EDITORIAL: Trudeau talked hot air on gas

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According to Prime Minister Mark Carney, former prime minister Justin Trudeau was gaslighting Canadians when he insisted there was no business case for exporting liquified natural gas to Europe.

To the contrary, Carney and Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson touted “enormous” opportunities to ship LNG to European countries anxious to reduce their reliance on Russia during an official visit to Germany on Tuesday.

That’s opposed to Trudeau, who claimed there was “never a strong business case” for shipping LNG to Europe just two years ago, when he met then-German chancellor Olaf Scholz.

This despite the fact Canada is the world’s fifth largest producer and sixth largest exporter of natural gas and that at the time European leaders from Germany, Ukraine, Poland and Greece, as well as from South Korea and Japan, were interested in buying Canadian LNG.

Carney, in Germany to sign a joint declaration of intent to co-operate in developing critical mineral supply chains with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, said federal government plans to expand ports in Montreal and Churchill, Man., will facilitate the export of critical minerals and LNG to foreign markets.

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Hodgson said proponents of LNG projects believe it could take as little as five years for Canada to develop the capacity to ship LNG to Europe by tankers.

The bad news is the lost decade of failing to build that infrastructure under the previous Trudeau government.

It means we have to sell almost all of our natural gas to the U.S. at heavily discounted prices, costing our economy billions of dollars annually.

During their decade in power, Trudeau and his environment ministers kept insisting, wrongly, that the age of fossil fuels was coming to an end because of concerns about climate change.

In fact, replacing coal-fired electricity with natural gas is one of the most effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because natural gas burns at half the carbon intensity of coal.

On Canada’s West Coast, LNG Canada in Kitimat, B.C., began operations in June and is now exporting LNG to Asia, while six other projects proposing to do the same are in various stages of approval and development.

But there are no facilities at present to transport LNG from Canada’s East Coast to Europe.