Doug Ford needs to get serious about the future

The Ontario premier's latest multi-billion dollar infrastructure proposal might be his dumbest idea yet. It's also a sign of how unprepared he is for the future his province is facing.

For a guy who’s supposed to be good at business, Doug Ford sure does love pitching bad business ideas. His latest is the “Northern Shield” pipeline, a 3,300-kilometre-long project that would traverse four provinces, numerous Indigenous communities and the unforgiving Canadian Shield bedrock, all to send Canadian barrels of oil to a Sarnia refinery that has no additional space to process them. It would cost anywhere from $70 billion to $100 billion, and that theoretical bill would have to be borne entirely by governments given the private sector’s complete lack of interest in building it.

Enbridge, after all, already owns the Line 5 pipeline that sends 540,000 barrels per day of Canadian oil and other crude products to Sarnia. It’s almost as dumb as his plan to build a 20-metre-wide tunnel under the GTA’s Highway 401, one that would take decades to build, cost upwards of $100 billion, instantaneously fill with traffic and even risk collapsing the key roadway above it. Every sensible observer, never mind actual transportation experts, have dismissed the idea as something between unrealistic and unbelievably stupid.

Not Ford, though. “You think of fifty years down the road,” he said last year. “We are building that tunnel as sure as I’m talking to you.”

But, of course, Ford isn’t thinking 50 years down the road — not on his highway to financial hell, and especially not on his redundant pipeline project. Instead, he appears to be looking in his rearview mirror. There was a time, back in 2020, when it looked like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer might find a way to get Line 5 shut down, mostly in the service of her own presidential ambitions.

But Whitmer is on her way out, both as governor and a Democratic presidential contender, and earlier this year the US Supreme Court denied her appeal in the ongoing legal dispute over Enbridge’s plan to build a new protective tunnel under the Mackinac Straits. More to the point, there is no political profit for anyone in Michigan, Democrat or Republican, in punishing Canadians right now. Neither of the Democratic candidates for Governor have pledged to continue Whitmer’s fight, while the leading Republican contenders have promised to end it immediately.

There is, I suppose, a non-zero chance that the legal campaign against Line 5 somehow succeeds in a Republican-dominated US federal court system, which would lend some value to a new pipeline. But at a price tag approaching $100 billion, that might be the most expensive insurance policy in the world. On the latest episode of The Curse of Politics, Ford’s longtime advisor Kory Teneycke did his best to defend the indefensible.

“This is as necessary as the Rideau Canal was as a competing route to the St. Lawrence Seaway back when we were coming out of a war with the United States,” he argued. “If you don’t think energy security is important, and if you don’t think the jobs in southwest Ontario are important, then I guess you can say that an alternative pipeline route is unimportant. But if you care about those things, then maybe there’s something really important going on there.”

Energy security and job creation are important, of course. It helps explain why energy-importing countries around the world are massively increasing their investment in renewable energy, electric vehicles, and other technologies that shield them from the vagaries and volatility of global energy markets. I understand why some people in Alberta can’t wrap their heads around this, whether for political or economic reasons.

But Ontario, as both a major net importer of oil and gas and a major net exporter of automobiles and auto parts, has to be thinking about the changing energy future more clearly and deliberately than most provinces. Getting it wrong will cost future generations more dearly than anywhere outside of Alberta — and right now, its provincial government seems determined to get it wrong. If it was thinking of 50 years down the road, as Ford said, it would be placing its bets on electrification and decarbonization, not redundant oil pipelines.

By 2076, after all, the only gas-powered vehicles will be in museums or in the garages of eccentric petroleum enthusiasts, and if there’s an automotive sector left it will be one making and supplying electric vehicles. Ontario’s prosperity will depend on how successfully it manages that transition, and how quickly it can deliver the cheap (and clean) electricity that industry and consumers will demand. Ford doesn’t even have to look that far down the road, though.

If he wants to improve Ontario’s near-term energy security, pouring those billions into things that reduce demand for imported oil, gasoline and refined products is a far better strategy. Dan Woynillowicz, a clean energy expert and principal at Polaris Strategy, pointed out on social media that the fuel cost of driving an EV in Ontario over the past six years is one-fifth that of a gas-powered one. And unlike purchases of oil and gas from other provinces or countries, money spent on electricity in Ontario tends to stay in Ontario, whether that’s Ontario generation assets, Ontario transmission infrastructure, Ontario labour and Ontario public agencies.

“If the goal is to benefit Ontarians,” he wrote, “it’s worth understanding that a public investment in a new pipeline would likely further entrench Ontario’s dependence on oil-price-linked gasoline, whereas EV adoption would shrink that dependence and bolster the province's electricity and automotive sectors.” Doug Ford’s “Northern Shield” pipeline isn’t going to happen. Even so, his decision to propose it speaks to a mindset, and a worldview, that still hasn’t reckoned with the economic realities bearing down on his province and its people.

Ontario can, and should, take energy security seriously, and it should be thinking about how that interacts with the economic interests of its manufacturing sector — especially what those look like 50 years down the road. It would help if its premier actually focused on the road in front of him for a change.