This article was written by Enes Tunagur and Laila Kearney, and was published in the Globe & Mail on January 1, 2026.
Oil prices were slightly lower on Wednesday, and headed for a fall of more than 15 per cent in 2025, as expectations of oversupply increased in a year marked by wars, higher tariffs, increased OPEC+ output and sanctions on Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
Brent crude futures were down over 17 per cent – the most substantial annual percentage decline since 2020 – and were on track for a third straight year of losses, their longest-ever losing streak. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was headed for a near 19-per-cent annual decline.
BNP Paribas commodities analyst Jason Ying anticipates Brent will dip to US$55 a barrel in the first quarter before recovering to US$60 a barrel for the rest of 2026 as supply growth normalizes and demand stays flat.
“The reason why we’re more bearish than the market in the near term is that we think that U.S. shale producers were able to hedge at high levels,” he said.
After rising slightly earlier in the day, Brent futures were down 31 cents at US$61.02 a barrel by Wednesday evening, while U.S. WTI crude was at US$57.59, down 36 cents. The 2025 average prices for both benchmarks are the lowest since 2020, LSEG data showed.
U.S. crude stocks fell last week, but distillate and gasoline inventories grew more than expected, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“It was a modestly supportive report on crude drawdown but the inners of the report are not so great and it will probably be a rough January and February with the holidays in the rear-view mirror,” said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital Markets.
Crude inventories fell by 1.9 million barrels to 422.9 million barrels in the week ended Dec. 26, the EIA said, compared with analysts’ expectations in a Reuters poll for an 867,000barrel draw.
U.S. gasoline stocks rose by 5.8 million barrels in the week to 234.3 million barrels, the EIA said, compared with analysts’ expectations for a 1.9 million-barrel build. Distillate stockpiles, including diesel and heating oil, rose by five million barrels to 123.7 million barrels, compared with projections of a 2.2-million-barrel rise.
Oil markets had a strong start to 2025 when former president Joe Biden ended his term by imposing tougher sanctions on Russia, disrupting supplies to major buyers China and India. The impact of the war in Ukraine on energy markets intensified when Ukrainian drones damaged Russian infrastructure and disrupted Kazakhstan’s oil exports.
The 12-day Iran-Israel conflict in June added to the threats to supply by disrupting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, a major route for global seaborne oil, which fanned oil prices. In recent weeks, OPEC’s biggest producers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have become locked in a crisis over Yemen, and U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered a blockade on Venezuelan oil exports and threatened another strike on Iran.
But prices eased after OPEC+ accelerated its output increases in 2025 and as concerns about the impact of U.S. tariffs weighed on global economic and fuel demand growth.
OPEC+, which groups the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, has paused oil output hikes for the first quarter of 2026 after releasing some 2.9 million barrels a day into the market since April. The next OPEC+ meeting is on Sunday. Most analysts expect supply to exceed demand in 2026, with estimates ranging from the International Energy Agency’s 3.84 million b/d to Goldman Sachs’ 2 million b/d.
“If the price really has a substantial fall, I would imagine you will see some cuts [from OPEC+],” said Martijn Rats, Morgan Stanley’s global oil strategist. “But it probably does need to fall quite a bit further from here on – maybe in the low $50s.”
“If today’s price simply prevails, after the pause in Q1, they’ll probably continue to unwind these cuts.”
This article was written by Ron Bousso and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 30, 2025.
Pumpjacks draw out oil and gas on a frosty day near Carstairs, Alta., in February. Global oil output has surged over the past year. The U.S. – the world’s biggest oil producer – ramped up production, as did Canada and Brazil.
IEA predicts oil supply will exceed demand, while OPEC analysts see largely balanced market
Energy markets enter 2026 in a downbeat mood as geopolitical uncertainty clouds the outlook and increasing signs of swelling oil and gas supplies threaten to sink prices.
This past year was a wild one for the oil and gas industry, punctuated by the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June, U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade wars, the intensified targeting of energy infrastructure in Russia in its war against Ukraine, OPEC’s often perplexing production decisions and the recently threatened U.S. blockade of Venezuela.
So what’s in store for next year? Here are five trends likely to shape the energy landscape in 2026 and beyond.
THE YEAR OF THE GLUT?
Investors will keep a razor-sharp focus on signs of swelling oil inventories next year after crude prices fell nearly 20 per cent in 2025 to about US$60 a barrel on fears of significant oversupply.
Global oil output has surged over the past year. The U.S. – the world’s biggest oil producer – ramped up production, as did Canada and Brazil, while the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies including Russia, a group known as OPEC+, reversed years of cuts.
The International Energy Agency forecasts supply will exceed demand in 2026 by a headspinning 3.85 million barrels a day (b/d), the equivalent of around 4 per cent of global demand.
Yet OPEC analysts see a largely balanced market next year, creating one of the sharpest forecast divergences in decades. Uncertainty about the supply-demand balance has been compounded by China’s large-scale crude stockpiling since April. Traders have limited visibility about these volumes, though they are estimated to be sizable at roughly 500,000 b/d, according to Reuters calculations.
Ultimately, the IEA looks more likely to be proven correct. According to Kpler data, oil being transported or stored on tankers has risen in recent weeks to its highest point since April, 2020, when consumption cratered owing to COVID-19 lockdowns. Such elevated seaborne stocks suggest onshore inventories may soon start filling, adding further downward pressure on prices.
THE LNG WAVE IS COMING
Demand for liquefied natural gas has surged in recent years, particularly as Europe has sought to rapidly replace the huge volumes of Russian pipeline gas it imported before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The boom generated enormous profits for LNG producers and traders, but that may not be the case moving forward as global export capacity ramps up.
Between 2025 and 2030, new LNG export capacity is expected to grow by 300 billion cubic metres a year, a 50-per-cent jump, according to the IEA, with around 45 per cent coming from the U.S., the world’s biggest exporter of the fuel.
Supply is set to outpace demand growth over the same period, squeezing producers’ margins and offering consumers in Europe and Asia some relief. Rising U.S. natural gas prices pose another headache for producers.
Still, producers have some reason for optimism. As LNG prices decline in 2026 and beyond, this power source will become increasingly competitive with lower-cost options such as oil and coal, potentially boosting demand for the superchilled fuel.
DIESEL OUTPERFORMANCE PERSISTS
Diesel profit margins have risen this year, gaining steam in the last six months as the refined product market faced supply constraints even as the world is increasingly awash with crude oil.
Benchmark European diesel refining margins rose 30 per cent in 2025, compared with a 20-percent drop in Brent crude prices in 2025, according to LSEG data.
That’s largely owing to a string of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries and oil terminals, which led to a decline in diesel exports in late 2025, as well as the EU decision to ban imports of fuels made from Russian crude oil.
This trend is expected to continue through 2026, since there is relatively little new refining capacity coming online. A peace deal in Ukraine would alter the calculus but likely offer only limited relief.
BIG OIL EXPECTS BRIGHTER FUTURE
Oil and gas companies are bracing for strong headwinds in 2026. Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and TotalEnergies have all lowered spending plans for next year by around 10 per cent and announced deep cost cuts. At the same time, the oil majors appear quite bullish about the longerterm outlook. They are spending more on exploration and investments in new projects that will come online later this decade or in the early 2030s. Major Middle East oil producers, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are also gearing up for a new era of upstream investments.
This long-term bullishness may prompt Western oil majors – most of which boast solid balance sheets and relatively low debt, with BP PLC a notable exception – to use the expected 2026 downturn to gobble up struggling rivals.
RENEWABLES DOWN BUT NOT OUT
In October, the IEA slashed its global forecast for renewable power growth through 2030 by one-fifth, or 248 gigawatts, compared with last year’s outlook, citing weaker prospects in the U.S. and China.
Global renewable capacity is now expected to rise by 4,600 GW by 2030, with solar accounting for roughly 80 per cent of the increase.
Even so, demand for electricity is expected to grow by 4 per cent a year by 2027, driven by power-hungry data centres and the broader electrification of economies, even as governments and companies may slow energy transition plans in the name of energy security.
This tension is set to dominate the world’s power markets in 2026 and beyond, particularly as the costs of solar, wind and battery storage are expected to keep falling.
This article was written by Jeffrey Jones and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 29, 2025.
A storm of new business risks and a shift in government investment priorities have converged to force a rewrite of what ESG is, and even what it should be called.
The concepts of environmental, social and governance – once a hot market trend – have long been the target of a backlash in the United States. MAGA Republicans, especially, decried them as “wokeism” that held companies and investors back from their main objective – making money.
But this year, simultaneous geopolitical and trade disruptions and crises affecting Canada have prompted experts to assert that the triptych, as it has been known, is being forced to evolve.
Climate change is still intensifying weather-related disasters, and Canadian companies are still tallying the environmental and social risks to their businesses. But now, other concerns outside the traditional ESG realm have entered the discussion.
So, what will ESG become? As a capital-markets veteran, Milla Craig, chief executive officer of Montreal-based ESG consultancy Millani Inc., lived through the fallout from 9/11, U.S. bank mergers, the financial crisis and other disruptions. They showed that nothing remains static, Ms. Craig said.
“You can sit and hold on to your views and your opinions, or you adapt. And I think that there’s a bit of reckoning right now. There’s a phase as things grow and come to a marketplace,” she said. “Now, there’s a pragmatism.”
She argues that ESG now encompasses items that have not traditionally been included, such as energy security and economics, affordability, a focus on sovereignty among Indigenous nations and Canada’s Arctic, as well as cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
“I don’t care if you call it ESG. These are business issues. These are topics that are being focused on by capital markets. It feels like it’s actually the mainstreaming of all the things that lay out within ESG, but they’re just becoming what a board needs to be looking at. It’s part of the materiality,” Ms. Craig said.
As an ESG and sustainable-infrastructure analyst, Baltej Sidhu has noted the expansion of what fits into ESG and has predicted that the label’s days are numbered.
Mr. Sidhu, of National Bank Financial, said sustainable investing in some cases no longer excludes the defence industry, for instance, or the materials that go into its armaments, as security concerns grip parts of the world. This took hold after Russia invaded Ukraine, he said. Some of those materials are also used for green technology.
“In the past few years, we’ve seen an evolution of what ESG is and what ESG isn’t,” he said.
“At the outset, it was very green, and I think it’s widened its breadth and scope.”
The risk-management tools developed within ESG for climate and societal issues are now ingrained in business culture, even if the acronym fades away, he said.
This evolution is not happening in a vacuum. Domestically, government priorities have shifted, as Prime Minister Mark Carney pushes to get major industrial projects built to blunt the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war.
