Over the last few months of Trump’s rollercoaster reign, Canadians have quickly awakened to the fact that we need a more resilient, independent economy. One idea that has emerged, as a possible silver lining to Trump’s mayhem, is that we will finally build the cross-Canada oil pipelines we’ve been talking about for decades.
But is that a good idea? Something we should be rooting for? No one is better equipped to answer this question than Don Gillmor, a Canadian journalist, novelist and a self-described “former roughneck in the Alberta oil fields,” who just happens to be publishing a book this month called On Oil, about connections between oil and democracy. His subject couldn’t be more timely.
For Maclean’s, he has written a fascinating piece about the North American energy supply and how we perceive oil in our culture. Gillmor’s sociological, historical approach never feels polemical. In fact, he bemoans the politicization of oil. “Like so much these days, energy has become tribal,” he writes. “In the U.S., oil is Republican, Christian and inherently masculine, while renewables are woke, socialist and elitist. Our own perspective in Canada isn’t much different. Trump, who has a gift for exploiting division, has seized on this divide and is using it as a cudgel, even though his best shot at energy security in the short term is a strong alliance with Canada. And in the long term it requires looking past oil.”
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—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief, Maclean’s
