Canada's energy-rich province signals to Trump it's ready for new pipelines, partnership

Amid high-stakes U.S. trade negotiations and internal secession rumblings, Canada's energy-rich province of Alberta is signaling to President Donald Trump it is ready to move further from China and embrace new partnerships and pipelines with America.

"It turns out that China is not developing the way we thought," Alberta Premier Danielle Smith told Just the News in an exclusive interview Thursday night.

"They're not becoming a more democratic jurisdiction, and they're using capitalism against us to hollow out our various industries. So I think that there has been a lot of re-calibration that has had to happen about our relationship with China, and certainly the U.S. president is causing us to have that rethink," she added.

Smith is Canada's most prominent conservative after liberal Mark Carney won the election last month to become its new prime minister. 

During a wide-ranging interview with the Just the News, No Noise TV show, she addressed the impact of Trump's tariffs, the growing movement within her province to hold a vote on seceding from Canada and its more liberal provinces, and the disappointment and harm former President Joe Biden created when he canceled the Keystone pipeline that ran between the two nations.

She said she believed it was possible for Alberta to strike a new energy partnership and build new pipelines to the United States even in the midst of a tariff dispute between the U.S. and Canada so that both countries could capitalize on the energy-thirsty Artificial Intelligence revolution and to expand North America's booming liquefied natural gas exports to Europe.

"We're looking to see if we can normalize our partnership, so that we can get into talking about what those new pipelines might look like," Smith said of the relationship with Trump. "Not only would we be able to have, I think, a bitumen heavy oil pipeline that would link our heavy oil to the heavy oil refining capacity in the US Gulf Coast, but also the opportunity for us to continue to provide additional supply of gas so that it can feed some of the European markets."

Top oil and gas executives in Canada and the United States confirmed Alberta's top industry would love to get past any tariff issues and begin building pipelines southward.

"It's being talked about behind the scenes," Mike Rose, the CEO of Tourmaline Oil, told Just the News when asked about new oil and gas pipelines that would traverse Canada and the United States.

"We can increase our exports of natural gas, certainly, and Canada is just about to enter the world LNG market," Rose explained. "We've been shipping gas to the Gulf Coast for over two years now, to the liquefaction complex down there, and then AI on both sides of the border is an added sleeve of demand that, to be fair, I don't think you know really, most of us on the producing side were thinking about two years ago."

Brendan McCracken, CEO of the natural gas company Ovintiv, said Americans are uniquely positioned to further grow their ties to Alberta because they are allowed to buy Canadian oil and natural gas at a huge discount compared to other countries.

"Looking over the past several years, the interconnectedness of our energy systems has meant that the U.S. gets Canadian oil at about a 20% discount and Canadian natural gas at up to a 60% discount to global prices," he said. "So it's been a really powerful part of the economic engine for Americans."

Pete Hoekstra, the new U.S. ambassador to Canada, said while much work needs to be done with Carney to get a deal, he is optimistic one will be reached, in part because the Alberta-American energy alliance makes so much sense.

"For much of the last four or five months, the only thing that you've heard in Canada is people being very critical of the United States and not talking about the economic strength of the relationship benefiting both countries," Hoekstra said, praising Smith's focus on the benefits of the US-Canada relationship.

"Prosperity for our people and confronting the threat from China — it's an important message for all Americans to hear, but also for all Canadians to hear," he said.

Smith signaled one advantage Trump and his energy-friendly policies hold with Alberta: many in her province chafed at the impact of liberal policies over the last decade, from Biden canceling the Keystone pipeline to ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's climate agenda holding back energy production.

"There's been a lot of damaging policies that have come in that have chased away tens of billions, indeed hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investment," she noted, saying such economic repression has driven a growing number of Albertans to seek a vote to secede from Canada.

“America's production has grown dramatically, whereas Alberta has stayed stagnant, and that's because of the policies of the federal government,” she continued.  "... So I think that that is at the heart of some of the frustration that you're seeing. I believe that we can make Canada work. That's what I'm working towards."