This Canada Day, Celebrate and Champion Canada's Potential for Energy Renewal and Prosperity

Resource transformation the key to July 1 celebrations of the present, not just the past.

By Geoff Russ, Special to the National Citizens Coalition and Energy Affordability Now

As we head towards Canada Day, there is much to be proud of.

So many great accomplishments and victories have been earned by Canadians over the years, and all of it is inspiring.

Throughout the life of this country, Canadians were able to construct grand projects like continent-spanning railways, long-winding highways for the Olympic Games, and grand hydroelectric dams. It all helped to transform this land into a great and prosperous country.

This year’s July 1 will be one filled with appreciation for past glories, for that is just about all that we still have.

Canada’s present and future are respectively grim and dim, so thank God this country has memories to give people the temporary high of nostalgia.

Those who can remember the days of rich job prospects, empowering salaries, and receiving the keys to the first home they purchased – those would be the lucky ones.

For the millions of young, disillusioned Canadians, who are still early in their careers and reckoning with the ills borne from the Trudeau era, one can excuse them for not wholly revelling in this national holiday.

Being able to easily choose aspects of this country to celebrate has become a sort of privilege and marker of social status. Youth are rarely the most enthusiastic cohort when it comes to love of country.

Canada is hardly a fair or free place if you are under 40 years of age.

For the past decade, the federal government and its accomplices in the provinces have run this country into the ground. It will require heavy lifting to pull it out and get it back on the road.

For the youngest and present working generations to grow into genuine patriotism, instead of degenerating into permanent apathy, it requires a government and state that gives them a roadmap to the good life. That cannot be achieved by the top-down redistribution of wealth; that is not just a regurgitated libertarian talking point, but an observation of recent history.

If Liberal social democracy had paid true dividends, the last decade’s mammoth expansion of government welfare programs on borrowed money would have yielded a healthy and growing middle class.

Instead, Canada’s middle class is one of the most economically trapped and sclerotic in the developed world, with just enough to not qualify for government assistance, but far less than they need to be financially secure.

Canadian leaders, and particularly the Liberals, cannot afford to keep doubling down on the failed model of taxing and spending a dwindling supply of wealth, and covering the shortfalls with massive borrowing.

It does not have to be this way.

There is the opportunity, the appetite, and the means to revive Canada’s place as an economic leader. Hundreds of billions of dollars in value lie beneath our feet. Massive deposits of critical minerals remain in the ground, with just six types of them valued at over $500 billion.

Hundreds of billions more in oil is still lying unused, instead of being sold and shipped to our democratic allies in global markets, alongside the minerals needed to mass-produce modern technologies.

One of the worst misleading stereotypes about the resource industry is that it only creates jobs out in the bush or the oilpatch. In reality, the offices of Vancouver and Calgary start filling up with new young hires as mining, oil, and forestry grow.

For evidence, look no further than the downturn in oil markets that hollowed out downtown Calgary in 2015, leaving entire towers nearly empty. Boom times for energy turned the city into a Mecca for enterprising young men and women.

The fact that those offices have not been refilled since is an indictment of bad decisions by federal and provincial governments that stymied the cultivation of our resources, and thus delayed our return to a booming economy.

New markets are emerging in Asia and Europe which will eagerly buy oil, gas, and minerals from the first friendly supplier who picks up the phone. That can be Canada, so long as our government has the will and commitment.

Our mineral and energy sectors can become powerhouses that create thousands upon thousands of well-paid, white-and-blue-collar jobs, and generate historic, generational wealth.

Canada may have a fresh prime minister in Mark Carney, but the Trudeau era will not end until he is pushed to turn the page on the Liberal obsession with controlling the economy, instead of letting it naturally breathe.

It is more important than ever to hold their feet to the fire and keep up the pressure so that the Liberals cannot avoid doing the right thing this time. Then, and perhaps only then, will future Canada Days be celebrations of the present, not the past.

Resources alone cannot transform the Canadian economy, but they can be the biggest driver of change, and what turns this country into an ambitious one that builds and is again a place of prosperity.

Geoff Russ is a policy manager in the resource sector and contributor to several national publications across Canada, the United States, and Australia. Read his work in the National Post, the Spectator Australia, and Modern Age.

There's no solving for Canada's cost of living crisis -- or tariff crisis -- without growing Canada's resource economy, and restrictions on our energy sector have proven themselves to be just another tax on working families. Help us advocate on your behalf, and on behalf of our Great Canadian energy producers and innovators.

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