GUNTER: Trudeau cost Canada a chance to get into global LNG game — Trump and U.S. are reaping the benefit

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Last Sunday, at President Donald Trump’s golf resort in Scotland (a.k.a. King Donald’s summer palace), Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Union pledged European countries would buy US$750 billion (over $1 trillion Canadian) of U.S. energy – largely LNG – over the next three years in return for Trump promising to impose only 15% tariffs on the union’s member states.

Boy, those American and European trade negotiators must be dunces. Don’t they know that three years ago, then-German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made a special trip to Canada to ask our government to sell tens of billions in LNG to his country? Our economic genius of a prime minister, Justin Trudeau rejected Scholz’s request because “there is no business case” for selling LNG to Europe.

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The Germans almost immediately turned around and signed a 15-year agreement with Qatar for about $1.5 billion a year in LNG from that Gulf state.

This past Thursday, the South Koreans made a similar deal with the U.S. — $100 billion (about $138 billion Canadian) in energy over four years, primarily LNG.

What’s wrong with these countries? Can they not see that the greatest economic mind of the 21st Century, Justin Pierre James Trudeau, had decreed it was foolhardy to sign such agreements?

The U.S. deals with the EU and Korea just for LNG are worth about $800 billion Canadian over the next four years. The rest of the sales are for oil and nuclear fuels.

A good part of that market might have been Canada’s had we not been ruled by a “green” dreamweaver and eco-cultist who prevented this country from jumping into the world LNG market early in the game.

Now the Americans have sucked up a lot of the oxygen in the room, and it will be hard for Canada to get a foothold, even if current Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney gets off his duff and agrees to more pipelines and LNG ports.

Trudeau’s thinking (which remains Carney’s thinking until the current Liberal government does more than just talk a good game) cost Canada at least $400 billion in investment during the Trudeau decade, drove down our per capita income, dropped us out of the 25 richest countries in the world, distorted our housing market and drove up prices and unemployment.

Even after the change in prime ministers this year, the OECD still projects Canada will have the lowest level of economic growth of any developed country in the world for at least the next 20 years, because we just can’t bring ourselves to do the tough work of becoming an energy superpower.

Do you have any idea how much government revenue could be generated from $400 billion? At least $100 billion in corporate taxes and energy royalties. And that doesn’t include more income tax collected from more Canadians working at higher-paying jobs.

I was being facetious above, of course, when I said Trudeau was an economic genius. I would list him and the economic devastation he wrought as the worst government this country has ever had. He and his woke, “green” obsessed cabinet dug a huge pit and threw us in it. (Then he trotted off to a Katy Perry concert and date.)

Mark Carney may sound and look more competent than Trudeau, but is he? Just about half of his cabinet were ministers in Trudeau’s cabinet and were just as obsessed as Justin with combatting climate change and shutting down oil and gas. They voted in lockstep with Trudeau for the emission caps, harsh eco regulations, EV mandate, net-zero power grid and opposition to resource development and pipelines.

Carney himself spent the better part of a decade, before becoming P.M., acting as the U.N.’s ambassador on “green” investing (even though in his own portfolio he retained millions of shares in oil companies). He also frequently advocated leaving most of today’s proven oil and gas reserves in the ground.

Count me skeptical that this leopard has changed his spots.

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