Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ambition to turn Canada into an “energy superpower” has received a boost after the Conservative Party won a key provincial election for the first time in almost 100 years. The British Columbia Conservative Party, led by Lorne Doerkson, won a majority on Sunday in a dramatic reversal of fortunes after months of internal conflict and controversies that threatened to derail their campaign. Hoping to capitalise on the opposition’s disarray, former premier David Eby called a snap election two years early, a move that spectacularly backfired. He resigned late on Saturday night following projections of a Conservative victory. Doerkson has promised a raft of new measures to appeal to the oil and gas sector, including ending emissions limits and replacing the province’s carbon tax framework. He has urged big energy companies such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Woodside to reinvest in British Columbia.
“I believe in energy . . . We will cut red tape like it’s never been cut before,” he said in his victory speech on Saturday night. Doerkson has pledged to double the province’s LNG production by 2032 and triple it by 2035, while backing Carney’s plan to build a 1mn barrel of oil per day pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia. Canada supplies about 60 per cent of US oil imports, or about 4mn barrels a day. Most of it comes from the giant bitumen-rich oil sands of northern Alberta, home to the world’s third largest reserve of oil. But President Donald Trump’s punishing tariffs on Canada — the US’s second biggest trading partner — have spurred Ottawa to seek new customers, in particular in Asia via British Columbia’s west coast. Carney posted on X that he looked forward to working with Doerkson to “unleash our full potential as an energy superpower”.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing