The response to America’s renewed belligerence under Trump 2.0 has been all over the map. Doug Ford, perhaps Canada’s most Trump-like politician, made headlines for his “Canada Is Not For Sale” hat, despite his entire premiership being dedicated to selling off Ontario. BC Premier David Eby, for his part, suggested we might tax the Alaska Highway or ban American liquor and asked British Columbians not to vacation in the US.
Underneath Eby’s haphazard ideas lurked an announcement that lent a little more clarity to the multipartisan strategy that the range of Canada’s parties seem to be pursuing: capitulation. Eby announced a new task force focused on the threat of Trump’s tariffs, co-chaired by three business leaders including the president of Teck Resources, Jonathan Price.
Teck is a major, publicly traded multinational mining company with a century-long history, and like most of these firms, it is deeply tied to U.S. capital. Teck is 67 percent owned by institutional investors. U.S.-based asset managers Vanguard, Fidelity, Boston Partners, Dodge & Cox, Blackrock, Janus Henderson, and Davis Advisors account for seven of the top ten shareholder positions, and many of the other owners that aren’t based in the U.S. are connected to and partially owned by American companies.
What this means is that Eby’s so-called response to the tariff threat is a matter of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Eby, like most other Canadian politicians, is trying to present a rhetorical commitment to Canadian nationalism while simultaneously rolling out the red carpet for foreign corporations. This isn’t a departure, exactly. He is simply doubling down on the neoliberal consensus that has created the very dependency on the U.S. he claims to reject. He is ensuring that, indeed, Canada remains for sale.
There is no doubt that Trump’s tariff threats pose a very real problem for Canada. The U.S. accounts for almost two-thirds of Canadian trade volumes, and virtually all of Canada’s oil exports go south. But responding to this threat with anything but capitulation will require a significant break from the decades of Canadian policy that opened the door to foreign ownership.
Which is why Trump’s threat is an opportunity to imagine a radically new approach to Canadian national development that will not only allow us to disentangle ourselves from the decaying American empire, but also to chart a meaningful course towards climate justice and reconciliation. Both of these projects have demonstrated themselves to be impossible under the existing neoliberal consensus.
Fossil fuels represent the lynch pin for the tariff question and are an industry that remains, unfortunately, critical for Canada’s economy. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), a progressive think tank, has proposed using export taxes on the energy sector as a way to generate new revenue at the expense of U.S. corporate profits and pressure the Trump administration to stop escalating its trade war.
But their proposal doesn’t go far enough. Canada’s oil and gas industry is, to a large degree, owned by American companies, including asset managers, other financial players, and oil majors. This is true for the oil sands, where many operators are either largely owned by American financiers or are simply subsidiaries of American companies, as in the case of Imperial Oil.
It’s also true for the newly developing fracked gas and LNG export industry.
The controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline is largely owned by U.S.-based private equity firm KKR. LNG Canada, the $20 billion export terminal that will be fed by Coastal GasLink, has a more diverse ownership, but every major partner is based outside Canada. Shell, its largest owner, is, predictably, itself substantially owned by American asset managers.
The proposed Ksi Lisims LNG project and its pipeline, the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission line, are both co-owned by a small Texas-based firm called Western LNG with extensive corporate ties to the major American gas company Cheniere.
In short, large portions of the profits generated by the oil and gas industry in Canada—as in much of the rest of the world—find their way across the border to financiers and shareholders in the U.S. An export tax, as the CCPA suggests, helps hit these players where it hurts, and it might help push the Trump administration to back off. But it wouldn’t change the underlying dynamic, nor would it allow Canada to chart a new path that reduces our dependence on and vulnerability to American capital.
Instead, we should take this opportunity to nationalize the fossil fuel industry. Through nationalization, we can keep fossil fuel profits in the country, reinvesting them in ways that can mitigate the impacts of rising trade tensions with the U.S. while simultaneously disempowering the foreign business interests that retain such a tight grip on this country’s economy and politics. This latter point is key, not only because it would allow us to begin taking more meaningful steps towards winding down the fossil fuel industry in line with our climate ambitions, but also because it would create a more fertile ground for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Negotiations over sovereignty between Indigenous nations and the Canadian state can’t meaningfully progress when American finance capital gets the final say on what happens here.
It’s not that simple, you might say. As Environment Minister Guilbeault put it, “We’re getting sued on just about everything we do.” But Trump, building on the collapse of the liberal world order kicked off by Biden’s genocide in Gaza, has opened the door for radicalism. Canada can leave (or renegotiate) the USMCA (NAFTA’s successor), the CPTPP, the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID), and every other international agreement that exposes Canada to the wrath of American financiers through Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). In so doing, we can stand in solidarity with and lend legitimacy to countries like Honduras as they fight against these structures of the global order that facilitate American imperialism and neo-colonialism. And we can free our hand when it comes to dealing with these corporate entities within the country.
This may sound farfetched. But as the journalist Martin Lukacs argued way back in 2014, the idea has often been popular with Canadians, including when Pierre Trudeau attempted to nationalize the industry in the 1980s. The unfortunate reality is that there’s no other way through this mess that actually helps defend our sovereignty against American expansionism rather than tacitly capitulating to it.
The Western-backed genocide of Gaza created a rupture in the neoliberal world order that Trump is continuing to widen. As a country that claims to be committed to climate mitigation, climate justice, and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, Canada needs to see this rupture as an opportunity to help shape a new, more just international order that rejects the domination of American fossil capital. To play our role in that project of world-building and to generate our own resilience against the increasingly unpredictable acts of our belligerent neighbours to the south, we need to nationalize the fossil fuel industry.
Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome.