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How 15 years of political warfare transformed Canadian capitalism—and why the state may be building its way back out
By Stewart Muir
The greatest victory of the anti-pipeline movement that took root in Canada wasn’t stopping pipelines.
It was making sure governments would build them instead.
That sentence should bother you. It should bother you whether you marched against pipelines or invested in them. Because it means something broke in this country that nobody intended to break—and fixing it will require understanding how it happened.
This is not really a story about oil. It is a story about what happens when a country’s politics becomes so hostile to private investment in nationally significant infrastructure that the state becomes the only actor left standing.
It is a story about the transformation of Canadian capitalism.
A lost era of investment
Milton Friedman would have understood the world that existed before.
Private companies built pipelines. Governments regulated them. Capital flowed to projects that made economic sense. The risks were commercial—geology, commodity prices, construction costs. The rules were clear enough that a company could model a return, raise the capital and build.
Simple.
That world is gone.
The strategy of attrition
It didn’t disappear overnight. It was dismantled, methodically, over 15 years.
McGill political scientist Amy Janzwood documented exactly how in her 2025 book, Mega Pipelines, Mega Resistance. Environmental organizations, Indigenous leaders, local activists, municipalities and international campaign networks fundamentally reshaped the politics of Canadian energy infrastructure. They didn’t just oppose projects. They changed the rules of engagement—turning every pipeline proposal into a years-long political and legal war of attrition that no private company could sustain indefinitely.
Janzwood’s sympathies clearly lie with the movements she studied. But her warning to the green lobby is striking: the power of the state to intervene “as owners and financiers” has dampened the very resistance movements she spent years documenting.
Think about what she is saying. To her own side. The strategy worked too well—and produced the opposite of what they wanted.
The sequence of pipeline failures
The record that Janzwood documents is devastating in sequence.
In 2014, Northern Gateway received federal approval. It was never built.
In 2017, Energy East—the pipeline that would have connected western oil to eastern refineries and Atlantic tidewater—was abandoned before it even reached a decision.
Then, in 2018, Kinder Morgan.
One of North America’s biggest pipeline companies looked at the Trans Mountain expansion—a project with federal approval, with provincial support, with customers lined up—and concluded that Canada had become too politically risky to build a pipeline in.
A pipeline company decided that Canada was too dangerous for pipelines.
Ottawa stepped in and bought the project for $4.5 billion.
Three nationally significant pipelines. Three private-sector exits. Each one raised the stakes. Each one sent the same signal to global capital.
And then the exodus began.
When global capital walked away
Shell sold its oil sands assets. ConocoPhillips sold. Statoil sold. Total scaled back. One by one, the global majors looked at the political environment that had killed three pipelines and reached a simple conclusion.
The problem was not any single project.
The problem was Canada.
The high price of political uncertainty
Why would a company spend billions on a project only to discover that approval wasn’t really approval?
That is the question that drove private capital out of major Canadian pipeline development. Approval stopped meaning approval. The fight began after the permit arrived. Projects remained vulnerable to years of political campaigning, legal challenges and shifting government priorities—not before they were approved, but after. The commercial risks were manageable. The political risks were not.
A study published this month by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute puts a number on what this costs. Jerome Gessaroli’s “Making It Count” framework estimates that for a $680-million mining project in British Columbia, the consultation architecture—the legal uncertainty, the multi-nation negotiations, the overlapping territorial claims, the benefit-sharing obligations, the approval delays—reduces project value by 16.8 per cent compared to an equivalent project in Alberta. The BC project captures only 39 per cent of its post-approval value once approval risk and pre-approval spending are included. Alberta’s equivalent retains most of its value. The difference: $30 million on a single project.
This is not an argument against consultation. The rights are real. The partnerships that flow from genuine engagement are among the most valuable things the resource economy produces. But if we are going to build projects in this country, we have to understand the true costs of the system we have built—and the Gessaroli framework makes those costs visible for the first time. Three features of BC’s legal environment drive the premium: unresolved Aboriginal title, DRIPA’s unsettled application of free, prior and informed consent, and the transferred legal exposure where the Crown’s duty to consult effectively falls on the proponents who do not control the process.
A private company has shareholders. It has lenders. It has a finite tolerance for delay, litigation, uncertainty and reputational attack. At some point, even an economically sound project becomes politically radioactive.
A private company cannot hold a radioactive asset indefinitely.
Governments can.
They can absorb political risk that would bankrupt a private developer. They can withstand years of delay. They can carry projects through election cycles. They don’t answer to quarterly earnings reports.
And so they became the only institutions capable of building nationally significant energy infrastructure in Canada. Not because they wanted to. Because there was nobody else left.
The irony of the resistance
Janzwood’s frustration that the resistance ultimately produced a state-owned pipeline rather than no pipeline is palpable. But that frustration is the point. Even the people who built the opposition recognize that the result was not what they intended.
The anti-pipeline movement didn’t eliminate pipelines.
It eliminated privately financed pipelines.
The return of national ambition
The shift is no longer theoretical.
At Davos in January, Mark Carney said it plainly enough: “A country that can’t feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options.” Six months later, we’re starting to see what that means.
In the first week of July 2026, three major pipeline projects were announced in a matter of days. A $35-to-$44-billion oil pipeline from Alberta to the southern B.C. coast. The Pathways carbon capture and storage pipeline—one of the largest CCUS projects in the world. And Northern Shield—a proposed 3,300-km oil pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta, to Sarnia, Ontario, carrying up to 800,000 barrels per day entirely through Canadian territory, bypassing the United States altogether.