Mr. Carney, previously one of the foremost exponents of climate finance, has pledged to loosen or scrap a number of the previous government’s decarbonization regulations as part of a memorandum of understanding with Alberta, which wants a new oil pipeline to the West Coast. As a quid pro quo, Alberta must strengthen its industrial carbon pricing.
Yrjo Koskinen, professor of sustainable and transition finance at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business, believes carbon pricing remains the best tool for reducing carbon emissions, even if those moves over all have upset environmentalists.
Yet companies are still embracing the principles of ESG for managing risk, and collecting the metrics, if they see it improving value for their shareholders, he said.
“Even if the term ESG might be retired at some point, I think the activities are going to continue, maybe under the sustainability label. So the death of ESG is highly exaggerated,” Prof. Koskinen said.
Mr. Carney’s government has also called for some provisions in anti-greenwashing legislation to be scaled back. Several companies, especially in the fossil fuel and financial sectors, complained that the legislation prevented them from publishing anything about their environmental records and ambitions by putting them at risk of stiff financial penalties. Many removed materials from their websites.
The law firm Torys recently reported that 91 per cent of the largest 200 Canadian companies published a sustainability, ESG or climate-focused report last year, down from 95 per cent in its previous study. Meanwhile, it said “materially fewer” companies used the term ESG to describe the report.
Millani’s surveys, however, have shown that major investors are not backing off their own commitments to sustainable investing, including demanding climate-related and work-force diversity metrics as they evaluate their holdings.
Climate Engagement Canada, whose members, comprising several institutional investors, seek to push the largest industrial emitters to reduce climate-related financial risks, increased its membership in 2025. The group now collectively manages $14.5-trillion of assets.
In addition, there is still money flowing into ESG-related funds, both public and private. National Bank Financial reported net inflows of $1.5-billion into Canadian ESG-focused exchange-traded funds from January to November. In the most recent month, there was a net outflow of $161-million, though most of that was driven by redemptions among large institutional funds in the NBI Sustainable Global Equity ETF, the bank reported.
Long-term investors remain active in private markets. Investors plowed US$20-billion into the second iteration of NBI Sustainable Global Equity ETF, making it the world’s largest private fund targeting the energy transition.
Among other big deals, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec bought out Montrealbased Innergex Renewable Energy Inc. for $2.8-billion.
The law firm Torys recently reported that 91 per cent of the largest 200 Canadian companies published a sustainability, ESG or climate-focused report last year, down from 95 per cent in its previous study. Meanwhile, it said ‘materially fewer’ companies used the term ESG to describe the report.
Goal is to draw in private capital for lowcarbon projects
This article was written by the Canadian Press and was published in the Toronto Star on December 19, 2025.
The federal government says it is moving forward on a long awaited central list of investments considered to be sustainable.
The list, also known as a green taxonomy, is intended to make it clear what activities and investments fit within Canada’s climate goals and help to attract private capital to them.
The government says the Canadian Climate Institute, a government funded independent think tank, will lead the effort, working with Business Future Pathways, an investor driven group helping push corporate transition plans.
Finance Minister FrançoisPhilippe Champagne says in a statement that Canada needs to attract more private capital to build a low carbon economy, while financial markets are demanding common standards on what’s considered green or transition investments.
Official guidelines, though voluntary to use, can help add credibility to green or transition bonds and allow investors to better assess sustainable investment products.
While many countries have already moved ahead with their own green taxonomies that cover areas like renewables, construction and bioenergy, Canada’s approach has also included a more contested “transition” category that could see investments going to high emitters like oil sands projects to reduce their emissions.
Jonathan Arnold, director of sustainable finance at the Canadian Climate Institute, says in a statement that the guidelines crucially help transform emissionintensive sectors that are central to the national economy.
The Canadian Climate Institute and Business Future Pathways have been tasked with establishing a governance structure to oversee development of the taxonomy, with finalized guidelines expected for three priority sectors by the end of 2026 and another three sectors covered by the end of 2027.
The government initially asked a group of experts in 2021 to provide recommendations on a taxonomy and has made several commitments since then to move ahead.
This article was written by Jeffrey Jones and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 18, 2025.
The federal government has named a coalition of climate and finance experts to put a long-delayed green and transitionary investing guidebook into use with the aim of attracting billions of dollars in private capital to help meet the country’s net-zero targets.
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the Canadian Climate Institute think tank will lead the effort to develop the climate-focused investing taxonomy along with an investor-led organization known as Business Future Pathways.
The taxonomy is being developed to give institutional investors comfort that their capital is being directed at projects that meet clear climate objectives, not greenwashing exercises.
As many as 60 other jurisdictions have put taxonomies into force or are planning to. In some cases, they have used Canada’s early work as guidelines.
The group will put together a governance structure to oversee development of criteria for determining which investments are to be certified as green, such as renewable energy, and those that fit into a transitionary category.
The latter would involve technology for decarbonizing high-emitting industrial processes.
As a first step, it will set up a taxonomy council to review and approve investment guidelines, Mr. Champagne said in a statement. The council will comprise representatives from academia, finance, climate science, Indigenous nations and civil society. Working groups made up of industry experts will make recommendations to the council.
Prime Minister Mark Carney sees the effort as key to enticing foreign investors to help finance Canada’s decarbonization commitments, said Ryan Turnbull, parliamentary secretary to the Finance Minister.
Current estimates place required capital for meeting Canada’s net-zero target at $115-million to $125-million. That compares with the current investment of $15-billion to $25billion.
