Dan McTeague: Ottawa’s energy failure is now on your credit card statement - National Post
Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Sign Out A person fills up their vehicle at a Pioneer gas pump in Mississauga as gas prices climb due to unrest in the middle east, Wednesday March 4, 2026. (Peter J. Thompson / National Post) By Dan McTeague November 3, 2026 at 1:48 p.m. Last Updated: November 3, 2026 at 1:51 p.m. Countries don’t typically get report cards, but there are hard facts that can be collated, assessed and compared. Enter Benchmark Canada, a new project from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute that brings together more than 40 different metrics that measure this nation’s performance. This fall, the National Post is examining many of those findings.
In the same week that the Bank of Canada raised interest rates citing the rise in energy costs, Canada’s economy disappointed, showing anemic growth for the month of August. Statistics Canada reported that real GDP was essentially unchanged for a second straight month, and its own early estimate already shows a 0.1 per cent decline in September. Analysts fear October will see the outlook turn negative too.
While some will quickly conclude our weakening economy is the product of a recent trade standoff between Canada and the U.S., affordability and productivity concerns have less to do with trade policy and everything to do with the policy direction the government has pursued over the last 11 years, and in particular, the pursuit of net zero.
To achieve this questionable objective, an energy-intensive nation began to impose restrictions and conditions on itself for the production and use of all carbon-emitting forms of energy, in the firm belief this would mitigate the effects of global variances in weather patterns. Caps on emissions, carbon taxes, tanker bans and rigorous permitting for pipeline and takeaway capacity, including a stringent impact assessment with no global equivalent, much less in a producing nation with some of the planet’s greatest proven reserves, effectively chased away critical capital and escalated energy prices to intolerable heights. They now threaten the purchasing power of every Canadian.
In the midst of an energy crisis marked by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, Canadians can no longer rely on the more than 40-year protection of the “Petro Loonie” to offset rising energy costs, which are priced in U.S. dollars.
The evidence is hard to miss. Benchmark Canada, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute project that measures Canada against its peers, tracked the loonie through the five most recent oil-supply shocks, from the 2019 attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq facility to this year’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. A month after each one, the dollar had moved somewhere between a 1.8 per cent loss and a 1.6 per cent gain. When Hormuz closed, disrupting about a fifth of the world’s oil, the loonie gained 0.4 per cent for a moment, then slid 3.6 per cent. Since January 2015 it has lost 13.2 per cent against the U.S. dollar. In September it averaged about 72 U.S. cents, a third below its 2007 peak of US$1.09.
Currency markets price what a country can deliver to world markets, not what it has in the ground. A producer that cannot get its oil to tidewater captures less of every price spike, and investors price its dollar accordingly. As a result, Canadians pay 38 cents a litre more for gasoline and 52 cents more on the fuel that is our economic workhorse, diesel and distillates.
Diesel moves the trucks that stock grocery shelves and runs the equipment in our mines, farms and forests. You do not need to own a car to pay for it. Statistics Canada’s September figures show where it ends up. Consumer prices rose 3.1 per cent from a year earlier, gasoline 27.8 per cent, and fuel oil and other fuels 57.8 per cent. Strip out gasoline and inflation was 2.2 per cent. The Bank of Canada now expects it to reach about 3.5 per cent by year-end.
And while Ottawa contents itself with having removed the consumer carbon tax, it holds fast to its second carbon tax, the Clean Fuel Regulations, which now add 15 cents to every litre of gasoline and 19 cents to every litre of diesel. All the while it makes a windfall in GST and HST revenue, which compounds the direct increase in fuel prices and its knock-on effect on the cost of everything else.
The Bank of Canada cannot build a pipeline. It has one main tool, and last week it used it, passing the cost of failed energy policy on to anyone carrying debt. Many households were already falling behind. Bank of Canada figures, built on TransUnion data, show that arrears of 90 days or more on auto loans, credit cards and instalment loans all hit series highs in the second quarter of this year. Instalment-loan arrears reached 2.95 per cent, more than three times their level at the end of 2015. Every one of those figures predates the rate hike.
Thursday’s federal budget will be tempting ground for another round of targeted relief. Relief treats the symptom. Ottawa should instead treat energy policy as what it has become, affordability policy, starting with a credible plan to get Canadian energy to world markets and an honest accounting of what its regulations add to every litre.
The extravagant cost of net zero, obscured from hard-pressed Canadians, is an unmistakable attack on affordability, disguised as a solution to combat the effect of an inert trace gas.
For most Canadians, it’s an unsettled policy that they can neither afford nor ignore.
Dan McTeague is president of Canadians for Affordable Energy .
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