Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.The war in Iran has sent oil markets — and thus gas and diesel prices — out of control. The Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, is effectively closed to shipping. Even if ships were inclined to make a run for it, their insurance companies have already cancelled their war coverage policies, making crossing impossible in more ways than one.Meanwhile, Iranian ballistic missile attacks on oil and gas facilities in countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq have ground production to a halt.And though there’s every reason to think that the Trump Administration wants to wrap this up quickly — indeed, the president has been signalling his hope that it will start winding down in short order — conflicts like this have a tendency to drag on, taking on a life of their own. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has suggested that the war might last as long as eight weeks. And recent reports hold that the Pentagon is preparing for it to extend till September.Unfortunately, Canada is badly positioned to endure disruptions of that duration. We were already on the cusp of a cost of living crisis. Thanks to elevated gas and diesel prices, that is about to get worse.It’s the cost of diesel that is particularly underappreciated. Diesel is the lifeblood of the modern economy. It fuels the transport that hauls just about every good that we rely on. And the war has increased its cost by more than 40 cents per litre at the time of writing, more than double the increase in gas prices. Soaring diesel costs mean inflated prices across the board..Now, in times past, these problems would have been counteracted by the positive effect of rising oil prices on our currency. The “Petro-Loonie” got stronger as oil got pricier. But no longer. Because of the Liberal Party’s monomaniacal focus on preventing the expansion of our pipeline capacity, the Canadian dollar is both significantly weaker going into this crisis than it should be and poorly positioned to benefit from higher oil prices by appreciating as it once would have. Instead of acting as a natural buffer — boosting export revenues, tax revenues, and offsetting some of the pains of inflation — the loonie remains degraded, leaving Canadians exposed to the full force of global energy shocks without that traditional shield.And that’s not the only area where the modern Liberal Party’s deliberate sabotaging of the natural resource sector — the backbone of our economy, which supplies numerous jobs and billions in tax dollars for this country — because of their ideological obsession with net-zero is coming back to bite us. See, for instance, C-69 — the “No More Pipelines Act” — which has made it nearly impossible to build the infrastructure needed to get our resources to market. And C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which cripples our export potential to Asia and beyond. And C-59, which bizarrely prohibits companies from promoting the environmental benefits of their products if it doesn’t conform to a government-approved standard. I’ve been glad to see the Conservative Party pick up on the fact that the so-called Clean Fuel Standard raises our energy prices while decreasing fuel efficiency, exacerbating all of these problems, something that I’ve been banging on about for years.And then there’s our old friend the Industrial Carbon Tax, which jacks up operational costs for everyone..These were deliberate policy decisions made by our government over the past decade, the object of which was an eventual “phase out” of our hydrocarbon energy industry.Some have suggested that these policies are the legacy of former prime minister Justin Trudeau, and that current Prime Minister Mark Carney is entirely blameless for them. But that’s wrong. Read up on the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) — his babies — as well as his time as the United Nations’ Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. Carney’s pre-political career was all about divestment — starving the oil and gas industry of investment so that it would wither away and be replaced with forests of windmills and acres of solar panels.Even his recent MOU with Alberta, which got a lot of Canadians excited at the prospect of one single pipeline being built, was designed to make Canadian petroleum products more expensive and thus a less attractive investment. Mark Carney owns this.In a better world, Canada would be in a perfect position to step up to the plate at this moment, filling the gap with hydrocarbon energy produced by a human rights respecting, environmentally conscious democracy. We would be the energy superpower the Prime Minister keeps talking about. Instead, Russia is taking advantage of this crisis, while we sit on the sidelines, with vast reserves of oil and gas under our feet and nothing to show for it.This is the result of a decade of deliberate policy sabotage by our net-zero zealots. The Iran war has laid it all bare: a weakened loonie, skyrocketing fuel prices that make everything else more expensive, and regular Canadians caught in the middle.Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
