Oil and gas industry needs to show 'we're human' during election, says economist

Economist and author Peter Tertzakian says a wide polarization of opinions exists across Canada on the topic of oil and gas, but that industry representatives play a key role in changing the debate.

Tertzakian, who is the executive director of Arc Energy Research Institute, joined host Jim Brown on The Homestretch on Wednesday to discuss pipelines and the energy industry during the federal election campaign.

This interview been edited for clarity and length.

Q: How big an issue is oil and gas likely to be in this campaign?

A: It's likely to be a very big issue because we know one of the big platform issues that the Liberals are running on is the climate change issue, and climate change obviously affects the entire country, the entire planet. We are the fifth largest oil and gas producer in the world. We're trying to build pipelines.

We're trying to understand policy and regulations and issues that are coming out of that whole narrative with climate change.

Q: So if that's the lens through which we'll be examining the issue in the election campaign, that isn't necessarily a good lens for some of the players in the industry.

A: No, it's not a fantastic lens because the industry has been on the defensive on this whole issue, and the federal government has largely been very aggressive with its climate change narrative and its Paris Agreement goals that it's trying to achieve.

Just as a colour commentator myself, observing the situation what's happening even in advance of the election is progressive polarization between the East and the West of the country.

Q: It's almost like there's a balancing act that the government is trying to achieve here when it comes to the energy industry because, on the one hand, as you say, they're trying to differentiate themselves from the Conservatives through their climate policy. On the other hand, they bought the Trans Mountain pipeline. What are the players in the industry saying about the Liberal government and about the election campaign?

A: Well, the players in the industry, first of all, would say the Trans Mountain pipeline has not been built, or, the expansion to the Trans Mountain pipeline, so I'll believe it when I see it given all the regulatory and court delays that have occurred even most recently. So, it hasn't been built, the investment has dried up in the industry.

Now that's multi-dimensional, the issues that surround that, but I think that there's an overlying narrative that really is harsh on the industry. That narrative, from the climate change perspective, that even comes at us from outside the country, is the people in the oil and gas industry are waking up every morning to destroy the planet and so on and so forth.

That, on top of disruptions that are happening by virtue of technology within the industry coming from outside the industry … it just leads to this intense feeling here of anxiety and anger that is becoming very populist. Populism then overlaps with politics and you can see that with the Liberals, the NDP and the Greens, [they] are very much using climate change in their platform as an overarching policy narrative of how it affects us here.

Q: CAPP, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, has registered as a third party so that they can advocate for the industry in the campaign. What impact do you think organizations like CAPP, and that kind of public relations, is going to have?

A: [CAPP] has now effectively become a political industry association. That's understandable given that policy and politics now are so influential in the fortunes of the oil and gas business, not only here but even in the U.S. and other Western countries. And so the move from being politically independent to being politically biased in this campaign is a significant one.

How effective that will be? It's not clear.

I mean, I like to tell people the old adage that politics is all local.… But, you know, ultimately we just have to build better bridges of communication across this country to try and arrest this increasing political and social divide that is emanating out of this debate.

Q: Picking up on that, if we are as polarized as we appear to be right now, how many minds out there are open to being changed?

I think there's a lot. I travel a lot to Ontario, Quebec, the East ⁠— all of corners of Canada. My sense is that there is a very large, what I would call, rational middle that is open to discussion. They haven't necessarily made up their minds [on if] oil and gas is a good thing or a bad thing or what's Alberta talking about, but they're open to talking about it.

As can be expected in any social media kind of debate, the extremes tend to be the loudest voices, squeaky wheels are a very loud part of the narrative, but my sense is that there are avenues to get to them.

My hope is that through this political discourse, this election, it doesn't widen us even further.

Q: So what does the industry have to do, and the players within it, to try to get their voices heard outside of this province to try to make inroads?

A: I think getting out and being in social media, we have organizations such as Canada Action, we have various organizations popping up, each have their place in the landscape objectively. But there's no substitute for actually going and talking to people directly.

I still feel that, yeah, you can put stuff out on social media, you can do all that kind of stuff, but at the end of the day, we all know that social media has become, whatever the issue, very much an echo chamber. It's like you're preaching to the converted, often, and getting everybody fired up and nobody else from the outside is listening.

I think the industry has to get out more to different parts of the country, show we're human, show we don't wake up every morning with the intent to trash the environment.

We're part of the solution when it comes to climate change and those sorts of issues, and I hope that the election and the politicians can hopefully feed off of that.