“Capital markets need clarity and consistency, transparency and clear market signals. I think this is a clear market signal,” Mr. Turnbull said in an interview.
Sustainable finance experts formed Business Future Pathways earlier this year to give corporations guidance on international standards that deal with climate risks and the shift to a low-carbon economy. The organization is backed by a number of financial institutions and pension funds.
Barb Zvan, chief executive officer of University Pension Plan Ontario, was a driving force behind BFP. She previously held a senior role at the Sustainable Finance Action Council, an Ottawa-appointed expert panel that developed a taxonomy road map. It presented the government with the document in late 2022, but work toward formalizing it stalled.
“Industries are going to grow as we move to renewable energy or fewer emissions, so how do we get money into Canada from foreign investors? How are they going to understand Canada and what our transition looks like? It’s confusing,” Ms. Zvan told The Globe and Mail.
Most companies today do not disclose how much of their capital spending is directed at navigating the energy transition, she said. And because Canada’s capital markets are dwarfed by those in the United States, many foreign investors won’t make the effort to conduct detailed research into Canadian companies.
The guidebook will improve companies’ access to capital as they plan projects to lower their climate-related risks, she said.
The Canadian Climate Institute will lead the research and technical aspects, building on the work of the Sustainable Finance Action Council and other sources, including taxonomies in place in other countries.
In October, 2024, then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland said she expected a taxonomy would start covering priority industrial sectors within the following 12 months. That timeline was upended by the Liberal leadership race and subsequent federal election in the first part of this year, Mr. Turnbull said.
Now, the taxonomy council is the group expected to establish investment guidelines for three priority sectors by the end of next year, and another three by the end of 2027. Previously, Ottawa listed as priority sectors: electricity, transportation, buildings, agriculture and forestry, manufacturing and extractives (including mineral extraction and processing), and natural gas.
Jonathan Arnold, director of sustainable finance at the Canadian Climate Institute, said the effort is aimed at bolstering Canada’s competitiveness in the race for green capital.
“If you look at the list of trading partners of Canada outside of the U.S., almost all of them have national taxonomies, either fully developed or developing. So, it becomes a question of market access and access to capital in the energy transition,” he said.
This article was written by Claire Brown and Mira Rojanasakul, and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 29, 2025.
Sandra Rojas, a fifth-generation resident of Lafitte, La., saw her annual home insurance premium increase to US$8,312 this year, more than doubling over the past four years.
New data show rising insurance premiums are cascading into the real estate market in the most disaster-prone areas
Even after she escaped rising floodwaters by wading away from her home in chest-deep water during Hurricane Rita in 2005, Sandra Rojas, now 69, stayed put. A fifth-generation resident of Lafitte, La., a small coastal community, she raised her home with stilts.
But this year, her annual home insurance premium increased to US$8,312, more than doubling over the past four years.
She considered selling, but found herself in a dilemma. As insurance costs have risen, area home values have fallen, dropping by 38 per cent since 2020. The roadsides around her house are dotted with for-sale signs.
“They won’t insure you,” Ms. Rojas said. “No one will buy from you. You’re kind of stuck where you are.”
New research shared with The New York Times estimates the extent to which rising home insurance premiums, driven higher by climate change, are cascading into the broader U.S. real estate market and eating into home values in the most disaster-prone areas.
The study, which analyzed tens of millions of housing payments through 2024 to understand where insurance costs have risen most, offers first-of-its-kind insight into the way rising insurance rates are affecting home values.
Since 2018, a shock in the home insurance market has meant that homes in the ZIP codes most exposed to hurricanes and wildfires would sell for an average of US$43,900 less than they would otherwise, the research found. They include coastal towns in Louisiana and low-lying areas in Florida.
Changes in an under-the-radar part of the insurance market, known as reinsurance, have helped to drive this trend. Insurance companies purchase reinsurance to help limit their exposure when a catastrophe hits. Over the past several years, global reinsurance companies have had what the researchers call a “climate epiphany” and have roughly doubled the rates they charge home insurance providers.
Benjamin Keys at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Mulder of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the authors of the study, which was published this week, have called these swift changes “a reinsurance shock.” For some Americans, these changes have made it unaffordable to remain in homes they have lived in for decades.
“Homeowners don’t appreciate or don’t understand that we are living in a much riskier world than we were 25 years ago,” Mr. Keys said. “And that risk? They have to pay for it.”
After analyzing 74 million home payments – which included mortgage, taxes and insurance and were made between 2014 and 2024 – the researchers found that a rapid repricing of disaster risk had been responsible for about a fifth of overall home insurance increases since 2017. Another third could be explained by rising construction costs.
The researchers estimated the effects of the reinsurance shock on home prices in the ZIP codes most vulnerable to catastrophes. They found that rising insurance premiums weighed down home values by about US$20,500 in the top 25 per cent of homes most exposed to catastrophic hurricanes and wildfires, and by US$43,900 in the top 10 per cent.
In parts of the hail-prone Midwestern states, insurance now eats up more than a fifth of the average homeowner’s total housing payments, which include mortgage costs and property taxes. In Orleans Parish, La., that number is nearly 30 per cent.
A hundred miles north of Lafitte, the small city of Bogalusa, La., lies further inland. Nevertheless, Cristal Holmes saw her insurance premium more than quadruple in 2022, to US$500 a month, on top of her US$700 monthly mortgage.
Ms. Holmes, a single mother who was working 56 hours a week at a warehouse, struggled to keep up with the higher bills. She fell behind on mortgage payments after her work hours were reduced to 35 a week. She worried she couldn’t stay in her home.
Similar stories are playing out all over town. Ms. Holmes’s real estate agent, Charlotte Johnson, said her office was getting phone calls every day from people who said they could no longer afford their rising insurance premiums. For many, dropping insurance is not an option, because banks refuse to offer or maintain mortgages for people without coverage.
That means owners are being forced to choose between accepting home insurance policies they can’t afford or risking foreclosure.
Buyers face their own obstacles. High insurance prices and interest rates are making it harder than ever for first-time buyers to purchase homes, said Nancy Galofaro-Cruse, a senior loan officer with CMG Home Loans who works with many of Ms. Johnson’s clients. She estimated that more than a third of would-be buyers in the area backed out of the market this year after insurance and interest rates pushed their total monthly housing costs out of reach.
It’s not just the hurricaneprone coasts that have been affected by the reinsurance shock. In Colorado, where wildfires and hail pose the biggest threats to homes, the average homeowner’s premium has more than doubled in the past decade and median premiums have increased 74 per cent since 2020.
Steve Hakes, an insurance broker with Rocky Mountain Insurance Center in Lafayette, Colo., has seen clients consider homes in wildfire-prone areas, only to back out when they can’t find affordable insurance. High prices and limited availability have pushed him to advise buyers to look for insurance early in the homebuying process.
And in California, 13 per cent of real estate agents surveyed by an industry trade association said they’d had deals fall through in 2024 after buyers couldn’t find affordable insurance coverage.
Colorado regulators are aware of the threats these dynamics pose to the real estate market and are exploring a wide range of fixes, said Michael Conway, the Colorado insurance commissioner.
“We don’t want a situation where the insurance market is effectively decimating the real estate market,” he said.
As insurance becomes more expensive, home values will need to adjust for potential buyers to afford their monthly costs, industry analysts say. And if home values fall, lower property tax revenue could mean less money for local governments.
Clarence Guidry reached a breaking point this year when he got a quote to insure his home in Lafitte, La. He’d pay a US$20,000 annual premium, but if a hurricane struck, he’d be on the hook for the first US$50,000 in damage before the insurance company would pay out.
His lender wouldn’t let Mr. Guidry, who goes by Rosco, keep his mortgage without home insurance. But keeping his home insured against damage from hurricanes would mean stomaching monthly payments that are at least 40 per cent higher than the rest of his monthly mortgage and property taxes combined.
Politicians, homeowners, economists, state insurance commissioners and real estate agents have long worried that insurance costs will rise so much that they will begin to pull down home values.
According to the study by Mr. Keys and Mr. Mulder, which was published as a working paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research, this is already happening in some areas.
Over all, U.S. home prices have risen about 55 per cent since 2018, but New Orleans prices have increased by only 14 per cent, less than the rate of inflation over the same time period.
Even in states where heavy regulations have kept costs down, there are signs that home insurers will continue to raise premiums to align more closely with disaster risk. New rules in California allow insurance companies to pass rising reinsurance costs on to consumers. One consumer advocacy group, citing the effects of similar changes in other states, has estimated this provision could raise net premiums significantly for homeowners.
Back in Lafitte, Mr. Guidry was running the numbers for his own budget. Against the advice of his financial adviser, he took money out of his retirement account to pay off his home loan. The plan now is to self-insure for wind and hail damage. That means he and his wife will have to pay out of pocket to repair their home if another severe storm hits.
In forgoing coverage, the Guidrys join some 13 per cent of U.S. homeowners who are uninsured, according to Census Bureau data. Insurers continue to drop people in many areas.
“Now, we’ve got to take the gamble,” Mr. Guidry said.
This article was written by Tim Kiladze and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 15, 2025.
Ovintiv Inc., once known as Encana, spent the past decade running away from Calgary.
Originally a lion of Canada’s energy sector, the natural gas giant tapped an American, Doug Suttles, to be its chief executive officer in 2013, and amid a natural gas downturn he quickly repositioned the company away from its home base and toward U.S. assets.
Within a year, Mr. Suttles spent $10-billion on assets in regions like the Eagle Ford shale fields and the oil-rich Permian Basin in Texas, then went on to change the company’s name and move its headquarters to Denver.
A decade on, and a halving of Ovintiv’s share price later, the company is buying back into Canada. In early November Ovintiv’s current CEO, Brendan McCracken, announced the acquisition of Calgary-based NuVista Energy Ltd. for $3.5-billion, a deal that will add to Ovintiv’s existing exposure in the Montney formation that spans the Alberta and British Columbia border.
The transaction isn’t a one-off. On Wednesday, Calgary’s Baytex Energy Corp. said it would sell all of its U.S. assets as part of a new strategy to focus on its “higherreturn Canadian core portfolio.” The repositioning comes only two years after Baytex spent US$1.9-billion to expand in Texas’s Eagle Ford region.
And then there’s the MEG Energy Corp. takeover, with Cenovus Energy Inc. closing its $8.6billion acquisition of the oilsands producer this week.
It is still too early to declare this a significant shift in Canada’s favour. There are other variables that factor into these deals.
Baytex needed to pay down debt, for example, and an economic downturn arising from U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war could send energy prices tumbling, killing deal activity.
