An awkward response

Asked earlier in the interview what tariffs would do to oil prices, Wright said the Canadian energy system is integrated with the US one, with pipelines feeding US refineries tuned for heavy Canadian crude, and "I don't think we're going to see that change"; "As the President has said, this is a drug war." When CNBC's Brian Sullivan then asked whether Canada might answer tariffs by shipping its oil "to Vancouver" to sell overseas, Wright replied: "It's hard to build new pipeline capacity. Canada does have a West Coast pipeline, which is running today and exporting oil to Asia, but that's that's 10% or less than 10% of Canadian oil production."

At the Hudson Institute, Miran said there were "many options" for burden sharing and offered "a few ideas": accept US tariffs without retaliating; open their markets and buy more from America; raise defence spending and buy more from US suppliers; invest in and build factories in America; or "simply write checks to Treasury". The prepared remarks do not mention Canada.

On Jan 30, 2025, two days before the first tariff order, David Goldwyn and Joseph Webster of the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Center urged the administration to pause major tariff actions or at least leave energy out. Canada supplied about 62% of US crude imports in the first ten months of 2024, they noted, and markets such as the Midwest have no alternative import supplier of heavy oil. Warning that Brazil, Argentina and other Latin American markets would be watching if Canada and Mexico were targeted, they wrote that "rather than establishing US energy dominance, tariffs on energy products could accelerate the desire of major US hydrocarbon partners to diversify trade with other countries, including China." The piece does not forecast specific pipelines or terminals.

On Mar 31, 2025, days after Carney said the old relationship with the US was 'over' and after 14 energy CEOs had called for new pipelines and LNG terminals, Christopher Hernandez-Roy of CSIS's Americas Program described Canada's response as already under way: Canada 'is talking about building new infrastructure on its coasts' to reach other markets rather than north-south links, and new pipelines, if built, would cost the US its source of cheap heavy crude. He wrote that Canada and Mexico 'will make long-term investments in infrastructure to facilitate access to non-U.S. markets' and warned that North America could become less integrated, a loss for US economic and national security.

The day after Canada's Apr 28, 2025 election, Edward Alden and Inu Manak of the Council on Foreign Relations noted Carney's promise 'to diversify Canada's trading relationships with new infrastructure investments' but judged that the strategy 'faces strong headwinds': 75% of Canada's exports go to the US, and China and India are both difficult partners. They concluded, quoting Canadian diplomat John W. Holmes, that Canada 'can disagree with the United States but not reject it.'

In a three-part AEIdeas series, "Canada and the Trump Administration" (18, 24 and 26 February 2025), Colin Dueck of the American Enterprise Institute argued in Part I that Trump's statements had catalysed "a stunning surge in old-fashioned Canadian nationalism" that was helping the Liberals. In Part II he wrote that a Conservative government "will unleash oil and gas production, dismantle stifling regulations", and that talk of Canada as a 51st state "is fueling an unusually powerful surge of anti-Americanism north of the border. This will not provide the Trump administration with bargaining leverage versus Ottawa. On the contrary, it will simply make it more difficult for any Canadian government—even a Tory one—to offer reasonable concessions. As election season opens, the only beneficiary of annexationist talk is Trudeau's Liberals." He proposed a US-Canada "grand bargain", and in Part III listed its elements, including enhanced US-Canada cooperation on Arctic oil and gas production, adding: "I do not believe that any Liberal Party government could ever agree to it."

Predicts harm to US refining, not any Canadian reaction. AFPM is, in our reading, the lobby behind the energy carve-out.

The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership (2023), in its Department of State chapter (printed p. 184; PDF p. 216), says the United States must work with Mexico, Canada and other countries on a "hemisphere-focused energy policy". The framing is cooperative: it does not tie the goal to pressure on Canada or predict how Canada would respond. The Department of Energy chapter does not mention Canada, and the free-trade chapter criticises the 2018 Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs imposed on Canada, Europe and other allies.

Olsen (Ethics and Public Policy Center) said Trump wants the US trade deficit with Canada eliminated, and that the four quickest ways he could see to do that were "purchasing more in defense, paying more for drugs, buying more American agriculture, and allowing more American entertainment into the country". He suggested that offering to send more gas south would not satisfy Trump (part of the remark is inaudible in the transcript), and said that in Carney's place he would build a pipeline from Alberta and "send it to Hudson Bay", while doubting Carney's coalition would accept it. Tronnes (Center for North American Prosperity and Security), who is from Alberta, said Canada had "a real opportunity now to get moving on permitting reform, on getting things out of the ground, on building pipelines. Whether it's from east to west or north to south, we've got to get something going in Canada… And this might just be the kick in the butt that we need."

