Energy Threatens To Split Canada Apart

Forbes

22-05-2025

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during a press conference after the First Ministers ... More Meeting in Ottawa, Canada on March 21, 2025. (Photo by Dave Chan / AFP) (Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Last month's Canadian federal elections restored the Liberal Party to power, but may have lit the fuse that will eventually break the nation apart.
Against all odds of only a few months ago, when increasingly unpopular Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seemed headed for certain defeat, and his party reduced to national irrelevance, the Liberals united around a former Bank of England Governor named Mark Carney and remained in control of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. As with the prior federal election, the Liberals again did not receive a majority, but the Party did win the plurality and should therefore have little trouble joining in a coalition with a smaller party to retain control.
The 2025 election also reinforced the historically geographic split in Canada, where the Liberals dominated the largest province, Ontario, and parts of Quebec in the east, but found precious little support in the western provinces, where Canada's mineral, oil, and gas wealth is mostly found.
Alberta is Canada's energy giant, and it has long felt hemmed in, stymied, and disrespected by Canada's eastern elite provinces, who have taken the concept of "Net Zero" far beyond what their southern neighbors in the United States believe practicable, or even possible. Indeed, shortly after the recent election, pundits were asking whether Carney was "Net Zero First" or "Canada First"? (Source). Further, the leader of the political party known as "Bloc Québécois", which only runs candidates in that Francophone majority province, Yves-Francois Blanchet, declared that there is no future for oil and gas in Canada, and that the Bloc Party would not support oil and gas pipelines under any circumstances. (Source).
This sounds like a declaration of economic war to the Canadian west, and especially the two major energy provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Conservatives won 34 out of 37 provincial seats in Alberta and 13 out of 14 seats in Saskatchewan. Alberta's Premier (the equivalent of a US Governor), Danielle Smith, has become the leader of the western group. Representatives from the four western provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia have had numerous discussions on future plans for that Party. While they didn't specifically say so, the threat of provinces separating from Canada has been raised.
Unlike the United States, which fought a civil war in the 1860's to prevent secession of certain States from the Union, the rights of individual provinces in Canada to effect "separation" from the nation as a whole are very unclear. The Canadian Supreme Court has issued opinions on this topic, as Quebec has a number of times raised the separatist flag itself, but the totality of the subject has never been fully addressed by that Court. (Source). As a result, Canada remains a confederation of provinces with provincial lines that demarcate legal jurisdiction, but not actual land ownership, so the complexity of the legal issues that would need to be resolved to allow any province to separate from the whole remains daunting, unsettled, and simply enormous.
Despite this, events seem to keep pushing the country's overall separation movement forward. Chief among these events are the so-called "equalization payments" that the Canadian federal government collects from richer provinces and that it then distributes to poorer ones. For example, in 2025, Quebec received $136 billion Canadian from the national government while the energy rich western provinces received exactly nothing. (Source). Meanwhile, much of that western wealth comes from energy resources, which Quebec is trying to block.
Newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney has a fateful choice to make. He can stick to his Net Zero energy goals and hazard ripping his country apart, or he can risk the wrath of his environmental allies to hopefully restore peace in the dominion. The Western Hemisphere awaits his decisions.