Prime Minister Mark Carney and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently announced five memorandums of understanding and plans for free trade by 2026. A better partnership with industrializing India and resource-rich Canada makes sense. Unfortunately, the details announced 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.
Canada picked a good partner. India is the world’s most populous country at 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 grasping for world domination by all means possible.
Despite its many mouths to feed, India seems unwilling to drop the 30 per cent tariff on yellow peas and ten per cent tariff on lentils that it imposed on Canada last year. However, India’s high commissioner to Canada, Dinesh Patnaik expressed strong desire for something else before Carney arrived in India.
“On energy, there is an appetite which even Canada cannot fulfill and we are willing to buy whatever Canada is offering on crude, on LPG, on LNG,” Patnaik said, regarding liquified petroleum gas and liquified natural gas.
Wow, 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, valued at $883 billion. Imagine, India wants all that and more! Too bad they won’t get it.
Instead, Canada will keep selling its oil to U.S. refineries at a discount. The Americans know that Canada lacks the port and pipeline capacity to send much of our petroleum anywhere else.
The most India will get from Canada is 22 million pounds of uranium. It’s incredible that Canada is happy to load up train loads of a radioactive product, send them to the West Coast, then on a ship for at least a month to travel 16,000 km to India–and yet not do that for oil. Can the reason really be environmental? Carbon is the chemical building block of life, and the more that’s in the air, the more that all vegetation can flourish.
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. Why? Because coal’s carbon emissions per unit of heat produced are twice that of natural gas. Okay, so why aren’t we selling India LNG if we will sell it coal?
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.
Canada’s oil reserves, the fourth-largest in the world, are nowhere on the radar. Instead, artificial intelligence is clearly in view. 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 1000 to 1,800 TwH by 2050. Data centres and AI will drive the majority 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 needs. 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.
