In January, Donald Trump told the World Economic Forum that his country doesn’t need Canadian oil and gas. “We have more than anybody,” he declared. Like so much else Trump says, this was untrue. The U.S. ranks ninth in terms of world oil reserves, while Canada is in third place. Twenty-two per cent of the oil America uses is imported from Canada. Nonetheless, in February, the White House went further, proclaiming its plan to restore “American energy dominance” by producing more oil domestically. But this is a fantasy, from a time long before oil and gas became the continent-spanning enterprise it is today.

For more than 50 years, the oil and gas industry has been deeply integrated, like the auto industry, across our borders. The U.S. imports oil from Canada and Mexico, while Eastern Canada imports it from the northeastern states and foreign suppliers. Most of Canada’s pipelines run south, out of Alberta to American refineries. The Enbridge mainline, from Edmonton to Sarnia, Ontario, was built in the 1950s to run partly through the U.S., because it was cheaper. (A scorched-earth approach to American energy dominance could result in the Americans shuttering it—they have the technical means—choking off 500,000 barrels per day of domestic supply.) So why does Trump believe America can simply go it alone?

In part it’s because the fracking revolution in the U.S. unlocked a wealth of new oil and gas reserves, and the country now produces more oil than it consumes. Simple math dictates that it could be energy independent—but there is little in the way of simple math in the oil world, and the American market remains dependent on Canada’s cheaper product. The benchmark price of oil from Alberta’s oil sands is Western Canadian Select, or WCS, which often trades at a steep discount to West Texas Intermediate, the comparable U.S. benchmark. In early April, WCS was less than $50 per barrel, while WTI was above $60. This is the case for importing Canadian oil: buy low, sell high. Americans import cheap Canadian oil and sell their own oil internationally, where it fetches higher prices. The result is that while the U.S. ships more than 10 million barrels per day out of the country, it still imports 8.5 million, almost half of that from Canada.

America’s refining capacity is also set up for Canadian product. The oil sands produce bitumen—heavy, sour oil. Many U.S. refineries are designed for bitumen, rather than the lighter, sweeter oil produced from Texas’s Permian basin, which is........

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