Energy Core Principles

• Canada’s oil, natural gas, coal, hydro and nuclear industries are among the most efficient and technologically advanced sources of income, investment growth and export earnings of all industries in Canada.They are vital to the economic prosperity of all regions.

​

• Regulatory certainty, efficiency and predictability are important for industry investment planning. These conditions must be restored in industries affected by climate policies. The federal government must play its proper role as protector of the Canadian economic union, and address by legislation or other direct measures as necessary the use of political and legal tactics to block interprovincial trade and the legally-approved construction and operation of interprovincial and international energy infrastructure.

​

• Variable renewable energy (VRE) technologies are extremely expensive and rely on huge government subsidies. To use such intermittent and diffuse power sources requires that the consumer pays between three and ten times the price of power from conventional sources (coal, oil, natural gas, hydro and nuclear). Regardless, it is not currently possible to safely replace a significant fraction of Canada’s conventional energy supplies with alternative energy sources such as wind, solar and most biofuels.

​

• New VRE have only a minimal effect on carbon dioxide emissions because none of them can be relied upon to be available when needed. Therefore, conventional fossil fuel-fired power stations must be kept on standby in case the wind drops or a cloud passes over the Sun. This leads to additional emissions of carbon dioxide that, to a large extent, offset the reductions made by the renewable energy technologies.

​

• 'Energy independence' is not a good reason for promoting VRE technologies. Energy independence is more easily–and much more cheaply–attained by exploiting abundant national fossil fuel reserves, and spending some of the wealth created on research into potential new energy technologies.