SUBMITTED BY MAC VAN WIELINGEN
Mac Van Wielingen is chair of Viewpoint Investment Partners, founder and partner of ARC Financial Corp., and founder and former chair of the Business Council of Alberta
By almost every measure that matters in an anxious, resource-hungry world, Canada is not a middle power in energy and resources. It is a superpower. And for years, no other country held this hand of cards while playing it with such visible embarrassment.
Consider the endowment. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, holding the third- or fourth-largest proven reserves on Earth, roughly 163 to 170 billion barrels. It is the fifth-largest natural gas producer, with output still climbing through 2025. It is the world’s largest producer and exporter of potash, and the second-largest uranium producer, mining the highest-grade ore on the planet in Saskatchewan. It is a top-five global source of nickel, cobalt, palladium, and niobium, the critical minerals the transition demands.
And it feeds the world. Canada is a top-10 global agri-food exporter, shipping more than $100 billion in agriculture, food and seafood in 2024 to over 200 countries. It is the world’s largest exporter of oats and canola, the third largest wheat exporter, and in 2025, harvested a record 107 million tonnes of field crops, a genuine breadbasket for a volatile planet.
All of this rests on one of the cleanest power grids in the world with roughly 80% non-emitting, well above the 38-country OECD average (52%), and specifically far above the U.S. (39%) and China (35%). Canada is the worlds third-largest hydroelectric producer, and is backed by a proven CANDU nuclear fleet.
Here is what should reframe the conversation. There is exactly one other country that shares much of this profile of vast, diversified resource wealth combined with a stable, rule-of-law democracy: Australia. Both rank among the world’s highest quality democracies and top the global rule-of-law rankings. The other giants on the reserves tables are Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan which offer no such assurance. In a world scrambling to de-risk from instability in the Middle East, Russian coercion, and from Chinese control of supply chains, Canada and Australia are a club of two.
The difference is that Australia has spent two decades unapologetically monetizing its hand, building, from scratch, one of the world’s three largest LNG export industries. Canada got on that map only in July 2025, when it finally shipped its first-ever LNG cargo from the Pacific coast — decades late.
That lag was a choice. Under Justin Trudeau, the government insisted there was “no business case” to export Canadian LNG to Europe and was generally negative toward LNG development because of long-term global net zero commitments. The mindset was that resource development was something to apologize for — elevating emissions optics over energy security, affordability, and competitiveness. On the climate side, the plain arithmetic that Canadian LNG can displace higher-emitting Asian coal was unpersuasive to the then federal government.
This has all contributed to a significant decline in Canada’s standard of living. Our resource sectors are the largest contributor to productivity in the economy. In 2010, Canada’s GDP per capita gap with the U.S. was 10%, but that has widened now to 30%. Further, looking out long term, from 2030 to 2060, the OECD projects that Canada will have the lowest per capita GDP growth of any of its members.
The striking development of the past year is that all of this is changing, at least in rhetoric, and increasingly in policy. Mark Carney campaigned on making Canada an “energy superpower” in “both clean and conventional energies” and says he wants the country to “dominate the market for conventional energy.” His government passed Bill C-5, creating a Calgary-based Major Projects Office to compress a decade-long permitting cycle toward two years, and has referred more than 20 nation-building projects — including LNG Canada’s Phase 2 — for fast-track review. It scrapped the consumer carbon price, scaled back the emissions cap, gave gas a larger role in a doubled electricity grid, and signed a memorandum with Alberta pointing toward a new West Coast pipeline paired with carbon capture.
This is a meaningful reframe: an honest “all of the above” posture treating oil, gas, LNG, uranium, hydro, nuclear, critical minerals, and food as one integrated national advantage. But rhetoric is not yet delivery. Pipelines still await consensus, and the fast-track office is largely untested. Credibility will be measured in cargoes shipped and projects built, not speeches given.
That is why “super achiever” should land as a challenge, not a compliment. For years, we achieved this standing despite ourselves, carried by the resources beneath us while hesitating on the decisions in front of us. Australia built a national ambition around the same endowment. Canada, too often, built a national apology.
The question is no longer whether Canada can be an energy, resource, and food superpower. It already is. The only question left is whether this new resolve is real, and whether we will finally decide to act like one.