Canada's Moment

Danger looms to the south but the global environment could not be better for Canadians who want this country to step up and play in the big league.

Fatih Birol is the long-serving and globally respected head of the International Energy Agency. In today’s Globe and Mail, there’s an excellent article about Birol’s views on the current energy crisis and what it means for Canada.

From the article:

Oil and gas aren’t the only two commodities now missing from world markets, Dr. Birol said, so are “trust and predictability.”

That is so spectacularly right.

Human psychology applies even in the most sophisticated thinkers, and that psychology inclines people to be hyper-sensitive to risks that have recently manifested themselves in dramatic ways. It’s the flip-side of our tendency to belittle, or even shrug off, risks that haven’t inflicted harm for ages, or have never done so.

So what risk is manifesting now? An energy crisis, of course. It’s 1974 all over again. But that’s not the shock that has the greatest grip on the minds of the world’s officials and executives. They are (rightly) obsessed with the transformation of the United States from the bulwark of the international order to the leading threat to that order.

Not only does that transformation upset a whole array of assumptions that always appeared solid as granite. It makes all those very sophisticated players hyper-sensitive to political risk to an extent they haven’t been for generations.

If even the United States of America isn’t reliable, who is? That’s the question haunting them now.

Enter Canada.

Boring, dull, unsurprising Canada.

That’s long been the knock.

Canada plods along. It does what it’s supposed to. It’s not thrilling. It never amazes. But it’s nice. Canada is the earnest Boy Scout of nations.

But knocks can become brands. If we choose.

Take the same attributes, the same assumptions and stereotypes, and re-frame them: Predictable Canada. Trustworthy Canada. At exactly the moment in global history when, as Birah says, trust and predictability are at least as valuable as oil and data.

Canada is not perfect on these scores. Separatist movements threatening to create political instability hurt Canada’s brand and, as a result, the people those movements claim to speak for.

But counterbalancing that is the relative stability of Canadian domestic politics. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s reputation in global circles is golden but, just as importantly, he has an astonishingly strong domestic political base. In France, the far right is leading polls. In the UK and Germany, ditto. But in Canada? Canada is the only major liberal democracy in which the centre is holding strong.

That’s the kind of thing global officials and executives notice.

Oh, and we have enormous energy resources, plus staggering potential for so much more, in the midst of the worst energy crisis since the world was rocked in 1974.

It’s not just a potential pipeline that Canada’s government must get a move on, Dr. Birol said, “it’s everything.”

That includes nuclear projects and supplying the world with the uranium needed to power the sector, the extraction, refining and processing of critical minerals, and bolstering oil and gas exports.

Countries will choose their energy partners “much more carefully at this time,” rather than looking solely at prices and what they have done in the past. “They will also look at the reputation and the risks of their energy partners.”

Yes, we Canadians are deeply worried about the madness to our south. The danger is blatant. But alongside that, we have a global environment so perfectly suited to benefit Canada it looks almost scripted in Ottawa.

This really could be Canada’s moment — if we have the wit and the passion to seize the promise and avoid the peril.