Prime Minister Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed a memorandum of understanding in Calgary on 27 November 2025. Alberta agreed to act as proponent of one or more private-sector pipelines carrying at least one million barrels a day of bitumen, with a route to Asian markets as a priority and an application ready for the Major Projects Office by 1 July 2026. Ottawa agreed to declare such a pipeline a project of national interest that can be referred for designation under the Building Canada Act and, if it is approved and offers Indigenous co-ownership, to enable bitumen exports from a deep-water port to Asia, "including if necessary through an appropriate adjustment to the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act." Ottawa also agreed not to implement the oil and gas emissions cap and to suspend the Clean Electricity Regulations in Alberta, while the two governments agreed to negotiate a new industrial carbon pricing agreement and support the Pathways carbon-capture project.

⚠ Caution: anonymous sources The Keystone XL pitch was reported from an unnamed Canadian government source; the oil-export offer comes from the US ambassador's account nine months later. No document on the offer has been published. Reported by an outlet citing unnamed sources.

Prime Minister Carney met President Trump at the White House on 7 October 2025, his second visit since taking office. Trump told reporters Carney would walk away "very happy," but showed no sign of easing tariffs, The Canadian Press reported, and no tariff relief was announced. The Prime Minister's Office said on 8 October that the leaders had identified opportunities for progress on steel, aluminum and energy and directed their teams to conclude that work in the coming weeks. A Canadian government source told The Canadian Press that Carney raised reviving the Keystone XL pipeline as part of a pitch linking energy cooperation to support for Canada's steel and aluminum sectors. In July 2026, US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra said Carney had offered at that meeting to ship three to four million more barrels of oil to the US as part of a "preliminary" deal, the National Post reported.

⚠ Caution: second-hand account US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra’s account, told to an Alberta audience, of how two cabinet members reacted in a private negotiation. Someone recounting what others said or did.

Hoekstra said Carney had offered, at a meeting on 2025-10-07, to ship three to four million more barrels of oil to the US as part of a 'preliminary' trade deal (National Post, via Yahoo; its headline called this nearly doubling oil exports). He also said 'We want oil. We need oil', called Canada 'one of the best places in the world to get oil from' and said Saskatchewan and Alberta could make 'the most compelling case' to supply more. The 'don't necessarily need it from Canada' line was his gloss on Trump's 'we don't need your oil', not a statement of his own policy (CPAC video of the session, at about 10:45; also reported by Global News and the Epoch Times). In the same session he spoke of 'the pipe coming down south, the pipe going north' meeting at the border (CPAC video, at about 44:08; auto-transcript). This is a second-hand account, told to an Alberta audience, of how two cabinet members reacted in a private negotiation.

Enbridge said Canadian oil producers had not committed to the 250,000-barrel-a-day second phase. Coverage cited oil-price volatility since the start of the Iran war and the fact that the federal–Alberta energy agreement remains non-binding. Phase 1 (about 150,000 barrels a day) reached a final investment decision in November 2025.

LNG Canada announced that its five joint-venture partners, Shell (40%), PETRONAS (25%), PetroChina (15%), Mitsubishi Corporation (15%) and KOGAS (5%), had taken the final investment decision on the Phase 2 expansion of its plant at Kitimat, BC. LNG Canada's release is dated 28 September 2026; the Prime Minister's Office, Shell and TC Energy announced the decision on 29 September. Phase 2 adds two LNG processing units (trains), raising the plant's capacity from 14 to 28 million tonnes a year; Shell said commercial operations are expected to begin in the early 2030s. The Prime Minister's Office and the federal Major Projects Office put the investment at $33 billion, and the Prime Minister's Office, in the title of its release, called it the second-largest single private investment in Canadian history; LNG Canada described it as one of the largest private-sector investments in Canada. The decision lets MNT Investments LP, representing the Gitga'at, Gitxaała, Haisla, Kitselas and Kitsumkalum Nations, exercise an option to invest up to C$1 billion in a special-purpose entity that will buy Phase 2's new LNG storage tank; the Prime Minister's Office and the Major Projects Office describe this as a majority ownership stake in the tank but give different sizes for it (225,000 cubic metres in the Prime Minister's Office release, 255,000 on the Major Projects Office page). Each partner remains responsible for taking its own share of the LNG produced (equity lifting); the releases name no third-party buyers. TC Energy said the decision met the conditions of its earlier conditional investment decision on Coastal GasLink Phase 2, which adds compressor stations (five, according to LNG Canada) to nearly double the pipeline's current capacity of about 2.1 billion cubic feet a day; the Prime Minister's Office says the capacity will double. TC Energy expects construction to start in early 2027 and service to begin in the early 2030s.