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FIRST READING: New Brunswick sits on an ocean of natural gas. It’s now importing Australian LNG.

Australia did the exact opposite of Canada in developing its LNG sector, and is now reaping the rewards

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FIRST READING: New Brunswick sits on an ocean of natural gas. It’s now importing Australian LNG. Back to video

In a particularly potent illustration of the dysfunction of the Canadian energy sector, Canada is now importing natural gas from Australia despite sitting atop one of the largest gas reserves on earth.

This week, an LNG tanker called the Maran Gas Hector pulled into an LNG import terminal in Saint John, N.B., after charting a 25,000 km course direct from Gladstone, Australia.

The Maran Gas Hector was bringing gas into a region littered with failed or stalled proposals to send Canadian natural gas in the other direction.

As far back as 2015, the Canada Energy Regulator was listing four proposed LNG export terminals on Canada’s Atlantic coast. None of these projects bore fruit, including one that would have been directly adjacent to the Saint John facility where the Maran Gas Hector ultimately docked to unload its cargo.

Australian LNG is going global 🇦🇺🚢🌍🇨🇦 A shipment is slated to be delivered to East Canada for the first time this week. And earlier Australia sent a cargo to Turkey and Chile⚠️ This is a pretty big shift. 99.9% of Australian LNG was delivered to Asian ports last year pic.twitter.com/A1pwQuHObh— Stephen Stapczynski (@SStapczynski) February 25, 2026

Australian LNG is going global 🇦🇺🚢🌍🇨🇦 A shipment is slated to be delivered to East Canada for the first time this week. And earlier Australia sent a cargo to Turkey and Chile⚠️ This is a pretty big shift. 99.9% of Australian LNG was delivered to Asian ports last year pic.twitter.com/A1pwQuHObh

The Maran Gas Hector is also selling gas to customers with vast reserves of natural gas located just beneath their feet.

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New Brunswick, in particular, is known to sit atop an estimated 77.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to Natural Resources Canada. That’s enough to fill the Maran Gas Hector at least 20,000 times. And New Brunswick has known of these reserves since at least the mid-19th century.

In 1859 — eight years before Canada’s creation — New Brunswick became only the second place in the world to discover that a hole drilled in the ground could cause oil and gas to bubble to the surface.

But the main reason these reserves have never been tapped is because in 2014 New Brunswick imposed an indefinite moratorium on hydraulic fracturing (fracking), the precise system that would be needed to extract the gas reserves.

And New Brunswick’s gas reserves are just a small share of the Canadian total, which are about 1.4 quadrillion cubic feet. According to one analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy, that’s enough for Canada to meet all the world’s natural gas needs for 200 years.

But perhaps the starkest truth revealed by the arrival of the Maran Gas Hector is that its cargo comes from Australia, a country that has effectively done the exact opposite of Canada in terms of developing its natural gas sector.

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Australia has far less natural gas than Canada, and has been producing it for less time. But starting in the 1980s, Australia has leaned heavily into exploiting those reserves for export in the form of super-cooled Liquid Natural Gas. As of 2026, Australia operated 10 LNG export terminalssupported by thousands of kilometres of natural gas pipelines.

The effect has been transformative for the Australian economy, adding an estimated $220 million to the country’s GDP each day.

In contrast, Canada currently has just one LNG export terminal; the LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, B.C.

It opened just last year. And in one clue as to why there aren’t others, its construction was marred by a lengthy process of legal battles, environmental reviews and even civil insurrection.

LNG Canada is supplied by the Coastal GasLink pipeline, whose construction saw repeated violent attacks from suspected anti-pipeline activists, as well as a nationwide rail blockade in early 2020 that did at least $1 billion damage to the Canadian economy.

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In recent years, Canada’s status as a major producer of natural gas made it the subject of multiple entreaties from European and Asian powers looking for alternatives to imports of Russian gas.

Between 2023 and 2024, then Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida and then German chancellor Olaf Scholze both made rare dedicated visits to Ottawa in search of LNG commitments, only to be brushed off by the Trudeau government. In the latter case, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there was no “business case” for exporting LNG from Atlantic Canadian ports.

Aside from the tankers now leaving Kitimat, the only way Canada has been able to capitalize on the sudden surge in global demand for natural gas is to export its gas via pipeline to the U.S., where it is then sold to Europe at a markup by U.S. LNG ports.

The U.S. has also been bullish at ramping up its LNG infrastructure, in sharp contrast to Canada. From a standing start just 10 years ago, the U.S. now has eight operational LNG ports bringing in twice as much revenue as the country’s combined T.V. and movie exports.

Chrystia Freeland, of all people, has called out the new Liberal strategy of getting into bed with China as a reaction to fraying relations with the United States.

It was only last month that Prime Minister Mark Carney traveled to Beijing, said he was “heartened” by their leadership of the “New World Order,” and agreed to an unspecified “strategic” partnership with the People’s Republic of China. Beijing also agreed to lift punitive tariffs on Canadian canola until at least the end of the year in exchange for Canada importing 49,000 Chinese-made EVs.

Freeland was deputy prime minister under Justin Trudeau, and was a member of the Carney government until her resignation in early January. She told Bloomberg News this week that “we need to be a little bit skeptical of commitments from China.”

She added, “a lot of Canadians are now coming to the conclusion that Beijing can be trusted more than Washington. I think that’s really sad.”

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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