Jon McKenzie did not mince words. Speaking to analysts on Cenovus Energy's first-quarter earnings call this week — a call on which the company reported an 83 per cent jump in net profit — the CEO said Canada's national dialogue around oilsands development has been "myopically focused on the climate agenda." The result, he said, is a regulatory and policy environment that makes Canadian resource investment "uncompetitive with the rest of the world." With the Strait of Hormuz closed and oil above $100, Canada has an opportunity — but only, McKenzie added, "if they choose to seize it."
The remarks landed at the BMO CAPP Energy Symposium week in Toronto, in front of the most concentrated audience of Canadian energy executives and investors of the quarter. They were not made casually. McKenzie chose to say this, on the record, on a call that investors and media monitor closely. That choice is worth taking seriously.
He is right. The evidence is not subtle. Canada's net foreign investment gap widened from $100 billion in 2014 to $1 trillion in 2024. No new major greenfield oilsands project has been sanctioned in over a decade. TC Energy's CEO has been publicly calling for six-month permitting timelines since at least March — the same request the industry has been making for years. The MOU between Ottawa and Edmonton, signed with fanfare in November, has missed its own deadlines and is still hung up on a carbon pricing disagreement that both sides describe as nearly resolved every few weeks without actually resolving it.
The Part He Didn't Say Out Loud
McKenzie's point about the dialogue is correct, but it is also the easier argument to make. The harder one is the one he buried in the middle of the call: the pipeline MOU may have set out a path for a new pipeline to be built, but it fails to include the policies that would incentivise enough oilsands production to fill it. Alberta says a new West Coast corridor could carry one million barrels per day. Getting to that production level requires new greenfield development. Greenfield development, McKenzie said plainly, "comes at a higher cost and a higher break-even than the growth that you've seen to date."
That is not a climate agenda problem. That is an economics problem — one that a resolved MOU, a lower carbon price, and faster permitting would all help address, but none would fully solve on its own. Building a pipeline to tidewater is the necessary condition for Canada's energy ambitions. It is not the sufficient one. The industry also needs an investment environment that makes greenfield oilsands development pencil out at a cycle price, not just at $100 WTI. That conversation is happening inside boardrooms but not yet clearly enough in public.
Ottawa's Both-Sides Response
Prime Minister Carney's response to McKenzie's remarks drew a sharp divide — suggesting the Liberal government's new majority hasn't resulted in an immediate policy shift that would enable what both Cenovus and the IEA are calling for. Carney acknowledged record production — over five million barrels per day, up from three million a decade ago — and conceded the economic benefits. But he stopped well short of endorsing McKenzie's framing that climate policy has made Canada uncompetitive. That careful positioning is politically understandable. It is also, at this particular moment in the global energy cycle, exactly the kind of hedged response that makes foreign investors nervous.
Shell just committed $22 billion to the Montney. TotalEnergies and ConocoPhillips are reportedly taking fresh looks at Canadian assets. The BMO CAPP Symposium this week had an energy and urgency that participants described as unlike any in recent memory. Global capital is, for the first time in years, genuinely interested in Canada. The window for Ottawa to respond to that interest with clarity rather than careful positioning is not permanent.
The Real Test Is the MOU
Premier Smith said Friday she hopes the MOU can be finalized in the "next number of days," and that Albertans need to see "Canada can work." That framing is deliberate — it is not just an energy industry argument, it is now a national unity argument, with a separation referendum petition circulating in Alberta and the province watching closely to see whether a Carney majority government delivers differently than a Carney minority one.
The carbon pricing sticking point is reportedly about the speed of increases rather than the end target. That is a resolvable gap if both sides want to resolve it. The question is whether the final agreement will include the greenfield investment incentives and policy certainty that McKenzie described as prerequisites for filling the pipeline both governments say they want to build. A deal that resolves the carbon price number but leaves greenfield economics unaddressed is a deal that announces a pipeline without producing the oil to flow through it.
McKenzie was right to say Canada's dialogue has been too narrow. But the solution isn't a different conversation — it's a different set of decisions. The MOU, whenever it finally lands, will tell us whether Ottawa is ready to make them.