There was, he said, no business case for shipping Canadian LNG to Europe. Former prime minister Justin Trudeau said a lot of things that triggered the oil and gas industry and its numerous advocates in Alberta, but few got their collective dander up quite like that. And so, when news came out that a German industrial conglomerate called SEFE had committed to buying Canadian LNG, they all seemed to jump to their keyboards at the same time to rub it in his face. Dunking on the former prime minister’s supposed lack of economic savvy is still, more than a year after he left office, one of their favourite pastimes. 

Unfortunately — for them, at least — it turns out that their former bête noir was still right about the prospects for a new east coast LNG project. Yes, the Germans will eventually be buying a small amount (one million tonnes annually, or just over eight per cent of Ksi Lisims’s total output) of Canadian LNG, but it will be coming from the West Coast, not the east, and not until at least 2029. Even then, the cargoes won’t actually travel from the West Coast down through the Panama Canal and over to Europe. Instead, they’ll be financially “swapped” for cargoes closer to the continent, with the Canadian cargoes ending up somewhere in Asia. 

I have no problem with this, for what it’s worth. Indigenous communities in northwestern BC are free to back projects that increase their prosperity, and environmentalists in other parts of the country should probably tread carefully whenever they deign to tell Indigenous leaders what they should or shouldn’t be doing. But I........

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