Atlantic Canada risks losing guaranteed pipeline access to Western Canadian energy while still relying heavily on overseas fuel, a situation that former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna says threatens regional growth and Canada’s energy sovereignty. “Having control over our energy resources is essential for a country,” he said. “In our case, there’s a significant divide between the West and the East that we need to overcome.” Western Canada continues to export oil and natural gas to the United States , often at discounted prices, while Atlantic Canada imports liquefied natural gas (LNG) from overseas along with roughly 500,000 barrels per day of foreign crude. “We have resources. We should be using them,” McKenna said. Since European buyers are seeking alternatives to both Russian and American supplies, he said Canada is missing a strategic opening. “They want it from Eastern Canada,” he said. “We can’t give it to them because of the politics of Canada.” The political uncertainty in Quebec adds another layer of risk for Atlantic Canada, as the Parti Québécois is leading in polls there and a provincial election is scheduled this year. “We’re facing a possible (separatist) referendum in Quebec and we’re on the other side of the fault line,” McKenna said. “Anything dramatic that happens in Quebec affects all of Atlantic Canada. We haven’t been able to get an oil pipeline and we haven’t been able to get gas through.” He said there’s existing pipeline infrastructure inside Quebec, but Atlantic Canada cannot freely access natural gas moving through that province, which is why he wants Ottawa to step in to prevent Quebec from restricting access to what he views as vital national energy corridors. McKenna frames the issue in both political and economic terms, but Mark Oberstoetter, head of research for upstream companies at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie Ltd., points to a looming commercial deadline. The 10-year contracts guaranteeing space on TC Energy Corp.’s Canadian Mainline — the main pipeline sending Western Canadian natural gas eastward — expire at the end of December. These contracts provide reserved capacity that feeds into the Trans Québec & Maritimes Pipeline. But since there isn’t a direct pipeline connecting Quebec and New Brunswick, the gas must currently loop through the U.S. before re-entering the Maritimes. Once those contracts lapse, Atlantic Canada will lose guaranteed access to Western Canadian supply. In the absence of new infrastructure, the region could rely more heavily on the Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline, an aging system that was reversed in recent years to carry U.S. natural gas north. That shift effectively places the Maritimes at the end of a U.S. supply chain, exposing the region to American price volatility and competition from U.S. buyers. “From a national security standpoint, there are questions,” Oberstoetter said. “Would we prefer not to have that dependency?” The region’s growing reliance on overseas supply is already visible. A cargo of LNG from Australia — more than 25,000 kilometres away — arrived at the Port of Saint John, N.B., last Thursday. Saint John LNG (formerly Canaport) was designed to import and process gas, but it can’t export gas because it lacks liquefaction equipment. Local politicians have suggested converting the equipment so that it could send Western Canadian gas to Europe, but the owner, Repsol SA, said that wouldn’t work because of high pipeline tolls from Alberta to Quebec and the roughly $4-billion cost of a new pipeline. Beyond the contracts, the main challenge is geography and economics. “The last segments to reach eastern markets are the toughest to build,” Oberstoetter said, citing high tolls, dense populations and regulatory complexity. International buyers have shown interest in East Coast export concepts, but he said there has never been any kind of “serious backing with money” to solve the “last pipeline challenge” for projects such as GNL Québec, a proposed LNG export terminal, and Goldboro LNG in Nova Scotia, a planned facility to liquefy and ship natural gas to global markets. The industry, he said, has remained “more Western-oriented” in deciding “which projects are rising to the top commercially.” Political decisions in Quebec also complicate plans for eastbound pipelines because the border barrier is not just physical, but ideological, Gabriel Giguère, a senior policy analyst at the Montreal Economic Institute, said. “The politicians are absolutely disconnected from the population,” he said. Giguère points to the Quebec National Assembly’s unanimous vote in 2022 to ban oil and gas exploration, but said polling often shows a more nuanced public view that is open to developing domestic resources. He is also skeptical of recent signals from the Parti Québécois that suggest it’s conditionally open to pipeline projects, pointing to a motion last month in which the party voted against a Norwegian LNG proposal from Marinvest Energy AS before the project’s details were fully presented. “It’s a weird approach,” he said. “The message is clear: uncertainty will remain under the PQ.” A March 2025 study by Giguère estimated that if projects such as Energy East, a proposed pipeline announced in 2013 to carry Western Canadian crude to Eastern refineries and export terminals, and GNL Québec had proceeded, Canada could have redirected nearly 28 per cent of its oil exports and 20 per cent of its natural gas exports to markets other than the U.S. In dollar terms, that represents more than $38 billion per year in potential energy exports — including $36.7 billion in oil — reaching international markets, according to the report. The result would be more income and less reliance on a single market. New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt is trying to close Atlantic Canada’s energy gap, lobbying Ottawa to designate a $5-billion pipeline extension from Quebec City as a priority nation-building project, though outgoing Quebec Premier François Legault has signalled only cautious openness. Giguère said Ottawa’s proposed Building Canada Act (Bill C-5) and Quebec’s own Q-5 acceleration framework could, in theory, create a streamlined approval pathway for national pipelines. Whether that alignment happens, however, depends on the political will in both Quebec City and Ottawa. But there are also questions about whether high-cost East Coast Canadian projects would remain competitive if they were built. Europe scrambled to replace Russian gas and decided to rely on U.S. Gulf Coast sources, so some forecasters, including Oberstoetter, are projecting a potential oversupply of LNG in the early 2030s. But McKenna believes there’s an opportunity. “Europe doesn’t want to move from Russian dependence to U.S. dependence,” he said. “They’ve repeatedly said they want Eastern Canada to supply them with natural gas, but political realities in Ottawa and Quebec mean we can’t provide it.” As a result, he said Atlantic Canada’s position is increasingly precarious, especially since it’s physically separated from the rest of the country’s energy grid by a province whose political direction remains uncertain. “We have to get access to oil and gas, and the Government of Canada can’t be indifferent,” he said. “Projects like Hibernia and the Trans Mountain Pipeline wouldn’t have been built without Ottawa stepping in.” Whitecap says scale gained with Veren takeover helped secure global gas contractsNew cross-border U.S. pipeline proposal could revive idle Keystone XL assets: analysts • Email: arankin@postmedia.com