On a stretch of land by the Ottawa River, near the Quebec-Ontario border, Katherine Massam points to a sign warning of a pipeline under “high pressure.”
Beneath her feet runs Enbridge Line 9B, which transports oil from Alberta to Montreal refineries.
The proposed Energy East pipeline was also supposed to pass nearby, but the project was abandoned in 2017, after years of delays and opposition from environmentalists like Massam.
A mother of two, Massam worries about the possibility of pipeline leak and its effect on local drinking water. She’s also concerned about how another project would make it harder for Canada to meet its climate targets.
“A pipeline spill would be a disaster,” she said. Massam lives in Très-Saint-Rédempteur, Que., a small village dotted with farmland west of Montreal. She said opposition would quickly mobilize if another pipeline project were proposed.
“I think it wouldn’t take much to get it woken up again,” Massam said of the anti-pipeline movement. While resistance like hers has helped stall projects in the past, political winds may be shifting.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and threats to Canadian sovereignty have breathed new life into talk of national energy projects — including in Quebec.
In a federal election where the national conversation has focused so strongly on the economy and sovereignty, some younger voters say they feel ignored with so little attention paid to issues like climate.
Changes in Quebec
The Quebec government is now signaling a new openness to projects like Energy East, which would have carried more than a million barrels of oil a day from Alberta and Saskatchewan across the country to Saint John, N.B.
Premier François Legault, who not long ago called Alberta oil “dirty energy,” said last month Quebec would consider proposals — if they have “social acceptability.”
A recent poll suggests more Quebecers now support the idea, though a majority remain opposed.
The province has said it’s open to a natural gas pipeline to the Saguenay region, north of Quebec City, where it would be liquefied and shipped overseas. That project was scrapped in 2021 due to environmental concerns and strong public opposition.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has made reviving such projects central to his campaign. He wants to create an “energy corridor” to move oil to Saint John and build an LNG terminal in Saguenay.
He also promised to repeal Bill C-69 — the federal Impact Assessment Act — which allows regulators to consider environmental and social impacts of projects.
Liberal Leader Mark Carney has said he’s open to pipelines. Carney said this week he wants Quebec to use Alberta oil instead of American imports — but only “with the support of First Nations” and “all the provinces, obviously including Quebec.”
Francis Verreault-Paul, new chief of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador, said in a statement that “any development whatsoever” on ancestral territories “must take into account the principles of consultation.”
“This decision requires that consultation processes take into account the knowledge of First Nations affected by such projects,” he said.
Even the NDP has not closed the door completely to pipelines, though that party and the Greens are putting more focus on the idea of an east-west electricity grid.
The Bloc Québécois, under the leadership of Yves-François Blanchet, has made opposition to new pipelines a central campaign message.
“It would provide nothing to the Quebec economy,” he said, adding that there’s no actual project being proposed.
The case for a secure supply
As it stands, pipelines carrying Canadian oil and gas are aimed toward the U.S. — with the exception of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which runs through B.C.
If oil prices rise and U.S. access is restricted by tariffs, a project like Energy East could become viable again, said Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist and professor at the University of Alberta.
“Then I think that pipeline would have a chance of coming back,” Leach told CBC’s Front Burner.
Sonya Savage, a former Alberta energy and environment minister and pipeline executive, including with Enbridge, said these projects serve the national interest.
She warned that Enbridge’s supply route, which runs through the U.S., is vulnerable to being cut off.
“That’s something that I think would be devastating to both Ontario and Quebec if that ever happened,” said Savage, who supports Poilievre.
“There’s a national interest in getting secure supply, Canadian supply, to those refineries — and it’s going to take political leadership.”
The head of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, which supported Energy East a decade ago, also said Quebec and the rest of Canada would benefit from greater energy co-operation.
“We do not have a national energy strategy and we now are aware we need one,” said president Michel Leblanc, though he stopped short of backing a new pipeline outright.
That, he said, would depend on its impact on Quebec’s economy and environment. “The question is, ‘OK, how do we make sure that we take care of the environment but we’re not controlled by the Americans and their own policies?’
A ‘mirage,’ environmentalists say
Environmentalists in Quebec say they won’t let it happen without a fight. More than 100 civil society groups co-signed a letter describing the attempted revival of such projects as a political “mirage” given the need to transition to renewable energy.
The International Energy Agency has stated that to avoid severe climate impacts, the world must work toward net-zero emissions by 2050, which includes halting new long-term oil and gas projects.
Amy Janzwood, an assistant professor at McGill University who researches the politics of energy projects, noted the dramatic political shift away from those concerns.
“I think there’s been a lot of opportunism from industry groups and their positioning around this as a way to say, ‘if only we didn’t have climate policy, right?'”
