Canada has the energy India wants. We just won’t sell it

India is openly looking for reliable energy suppliers but our own policies keep us from selling our oil and natural gas to them

Prime Minister Mark Carney and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently announced five memorandums of understanding (MoUs) and plans for free trade by 2026. A better partnership with industrializing India and resource-rich Canada makes sense. Unfortunately, the details announced on March 2 did far too little to secure markets for Canadian resources.

On the face of it, the headline numbers look nice. The two countries will partner for $5.5 billion in commerce, partnering in energy, critical minerals, technology, defence and more. The biggest winner is Saskatoon-based Cameco, which will supply India with $2.6 billion of uranium.

India is the world’s most populous country, with 1.4 billion people. Its economy, already the fifth-largest in the world (fourth on some lists), has world-leading growth at more than six per cent annually. Like China, it is hungry for resources. Unlike China, however, India is democratic and not seeking world domination by any means.

Despite its many mouths to feed, India seems unwilling to drop the 30 per cent tariff on yellow peas and the 10 per cent tariff on lentils that it imposed on Canada last year. Energy, however, appears to be a different story. India’s high commissioner to Canada, Dinesh Patnaik, expressed a strong desire for something else before Carney arrived in India.

“On energy, there is an appetite which even Canada cannot fulfil and we are willing to buy whatever Canada is offering on crude, on LPG, on LNG,” Patnaik said, regarding liquefied petroleum gas and liquefied natural gas.

Canada should pay attention. Natural Resources Canada says our country has 170 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and 1,300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. At world prices, this would fetch $22.2 trillion. Too bad they won’t get it.

Instead, Canada will keep selling its oil to U.S. refineries at a discount because Canada lacks the port and pipeline capacity to ship much of its petroleum elsewhere. Most Canadian oil exports move south because existing pipelines connect primarily to U.S. refineries rather than overseas markets.

The most India will get from Canada is 22 million pounds of uranium. Canada is prepared to load trainloads of a radioactive product and ship it 16,000 km to India, yet refuses to do the same for oil. Can the reason really be environmental?

Canada accounts for only 1.42 per cent of worldwide human-made greenhouse gas emissions, ranking 11th in the world, while India has about 7.5 per cent, ranking third. While Canada’s emissions have almost stalled, India’s have nearly doubled over the past 20 years. Just the same, the Canada-India agreement includes Canada sending India more coal. B.C.-based producer Elk Valley Resources will sell 1.2 million tonnes of coal to India worth $285 million.

Despite an abundance of domestic coal, Canada is phasing out coal-fired power plants under federal regulations that require the phaseout of traditional coal-fired electricity by 2030. Why? Because coal’s carbon emissions per unit of heat produced are twice those of natural gas. Okay, so why aren’t we selling India LNG if we will sell it coal? The agreements signed with India offer another clue.

Adding to the irony, India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and Canada’s Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources signed an MoU to promote bilateral technical cooperation in solar, wind, biomass, waste-to-energy, small hydropower, energy storage and capacity building. These MoUs encompass every form of energy but the ones that would benefit Canada the most.

Energy demand is only going to grow. HCL Technologies, a major Indian IT firm, will open new AI centres in Calgary and Mississauga, and expand an existing one in Vancouver. The India-Canada MoUs also include collaboration and scholarly exchanges to develop AI. Unfortunately, this energy-gobbling technology only makes Canada’s net-zero energy pursuits all the more misguided.

Canada’s power demands are expected to grow from today’s 625 terawatt hours (TWh) to 850 TWh by 2030, and 1,000 to 1,800 TWh by 2050. Data centres and AI will drive most of this incremental load. Canada’s fossil fuels could help meet this demand in stride if it abandoned net-zero goals, as the United States has. Instead, industrial carbon taxes, Clean Fuel Regulations and various other mandates will make powering Canada a needlessly gargantuan task.

Canada has what India and the rest of the world need. What Canadians need is a government that will meet the challenges of today and tomorrow in practical, not idealistic ways. As it is, Canada has become the country doing the least with the most, modelling underachievement in frustrating ways.

Lee Harding is a research fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He holds a Master of Public Policy (U of C) and a BA in Journalism, with a career spanning major networks like CBC and Global TV, as well as landmark published research on Canadian economic and social policy.