Falice Chin spoke to Energy for a Secure Future chair Shannon Joseph on why there needs to be clearer timelines and rules for major energy infrastructure and the path to energy success in Canada. Here are key insights from the conversation.
After months of political signalling between Ottawa and Alberta over energy development, Shannon Joseph says Canada may finally be entering a phase where governments are shifting from rhetoric toward execution.
Though she cautions the hard part is only beginning.
“I think it’s really important that the governments have come out publicly finally on what’s happening with industrial carbon pricing,” said Joseph, chair of Energy for a Secure Future, during an interview on Hub Hits with Falice Chin. “This was a very big question mark, not only for anybody interested in the pipeline, but certainly for all the producers who have to fill that pipeline.”
Last week’s federal-provincial energy agreement laid out aggressive timelines for a proposed new bitumen pipeline to the West Coast while also clarifying Alberta’s TIER framework. But Joseph said certainty alone will not guarantee investment.
“The premier [of Alberta] said herself she’d hoped that it would be a $50 a tonne carbon tax and so now we’ve landed on this $130 [effective price by 2040],” Joseph noted. “So I think it’s useful for that clarity to be finally out there.”
The larger challenge, she argued, is convincing investors that Canada can actually complete large-scale projects.
“This has been the thing Canada has not given investors confidence about,” she said, adding that investors are less concerned with theoretical carbon pricing formulas than with certainty around approvals, timelines, and returns.
For Joseph, Canada’s emerging LNG sector offers the clearest model for how future oil and pipeline projects could succeed.
“LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink got themselves to the finish line,” she said. “We are now a global exporter of LNG. We weren’t before.”
She argued governments should study what allowed those projects to move forward.
“When we look at that context, we didn’t add extra costs to that project that didn’t need to be added,” Joseph said. “So I think we are on a path with gas that we can look at for oil and say, ‘How do we learn from what they did to be successful so that this oil project can be successful?’”
Joseph also pointed to Indigenous ownership models and loan guarantees as potentially transformative for future projects, particularly given the legal challenges pipelines have historically faced in Canada. She argued that moving the public-interest and political determination to the beginning of the approval process—as currently envisioned through the Major Projects Office —could significantly reduce one of the biggest sources of investor uncertainty.
“I think we’re in a different world now and that gives me a lot of optimism,” she said.
Energy for a Secure Future is a member of The Hub’s Corporate & Industry Council.