But the latest transactions are a welcome sign for the new government in Ottawa, which has an ambitious agenda to attract international investors to Canada’s natural resource sectors.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has set up the Major Projects Office to fast-track approvals for energy and infrastructure projects deemed to be of national importance, and these include LNG Canada Phase 2, which would expand the liquefied natural gas export facility at Kitimat, B.C. One of the hopes is that by making it easier to develop such projects, international producers and investors will realize Canadian energy can be more easily extracted and exported.
“Over the last decade, there was always a new law or ruling that penalized oil and gas, and it scared off a lot of international investors,” said Jeremy McCrea, an energy analyst at BMO Nesbitt Burns in Calgary.
Lately, though, “we’ve seen more operators take an interest in Canadian oil and gas,” he added, some of which stems from “a federal government that’s looking to be more workable with the oil and gas industry and more keen to get our product to market here.”
But there are other factors at play, including troubling production decline rates in U.S. shale oil and gas wells.
Over the past 15 years, shale producers such as Pioneer Natural Resources Co. and EOG Resources Inc. became masters of fracking – shooting sand, water and chemicals into rock and forcing it to fracture, allowing oil or gas to escape through the cracks – and this new form of production attracted heavy institutional investor demand. Out of nowhere, the U.S. became the world’s largest oil producer.
Yet from the start of this revolution there were fears that shale wells would deplete quickly. This very problem is now playing out. EOG was a shale pioneer, and it is now estimated to have only three or four years of quality locations left to drill. The company’s share price is down 10 per cent this year.
In Canada, meanwhile, many international players retreated during the shale boom, impressed by the U.S. opportunity and also worried there wasn’t ample infrastructure here to export increased production.
At the same time, the Canadian government added regulations and laws that made it harder to expand fossil fuel production, and environment, social and governance (ESG) guidelines started to dominate, making it harder for institutional investors to put money into energy-intensive assets, such as Canada’s oil sands. In retrospect, the retreat is now looking like a bit of a blessing, because Canadian companies often have ample amounts of attractive undeveloped assets.
When marketing its acquisition of NuVista last week, Ovintiv’s CEO told analysts and investors on a conference call that NuVista’s Montney portfolio “is one of the highest quality undeveloped acreage positions in North America and the overlap with our existing land makes us the natural owner.”
This article was written by Adam Radwanski and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 8, 2025.
An initial set of five projects, including an expansion to the Port of Montreal, pictured, are far enough along that the Major Projects Office’s job is mostly to help navigate last-minute permitting hurdles or financing gaps as they arise.
Rarely has a new government agency received so much hype, with so little known about it. When first promised by Prime Minister Mark Carney last spring, the Major Projects Office appeared to have a relatively narrow purpose: To handle the regulatory fast-tracking of large energy, mining and infrastructure investments under the controversial Bill C-5, which allows projects to bypass normal legal requirements if deemed by Ottawa to be in the national interest.
Since high-profile energy executive Dawn Farrell was announced in August as the MPO’s first chief executive officer, it’s become clear that Mr. Carney’s government has much greater ambitions for it.
By this week’s federal budget, which commits $214-million to the MPO, it was being described as “a single point of contact to get nation-building projects built faster” – not just those designated under Bill C-5, and not just in terms of regulatory expedition. It’s now also tasked with structuring project financing, including by helping co-ordinate backing from existing government financing agencies such as the Canada Infrastructure Bank and the Canada Growth Fund.
But what exactly that means, particularly on the financing side, has not been publicly explained in detail by either the government or by the Calgary-based MPO itself, which for now is rerouting all media requests to Ottawa.
As a result, confusion has swirled – including around whether the other financing agencies now answer in some way to the MPO, an interpretation fed by unclear wording in the budget.
In fact, that level of authority is not at all what Mr. Carney intends, based on conversations this week with five people in or around government who are familiar with the MPO’s development. The Globe and Mail is not identifying those individuals because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the subject.
The picture they painted of what the MPO is instead expected to do still suggests an extremely central – if not fully defined, and potentially contentious – role in determining whether some of the investments most central to Mr. Carney’s vision for Canada’s economic competitiveness and sovereignty get across the finish line.
It adds up to the office serving proponents as some combination of project manager, champion and concierge – all depending on the stage of the extremely wide range of potential investments falling under its purview.
The first tranche of referrals to the MPO, announced by Mr. Carney in September, was, in retrospect, telling of that range and of the variation in the office’s mandate.
An initial set of five projects – the Darlington small nuclear reactor in Ontario, an expansion to the Port of Montreal, Phase 2 of the LNG Canada liquefied natural gas terminal in B.C., the expansion of the Red Chris mine also in B.C., and Foran Mining Corp.’s McIlvenna Bay Project in Saskatchewan – are far enough along that the MPO’s job is mostly to help navigate last-minute permitting hurdles or financing gaps as they arise. This is the concierge service.
By contrast, another six referrals also made by Mr. Carney that day are abstract and unadvanced. Some, such as a national critical minerals strategy and an Arctic economic and security corridor, are not even projects so much as concepts that could beget projects. The rest – high-speed rail between Toronto and Quebec City, a massive offshore wind farm in Nova Scotia, huge upgrades to Manitoba’s Port of Churchill and the Pathways collection of potential carbon-capture investments in Alberta’s oil sands – are nowhere near investment decisions.
