Inflation has surged to its highest level in years, Statistics Canada announced Monday, and we can rightly blame U.S. President Donald Trump and his war in Iran for the oil-fueled increase.
But we can also reserve some blame for ourselves.
Time and again, this decade, we’ve been reminded of our economic vulnerability to an increasingly volatile world rife with supply-chain disruptions — the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the biggest previous ones.
And yet for all the talk of making ourselves more self-reliant, we continue to lag other countries that are actively working to reduce their exposure to global oil prices.
There are ways we could better insulate ourselves from that kind of volatility, which is likely to keep flaring up given how much of the world’s oil-and-gas supply comes from unstable places.
It’s not by significantly increasing our reliance on fossil fuels extracted within Canada, despite intermittent political noise to that effect. Even if new pipelines eastward from Alberta could get built swiftly, and there’s no reason to believe they could, oil and to a lesser extent natural-gas prices would remain pegged to global markets. (That doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t build infrastructure to export more energy to other markets, which is a separate matter.)
What we plainly should be doing to avoid wild price fluctuations is joining the global shift toward using fossil fuels less and electricity — produced and priced domestically — a lot more.
You’d think we’d have gotten a head start, considering a starting-point of electricity abundance compared to most other countries. And yet it’s especially striking, in moments like this, how relatively complacent we’ve remained.
The numbers tell the story — most prominently with electric-vehicle uptake.
Never mind the most famous examples elsewhere — Norway at nearly 100 per cent of all personal vehicles sales being EVs, China well above 50 per cent now. Across the entire global market, per the International Energy Agency, that figure will approach 30 per cent this year, up from about 25 per cent the previous one. Meanwhile, in Canada, even a recent revitalization of the EV market after a particularly grim 2025 only has us a bit above 10 per cent.
Not that it’s just about how families get around. The market for electric trucks, which can help minimize the impact of energy shocks on consumer goods, is more nascent most places. But Canada isn’t exactly at the forefront there, either, at about two per cent of all commercial vehicles sales, versus more like 10 per cent globally.
The contrast is a bit less stark with home heating, with electric heat pump sales rising dramatically here as elsewhere (though comparable data is harder to come by).
But there’s been less willingness in Canada than in other countries, particularly in Europe, to move toward bans on gas furnaces in new homes or phasing out existing ones. And the pushback, when local governments have tried going in that direction, has been enough to dissuade others from following suit.
That sort of backlash, toward attempts to use public policy to make us less reliant on fossil fuels, merits some self reflection.
It’s always tempting to point the finger at politicians, both when price shocks hit and when long-term economic shifts take too long.
While Ottawa has been making moves to reduce consumers’ fossil-fuel exposure, including a recent return of EV purchase rebates and an increasingly active role in building out the electricity grid, there’s certainly more that Mark Carney’s government could do. More consistent incentives, more urgent construction of EV charging infrastructure, less passive interest in commercial transport electrification, greater regulatory consistency — it would all help. And that’s not to mention the provincial level, where Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been interested in building a domestic EV industry but seems indifferent toward electrification in our daily lives.
But consumers are also capable of making decisions on their own, and of leading the politicians with public pressure rather than being led.
There are plenty of explanations for why we’ve not tried harder to get off the global energy roller coaster.
The oil and gas lobby remains more powerful here than most places. The perception of EVs or heat pumps being unsuited to our northern environment remains strong, despite technological advances to the contrary.
The political emphasis (until recently) on electrification as a way to fight climate change has sometimes under-emphasized the consumer benefits.
And, not to be underestimated: Our remaining economic and cultural integration with the U.S., which is now an outlier in its resistance to moving off fossil fuels, can easily obscure how aggressively the rest of the world is doing so.
But when better to stop self-defeatingly following our neighbour’s worst habits?
Because if we instead stay in bed with Trump and other global chaos agents, resisting energy self-reliance through electrification, Canadians will keep paying the price.
