Kevin Krausert is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Avatar Innovations, Canada’s largest energy technology venture studio.
Thrill swept across the country when Canada won its World Cup match against South Africa to advance to the Round of 16 for the very first time. Celebrations from St. John’s to Victoria and everywhere in between showed what it looks like when Canada gets back to winning: There is more that unites us as a country than divides us.
Thursday’s Government of Alberta submission of a new major oil pipeline to the West Coast should also be seen as a national win. A new shared national vision is emerging that promises to build a generation of prosperity. We’ve awoken to a powerful new realization: Our abundant resources are our greatest geopolitical lever, and expanded offshore export opportunities can build the inclusive and technological future Canada deserves.
But just as our soccer team has a long way to go, so too does our energy sector if we are to secure our rightful place as an energy superpower, restore our national economic sovereignty and solve our decades-long productivity and innovation problems.
We can quibble about the details of this pipeline, but first, let’s give credit where credit is due. A win is a win. This pipeline deserves to be celebrated from the same rooftops in St. John’s as in Vancouver. The first half of this decade saw Canada’s per-person living standard decline by 2 per cent – the worst since the Great Depression. The first quarter of 2026 saw the lowest amount of venture capital deployed in nearly a decade, a key indicator of future technology and innovation. All staged against the backdrop of a decade of needless polarization of our country’s largest, most valuable export: oil and gas.
Thursday’s win would have been unthinkable even two years ago. Leadership from all levels of government and industry should be applauded for working together and looking at how Canada competes – and wins – in a new fractured world order.
And this new world is stark and sobering. Our democratic allies in Asia have just found out that their energy supplies and quality of living can be held hostage by an unstable regime with a drone and a tight waterway. Combined with rapidly shifting, and increasingly mercantilist, trade policy by tweet. The deconstruction of globalization is increasing inflationary pressures and downward pressures on our home equities, the retirement savings of millions of Canadians. Our young people are being told that artificial intelligence is coming for their careers.
Amidst the doom and gloom, this submission to the Major Projects Office offers optimism about the future. It represents a major turning point in how Canada gets back to winning.
Here’s the play-by-play. On top of the $30-billion in capital to build this new pipeline, a recent report by ATB and Studio.Energy shows that an additional $100-billion in capital will need to fill all the new export capacity proposed. Instead of just creating temporary construction jobs, a recent Energy Safety Canada national labour-market report indicates that every additional $1-billion in energy industry capital investment will result in 5,400 long-term jobs. Taken together, that’s more than 720,000 high-quality jobs for young people from coast to coast.
Moreover, the project holds the potential to use new tools in our toolbox to drive generational prosperity for our Indigenous peoples. New provincial and federal loan guarantee programs enable First Nations to take meaningful equity stakes in major energy infrastructure like this one, changing the script on reconciliation into one of meaningful economic reconciliation. There has been no better industry than oil and gas at driving these new partnerships and this proposal can be a major step forward.
Finally, this pipeline involves a fundamentally new chance to rethink how Canada wins at the technology and innovation strategies that will both reduce our emissions and increase our prosperity in the long term. By enabling investment in our resource sector and streamlining our carbon markets, we hold the chance to finally make the needed breakthroughs in carbon-abatement technologies. It connects heavy industry and the innovation community together in a new technology investment thesis the world is looking for.
Let’s celebrate this win. Let’s move past the long-tired arguments of the past, the petty regional divisions only politicians benefit from and the ridiculous idea that we don’t build resource projects to the world’s highest environmental standards. Let’s show what our soccer team has showed us: We can – and must – win in this brave new world. This is a vision for the future of Canada I am cheering for.