Those might be where the MPO wears the project-manager hat, trying to work with potential proponents to shape their ambitions into practical plans that align with permitting and financing realities, while identifying what policy changes or governmentbacked capital structures could help.
“The MPO has created business development teams to work with provinces and territories, proponents, and Indigenous Peoples to further develop and make these projects a reality,” was how the Privy Council Office – the federal department to which the MPO is referring media requests – put it in an e-mailed reply to The Globe and Mail this week.
The next tranche of referrals to the MPO, which during a speech in Toronto on Friday Mr. Carney reiterated will be coming next week, may include projects whose advancement falls somewhere between those two extremes. That is to say, tangible prospects that are currently not in reach because of obstacles the office could help remove.
Across these different assignments, the MPO’s role on the regulatory side seems relatively clear. It includes helping proponents navigate the byzantine processes in place, trying to light fires under government departments to move faster and in some cases identifying how regulations could be pared back. It may also serve the purpose first ascribed to it, by shepherding projects under Bill C-5’s fast-tracking provisions.
Some of the financing implications, when the MPO gets involved, are also now coming into light.
But that is also where Ms. Farrell and her team may have to work even harder to find their sweet spot, particularly in terms of maximizing the value of the Infrastructure Bank and the Growth Fund – Ottawa’s two biggest project-financing vehicles – rather than getting in their way.
Both of those entities, launched under then-prime minister Justin Trudeau with a focus largely on low-carbon investments, are already highly active. The Infrastructure Bank, after an infamously slow start, has committed approximately $17-billion – mostly in concessional loans – to about 100 total projects. The Growth Fund, which usually strikes more complex deals involving tools such as equity stakes and offtake agreements, has committed approximately $5-billion to 16 projects or companies in its first two years of operations.
In one regard, the Infrastructure Bank – and project proponents seeking to borrow from it at below-market rates – is a beneficiary of the MPO’s arrival on the scene. That’s because, per the budget, it will now be allowed to invest in any project that’s referred to the MPO, even if that project doesn’t fit within the sectors the government has otherwise mandated it to invest in.
(Those sectors currently include public transit, clean power, green infrastructure, broadband, and trade and transportation, and the government is now planning to add data centres.)
That does not mean, the people interviewed for this story stressed, that the Infrastructure Bank will be required to invest in anything just because it’s on the MPO’s list. And neither will the Growth Fund or any other agency.
What the MPO will do, they suggested, is work with proponents to determine which of those entities – as well as government grants programs – are best suited to their capital needs and what’s reasonable to expect. It will also help them structure their requests and to some extent serve as a go-between.
Ideally, that will provide some degree of traffic control, minimizing overlap, and determining if and when supports from different entities could usefully be stacked.
It could also lead the financing agencies to be presented with a greater number of well-constructed, investment-ready, large-scale applications than they are currently.
But the Infrastructure Bank (which is a Crown corporation) and especially the Growth Fund (which is run under contract by the pension-fund giant PSP Investments) derive much of their value from the ability to make independent decisions.
Each has teams of sectoral investment experts, who have the tricky assignment of settling on deals to advance public-interest projects that take on a level of risk that private investors won’t absorb alone, but also stand a strong chance of earning back their investment.
So a challenge for the MPO, which is itself putting together sectoral teams, will be to strike the right balance in advocating for referred projects.
Too aggressive, and it could create friction that throws the financing agencies off the rails.
Not aggressive enough, and it could become an ineffectual layer of bureaucracy.
What is clear, on both the financing and regulatory side, is that the MPO’s creation reflects Mr. Carney’s belief that government and its agencies need to better and more swiftly row in the same direction, and that Ms. Farrell has the credibility to compel them to do so.
Absent much direct authority, other than on the Bill C-5 projects that have yet to materialize, Ms. Farrell’s overarching imperative will be figuring out how best to wield that undeniable but ambiguous clout.
The Infrastructure Bank, after an infamously slow start, has committed approximately $17-billion – mostly in concessional loans – to about 100 total projects.
This article was written by Emma Graney and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 7, 2025.
TC Energy Corp. expects to place $8.2-billion worth of projects into service by the end of the year, driven by the surging demand for natural gas all over North America.
Government policies across the continent have become “increasingly supportive” of development that can help meet unprecedented demand growth, chief executive officer François Poirier told analysts on an earnings call Thursday. That includes pipelines and power plants fired by natural gas.
Mr. Poirier pointed to recent federal policy developments in Canada, for example, that he said have improved the regulatory environment for projects of national interest such as LNG Canada Phase 2, which is supplied by TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline.
The company’s latest forecast has North American natural gas demand increasing by 45 billion cubic feet a day by 2035, driven primarily by an expected tripling of liquefied natural gas exports, unprecedented power demand from data centres and coal-togas conversions.
In the United States, roughly 40 gigawatts of coal-fired generation is expected to retire over the next decade, the majority of which will likely be replaced by natural gas.
As one of the largest operators of natural gas storage in North America, Mr. Poirier said TC Energy is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the swelling demand for the fossil fuel.
In Mexico, for example, the government plans to bring eight gigawatts of new natural gas capacity online by 2030 – and TC Energy’s assets there are “strategically positioned to support this necessary build-out,” Mr. Poirier said.
The combination of strong demand growth for gas and favourable regulatory momentum saw TC Energy update its three-year financial outlook through 2028.
The company now expects 2026 comparable EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) to be between $11.6-billion and $11.8billion, an increase of 6 per cent to 8 per cent over 2025.
