When European governments were paying record prices for liquefied natural gas in 2022 and 2023, desperately trying to replace Russian supply, Canada had essentially nothing to offer them. Not because the gas did not exist. Canada has enormous reserves of natural gas in British Columbia and Alberta. The problem was that Canada had spent the better part of a decade failing to build the terminal capacity and regulatory environment needed to get that gas to a ship and across the Atlantic. The result was that Canada sat out one of the most significant energy security crises its allies had faced in decades while holding a hand full of cards it could not play.
This is the defining pattern of Canadian resource policy. The assets exist. The demand exists, often from close allies with genuine strategic need. And Canada consistently fails to build the infrastructure, clear the regulatory path, or develop the political will to connect them. The cost is not just foregone revenue, though that is substantial. The cost is strategic irrelevance at precisely the moments when Canada could be converting resource wealth into geopolitical relationships that serve the country for generations.
The critical minerals story is similar and in some respects more urgent. The global competition for lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements is accelerating because these materials are foundational to electric vehicles, battery storage, semiconductor manufacturing, and defence applications. Canada has significant deposits of most of them. The permitting process to bring a new mine into production can take fifteen years or more. Australia, which competes directly with Canada for this investment, has moved aggressively to accelerate its approvals and is building processing capacity that Canada has so far declined to prioritize. The minerals will be extracted. The question is whether Canadian workers, Canadian communities, and the Canadian tax base will benefit.
Fresh water sits in a different category because its strategic importance has not yet fully materialized, but it will. Canada holds approximately 20 percent of the world's surface fresh water. Climate projections suggest that water scarcity will intensify in the coming decades across large parts of the world, including parts of the United States. Canada has not begun a serious national conversation about what this resource represents, what obligations it creates, and what strategic framework should govern it. That conversation needs to start now, before circumstances force it on less favorable terms.
The reluctance to treat resource wealth as a geopolitical tool is sometimes framed as principled restraint, as though there is virtue in leaving strategic assets undeveloped. There is not. Canada's allies need secure energy, secure mineral supply chains, and long-term access to clean water. Canada is positioned to help provide all three. A country that consistently fails to convert that position into infrastructure, relationships, and influence is not being principled. It is being outmanoeuvred. And the decisions being made without Canada at the table right now will not be easy to reverse.