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Margareta Dovgal: Carney must embrace Canada's petrostate status

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For 20 years, critics have hurled the word “petrostate” at Canada. If we are a petrostate, we are an embarrassingly bad one. A real petrostate knows what its resources are worth. Crucially, it seeks to preserve the advantages they provide.

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Ottawa refuses to view resource revenue as volatile commodity wealth. By being buried in the base budget, the sector’s economic value is hidden while it masks Canada’s deep-seated productivity failures. Business investment, industrial capacity, and export infrastructure have all atrophied. In lieu of transforming commodity wealth into a sovereign asset, we’ve instead built a housing-obsessed sandbox. Our regulatory failures remain ignored.

Margareta Dovgal: Carney must embrace Canada's petrostate status Back to video

Let’s be clear here that oil and gas is responsible for Canada’s enviable quality of life, not a post-industrial knowledge economy nor an enlightened public administration. It represents more than a quarter of domestic exports — $195 billion in 2024, per Statistics Canada. A GDP figure in isolation — energy production represents 7.8 per cent of Canada’s economy — does not show the full picture of just how crucial this sector is. Once pipelines, refineries and petrochemicals are counted, in 2025 the sector employed roughly 900,000 Canadians employed across direct, indirect and induced jobs.

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A Canadian worker downstream of resource........

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