Its 2025 to 2028 outlook includes an expected comparable EBITDA range of $12.6-billion to $13.1-billion.
However, the company reported Thursday that its third-quarter profit fell year-over-year, even as revenues edged slightly higher.
For example, net income from the company’s largest segment – U.S. natural gas pipelines – fell to $801-million in the three months ended Sept. 30. That compared with $1.3-billion a year ago.
Total revenue came in at $3.7billion, up from $3.36-billion in the same quarter last year.
The combination of strong demand growth for gas and favourable regulatory momentum saw TC Energy update its three-year financial outlook through 2028.
Still, the company has set 14 new natural gas pipeline flow records across its systems in 2025, and demand is only accelerating.
In Alberta, TC Energy’s pipeline system has seen an 80-percent increase in the volume of gas being transported for use in power generation over the past five years, said Tina Faraca, TC Energy’s executive vice-president and chief operating officer of natural gas pipelines.
“With the queue of data centre interconnections tripling over the last year, we are working closely with customers to ensure our assets can meet the market’s evolving demand,” Ms. Faraca said.
In the U.S., almost 60 per cent of data-centre projects are expected to fall in the footprint of TC Energy’s various assets in the country, she said, offering a massive opportunity for the company to deliver natural gas to fuel the growth.
TC Energy has placed $8-billion worth of projects into service this year alone, and they are tracking roughly 15 per cent under budget, Mr. Poirier said. He expects that number to climb to $8.2-billion by the end of the year.
In 2026, the company expects to bring roughly $4-billion worth of capital projects into service, including the Bruce Power Unit 3 in Ontario.
The bulk of TC Energy’s projects, however, are brownfield and corridor expansions in the U.S., where the company is expanding its existing infrastructure to capitalize on the extensive demand for power generation and data centres.
When it comes to capital expenditures, Mr. Poirier said he expects them this year to fall at the lower end of the company’s previously announced $5.5billion to $6-billion guidance range.
In all, “robust fundamentals” in the market have seen TC Energy sanction more than $5-billion worth of new growth projects over the past 12 months.
Mr. Poirier said he expects a similarly steady march of project announcements to continue in 2026.
This article was written by Jeffrey Jones and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 6, 2025.
Ottawa is clawing back some provisions in its contentious antigreenwashing legislation in a move that has upset both business groups and environmental advocates.
In its 2025 budget, the government said it would propose legislative amendments to remove some aspects of the provisions within the Competition Act under Bill C-59, while maintaining protections against greenwashing – the practice of making false or misleading environmental claims.
Two provisions to be revoked require companies to prove their green assertions using internationally recognized – though unspecified – methodologies, and allow third parties to make complaints directly to the Competition Tribunal. They went into force over the past 16 months.
“These ‘greenwashing’ provisions are creating investment uncertainty and having the opposite of the desired effect with some parties slowing or reversing efforts to protect the environment,” the government said in the budget, unveiled Tuesday.
Companies, especially in natural resource industries, complained the legislation, strengthened in 2024, prevented them from publishing anything about their environmental records and plans by putting them at risk of stiff financial penalties, and many removed materials from their websites.
Some business groups, as well as the Alberta government, criticized the rules as overreach, though supporters of the legislation said corporate decisions to expunge materials showed that it was acting as a deterrent as designed.
“The changes are important but insufficient. We’ve long called for the full repeal of the Bill-59 changes,” said Adam Legge, president of the Business Council of Alberta, which represents the chief executives of large companies as well as entrepreneurs. “They are unnecessary, given the existing powers of the Competition Bureau and the commissioner.”
Mr. Legge said the uncertainty over the anti-greenwashing rules is holding back communications and even investment in cleantech over fears of being targeted under the legislation for forward-looking statements.
“They are unacceptably demanding and strict, such that without the removal of those requirements or the softening of the language around the certainty of forward-looking statements, I still think there will remain a chill in innovation investment and clean technology investment,” he said.
Marie-France Faucher, deputy spokesperson for the Finance Department, said feedback from business organizations and advocacy groups was given “careful consideration” when deciding on the amendments. The government will present the amendments in the coming weeks, she said in a statement.
According to one survey, investors complain that information about climate-related risks and energy-transition planning has become more difficult to glean after companies in various sectors scrubbed data from public disclosures in response to the legislation.
However, Richard Brooks, climate finance director at environmental advocacy group Stand.earth, said he is disappointed that the provisions had not been given the time to achieve their full effect. “We do know that it did lead to the removal of a number of greenwashing statements by oil and gas companies and the largest bank in Canada, so it was clearly having an effect,” Mr. Brooks said.
Royal Bank of Canada in April dropped its sustainable finance targets from public materials. It blamed legal uncertainty stemming from the anti-greenwashing provisions in Bill C-59 as well as changing measurement practices. An official with RBC had no immediate comment on whether the changes would affect its disclosure.
There are enough experts available to guide companies on how to navigate the legislation and locate recognized standards, and the Competition Bureau could have provided more education, said Wren Montgomery, associate professor of management and sustainability at the Western University’s Ivey School of Business.
But reversing the provisions only showed the government capitulating to the corporate sector and moving Canada’s policy in the direction of the United States, she said. She called the complaints from the corporate sector “fearmongering.”
“So, I think Carney has believed the greenwashing. They’ve greenwashed the greenwash bill,” Prof. Montgomery said.
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