Green Politics and Global Stability

 O Canada or no Canada? It’s a momentous question. Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta is poised to hold an independence referendum, perhaps in October. Similar sentiment has been bubbling in Saskatchewan. In Quebec, secession is the perennial dream of millions.

Will it be another rupture in the fabric of our era, like Brexit, Donald Trump’s rise or Russia’s Ukraine invasion? Or maybe the opposite? A putative Canadian secession crisis could prove a damp squib, evidence the world is restabilizing itself in a new geopolitical age.

The word rupture was recently given currency by none other than Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, decrying Donald Trump’s effect on NATO. Never say never but history isn’t a single train rushing down a single track. In fact, a lot has changed since we last visited Albertan independence seven years ago. All the news—every bit of it—suggests Canada finding its way back to an even keel.

Property values and housing starts in Alberta have bounced back strongly. Unemployment is up too, in a good way—because so many people are rushing to the province from other parts of Canada and abroad to find a job.

The world came to its senses about energy and climate. In May 2024, pipeline capacity increased significantly with the long-delayed and bitterly opposed Trans Mountain Expansion. Alberta crude now enjoyed better access to Asian buyers. No more excessive fealty to the oversupplied U.S. Midwest, which in 2018 saw the province’s take-home price plummet to $10 a barrel due to transportation bottlenecks.

Result: Oil output has hit an all-time high and is expected to grow another 25% in the years ahead. Alberta is again the economic engine of Canada.

The Trans Mountain Expansion, started by a U.S. company, had been hopelessly stymied by Canada’s environmental and indigenous-group lawfare. At a huge cost in construction overruns, Justin Trudeau’s government eventually took it over and finished the project. Now a further agreement with Mr. Carney in November envisions a second pipeline, plus permits for large tankers to call at Canada’s western ports, plus certainty over taxes and anticarbon initiatives.

My 2019 column was headlined “Green Politics and Global Instability.” I linked Canada’s then near-civil war over Alberta oil to a timely and underrated Netflix series, “Okkupert,” about a fictional Russian energy takeover of Norway, supported by the European Union after Norway’s Green Party threatened to cut off North Sea gas. The show is still worth watching, but now as a reflection on a world rapidly being left behind.

Call it a global repudiation of Merkelism, for the politics of the German chancellor whose immigration initiatives contributed to the British vote to leave the EU, and whose energy and climate policies helped prompt Vladimir Putin’s disastrous Ukraine invasion.

All these forces have been reversed. Back in 2015, Canada’s Mr. Carney, as governor of the Bank of England, made himself a global darling with a speech claiming that financial markets were underpricing a pending climate disaster and also underpricing sweeping government action to mitigate it.

In retrospect, markets were guilty only of realistically pricing government hypocrisy on climate change. Mr. Carney’s speech is best seen now as a technocratic blessing on the age’s true climate innovation, the Obama abandonment of carbon-tax proposals in favor of green pork and virtue signaling, having no effect on climate change.

The ultimate blowback was the Ukraine War, but let’s brighten up. Mr. Carney is a testament to democracy and self-healing. He has disowned his previous Merkelism; as prime minister, he now champions Canada’s emergence as an “energy superpower” helping to restabilize the world and, not incidentally, Canada’s internal politics.

Alberta, after all, is home to the world’s fourth-largest petroleum reserves. At the time, it was enmeshed in a 10-year infrastructure war waged against it by Canada’s eastern voters and energy consumers, who nevertheless showed no interest in giving up their energy-rich lifestyles.

Three successive pipeline projects were scuttled by activist mau-mauing, a direct attack on the livelihood of Western Canadians and an insidious menace to the nation’s survival. Mr. Carney saw this. Leaders don’t get power if they don’t maneuver; but they misuse their power if they don’t also defer to the reality principle.

A paradox of our time is a media with hair on fire about everything, yet democratic societies so complex, weighty and built on the emergent order of millions of people acting on their own information and initiative that these societies tend to right themselves. They find a sensible course even against the ruptures history throws at them. Indulge a certain inner calm, then, when watching Canada’s secession politics. In fact, the world is headed in the right direction.

 

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. He writes the twice-weekly “Business World” column that appears on the paper's op-ed page on Wednesdays and Saturdays.