Three pipelines. One week.
The country that global investors wrote off is now the site of the largest resource infrastructure plans in Canadian history.
And the public is on board. An Angus Reid Institute poll released this week finds that 63 per cent of Canadians support the Alberta-to-BC pipeline—including 62 per cent in British Columbia itself. A province where pipeline resistance has been the dominant political story for two decades now supports a new pipeline at the national average. Nearly nine in 10 Canadians have heard of the project. Only 47 per cent say their minds are fixed—the rest are still persuadable, and when presented with arguments for and against, support ticked up in every region. The most compelling argument: diversifying Canada’s oil markets away from the United States. National unity barely registered.
That number—62 per cent in BC—is the data point that tells you how completely the political ground has shifted. The province that killed Northern Gateway, that fought Trans Mountain to the point where a private company walked away, now backs a new pipeline by a two-to-one margin among those who have decided. The anti-pipeline movement spent 15 years changing who could build pipelines. It did not change whether the public wanted them built.
Misreading the market
Free-market purists see the state displacing the market. They should look again.
The state is not displacing the market. It is doing what the market cannot do in a country where 15 years of political warfare made nationally significant infrastructure unbuildable by private capital alone. That is not a failure of capitalism. It is the triumph of politics—a judo move that uses the very momentum of anti-pipeline politics to put a pipeline in the ground.
There is a fact that rarely enters the Canadian debate: oil is one of the least privatized major industries in the world.
Canada’s anxiety about state involvement in pipelines looks parochial when set against the global reality. In the closing decades of the last century, a massive wave of nationalization swept the petroleum industry as producing nations asked a simple question: if we own the resource, why shouldn’t we own the company? The result reshaped the global oil business. Saudi Aramco, ADNOC and QatarEnergy are now among the world’s largest international investors. China continues to expand through state-controlled firms. The largest growth investors in global energy today are often governments, not private companies.
Canada is the exception, not the rule. One of the world’s largest oil exporters, yet virtually all production is by publicly traded companies. Government ownership is essentially absent. Among major hydrocarbon-exporting nations, that is extraordinary. State ownership of petroleum assets is the international norm. What distinguishes countries is not whether the state participates, but which parts of the value chain it chooses to own—upstream production, pipelines, refining or export infrastructure—and how commercially those assets are managed.
A government that builds a pipeline to tidewater and then sells it to private operators is not nationalizing the oil industry. It is doing what dozens of countries do as a matter of course—investing in the infrastructure that makes the resource accessible—while preserving the private-sector production model that makes Canada unusual in the first place.
If the oil nationalizations of the 1960s represented for many countries the act of throwing off a colonial yoke—asserting sovereignty over a resource that foreign companies had extracted on their terms—there is a bitter irony in what is happening in Canada today. For decades, environmental campaigns arrived in Indigenous communities promising an energy transition and the riches awaiting those who embraced a future built on whale-watching tourism instead of pipelines, or LNG, or forestry, or mining, or aquaculture. The projects that would have generated jobs, procurement contracts, equity positions and revenue-sharing agreements were blocked. The alternatives never materialized.
Eco-colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty
Many of my First Nations friends reflect on this solemnly, in a lowered voice. They watched their communities’ ambitions to elevate their quality of life collide with movements that claimed to speak for the land but never asked the people living on it what they wanted.
Eco-colonialism is the bitter phrase. It fits.
What we are seeing now is a nation rising up to throw off this tyranny.
First Nations are quietly celebrating.
When Indigenous Nations take equity in pipelines, negotiate ownership of LNG facilities and build heritage funds measured in billions, they are doing what the oil-producing nations of the 1960s did: asserting sovereignty over their own resources, on their own terms. The difference is that in Canada, the colonial power they are throwing off is not a foreign oil company. It is an environmental movement that presumed to decide their economic future for them—the same movement that has bullied us into a regulatory regime where it costs companies $30,000 per snail to execute a species protection plan.
The oil patch executive class has accepted this, however much it defies their business training. As one senior executive put it to me recently: we can handle the government stepping in to build the pipelines. Just sell the holdings once they’re built, so we don’t end up competing with the state. That is not ideology. It is pragmatism from people who have watched a decade of private-sector pipeline failures and concluded that the alternative to state involvement is not private pipelines—it is no pipelines at all.
Preparing for the next wave
None of this should be taken for granted.
The campaigns that stopped Northern Gateway, drove out Kinder Morgan and triggered the exodus of the global majors have not disbanded. They have regrouped. They will adapt their strategies for the next generation of projects—the West Coast Pipeline, the LNG corridor, the critical minerals buildout. The campaigns will return. The litigation will return. The political pressure will return.
The last cycle caught the resource sector flat-footed—confident that regulatory approval meant the fight was over, unprepared for the years of political warfare that followed. That mistake cannot be repeated. The Indigenous partnerships, the environmental performance, the political relationships, the unflagging work of independent public interest advocates like Resource Works—these are not luxuries. They are the infrastructure that determines whether the next wave of projects survives the next wave of opposition.
The path forward
The question is not whether Milton Friedman would approve. It is whether it works.
And if it does—if the West Coast Pipeline is built, if the LNG corridor delivers, if the capital that fled Canada in the last decade comes back in this one—then private enterprise will build the next pipeline on its own.
That was always the point.
Stewart Muir is the President and CEO of Resource Works Society.
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