry Lynn Karl in her 1997 book called The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-states. To explain more in deep as to why oil-exporting countries like Saudi Arabia and Nigeria are unable to turn their oil earnings into more sustainable economies, she developed the petro-state theory.

A country’s dependence on oil exports causes economic and political difficulties such as low growth in manufacturing industries, susceptibility to price shocks, significant social inequalities, authoritarianism, and corruption.

A number of scholars have argued over whether or not Canada can be considered a petro-state. After all, oil products only make up 8.3% of national GDP, a far lower percentage than in typical petro-states. However, Canada’s economy and those of other petro-states have similar structural flaws.

The pandemic has had an impact on Canada’s energy sector, resulting in a decrease in demand. The energy-dependent provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador have been particularly affected by this.

Ethical oil narratives that moralize bitumen extraction and demonize critics try to portray resource dependency as a part of the Canadian identity.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney tweeted, “Now if Canada really wants to help defang Putin, then let’s get some pipelines built!” days after Russia’s  invasion of Ukraine.

Yet, adding new pipelines to expand Canada’s reliance on fossil fuels is not the only option. Despite the country’s dependence on the oil and gas industry, Norway is a great example of how to solve the curse of the petro-state.

Bruce Campbell, a policy analyst, wrote that Canada’s current climate policy is based on delay, denial, and division, in comparison with Norway whose path to net-zero is focused on climate action, cooperation with labour unions and government leadership.

If Canada really wants to become an ethical energy producer, public talks should be about what policies we can put in place right away to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector and strategy for their eventual phase-out. 

Original source material for this article taken from here