Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks to construction workers as he tours a housing development in Ottawa on Nov. 6, 2025.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press

Yrjö Koskinen is director of research at the Institute for Sustainable Finance and BMO Professor of Sustainable and Transition Finance at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary.

Last year, after announcing the Ottawa-Alberta memorandum of understanding, Mark Carney walked into the Calgary Chamber of Commerce as Prime Minister and left as something closer to a folk hero. Yet, while the audience in Calgary surged to its feet, the stock market barely flinched – and what movement we did see was mostly negative.

An event-study of five key names tied directly to Alberta’s oil and pipeline ecosystem – Canadian Natural Resources CNQ-T, Cenovus CVE-T, Suncor SU-T, Enbridge ENB-T and TC Energy TRP-T – tells a sobering story. Over a window of seven trading days around the announcement, from Nov. 24 to Dec. 2, all five stocks underperformed the S&P/TSX Composite Index. Their cumulative abnormal returns – performance relative to the index – were modestly but consistently negative. In plain English, investors did not treat the MOU as value-creating news.

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