Tim Houston’s drill-baby-drill, shovels in the ground, obsession has been attracting a lot of attention, both locally and nationally.

Here in Nova Scotia, public meetings to sell communities on the desirability of natural gas production through fracking have not gone well. Information sessions last week in Windsor, Amherst and New Glasgow – towns near likely exploration sites – drew responses ranging from skeptical to hostile.  

But nationally – or at least those parts of the nation exposed to the National Post – Houston’s campaign has been going great guns. The headline over a Post article by Donna Kennedy-Glans captured the spirit of the piece. “A jolt of energy for Canada’s almost-worst performer – Premier Tim Houston wants Nova Scotia to confidently strive to do big things again.” 

According to the article, the jolt comes in the form of Houston’s “rolling out the welcome mat to investors who can unlock the province’s substantial untapped potential in offshore oil, inshore and offshore natural gas, offshore wind and geothermal.” 

Danielle Smith – yes, the very same Danielle Smith who is busy gerrymandering the electoral map, facilitating a referendum on separation and invoking the notwithstanding clause at every turn – is also pumped about Nova Scotia’s energy, especially natural gas. 

Shortly after hosting Houston at a roundtable with oil execs in Calgary, the Alberta Premier provided the National Post with an op-ed proclaiming that “Nova Scotia could be a natural gas superpower, too….Its natural gas reserves have the potential to enrich its people and power the world. Let’s get some shovels in the ground.”

Invoking a stereotype

It’s highly unlikely that the Post’s excitement or Smith’s endorsement, while providing ammunition for opponents of fracking, will do much to convince skeptics. Danielle Smith’s involvement is at best a mixed blessing.

However those interventions have the effect of raising the stakes in the debate about oil and gas development. There is a longstanding belief in some right-wing circles, especially in Alberta and Saskatchewan, that Nova Scotia and the Maritimes would rather stay poor, living off federal transfer payments, than encourage the environmentally-risky fossil fuel industry. Wild claims about Nova Scotia becoming a “natural gas superpower” instead of remaining as an “almost-worse performer” represent more of the same.

We can’t be too hard on the National Post for spreading that message – it’s simply taking to readers across the country something Houston and his ministers have been saying ever since they initiated their resource-extraction push. 

Houston refrained from the attacks on “special interests” – those putting the “No” in Nova Scotia – that marked the launch of the debate. But his interview with Post reporter Donna Kennedy-Glans made clear his belief that it’s our fault that our economy is lagging.      

As reported by Kennedy-Glans, Houston has no interest in managing Nova Scotia’s decline. He wants to reverse course and spark a genuine cultural shift “back to a sense that we can build things, we can do things.” 

“We just have to have the courage and confidence to do it,” he told the Post. “It wasn’t that long ago that every single community in our province was thriving, whether it was fishing and shipbuilding, farming or mining (but) we kind of got away from that, and we started to say ‘no.’ We banned sectors and put moratoriums on.”

Encouraged development

It’s difficult to know what Houston is talking about when he refers to ubiquitous thriving communities- perhaps he has been recently exposed to some of the debunked history about Nova Scotia’s mythical “Golden Age.” But if the issue is fossil fuel development, our history has been one of saying an enthusiastic “yes” – followed eventually by disappointment as the realities of markets and resource limitations took over. 

Take coal for example. For most of the Twentieth Century Nova Scotia governments did everything in their power to promote coal mining before mostly giving up because the resource was low quality, costly and dangerous to extract.

As for oil and gas, the expectations were even larger but the letdown arrived more quickly.

The Nova Scotia government of the 1960s was so keen to say “yes” to offshore development that it allowed Mobil Oil to drill on Sable Island, sole breeding ground of the Ipswich sparrow. Later, the federal government – with Nova Scotia’s enthusiastic support – poured billions of dollars worth of incentives into offshore exploration, leading eventually to the Sable Offshore Energy Project (SOEP). 

The hope was that SOEP would trigger further development of offshore gas, transforming the province’s entire economy. But of course that didn’t happen. Instead, recoverable reserves from Sable fell 25 percent short of expectations and the project shut down in 2018. 

That closure capped nearly two decades of disappointment for the offshore, a period of time marked by dry holes and the exodus of major oil companies, willing to forfeit millions to escape the exploration commitments they had made during the first rush of enthusiasm for the Nova Scotia offshore. 

During that period there were some Nova Scotians saying “no” – environmentalists, along with fishing and tourism interests and some First Nations. But it was the failure to find enough oil and gas that initially stalled the industry. Compounding the issue was the emergence of fracked gas from the Marcellus formation in the Appalachians, a development that lowered prices and captured the Eastern U.S. market, the destination for Nova Scotia gas. 

By the time the McNeil government put the “no” in Nova Scotia with the fracking ban, the prospect of Nova Scotia becoming a “natural gas superpower” seemed remote. So does the prospect of that changing anytime soon. 

Looking ahead

Houston’s Calgary visit attracted attention from the National Post, and that included columnist Chris Varcoe who talked with several energy experts about Nova Scotia’s prospects. While not dismissive, the experts were cautious in their assessments. 

Mark Oberstoetter, head of North American upstream research at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, said discoveries offshore of Nova Scotia that weren’t developed in the past would require “hefty” investment to bring to production. 

Richard Masson former CEO of the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission was only mildly encouraging. “Just because it wasn’t attractive five or seven years ago doesn’t mean it isn’t going to be quite attractive going forward, because the world has changed.” 

A changed world was also the theme for Tim McMillan, former CEO of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), who said “It looks like his timing might be very good, as the world is realizing the importance of domestic production – and production in safe, stable jurisdictions like Canada.”   

What with war, climate change, AI data centres and the growth of renewables, world demand for oil and gas from offshore Eastern Canada is impossible to predict. But should interest develop in the next few years, it is more likely it would not be focussed on offshore Nova Scotia but on Newfoundland and Labrador, which according to  CAPP has five times the oil and over four times the gas potential of offshore Nova Scotia. 

An indication of how the industry regards the prospects for the Nova Scotia may come this week with the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Energy Regulator’s deadline for bids on offshore exploration licences. If there are no bids Houston’s offshore dream may experience a quick death, leaving him with the more mundane task of selling onshore fracking to a wary public.  

It is interesting that in response to members of the public who turned out in numbers to state their opposition to onshore gas development Houston has cited Frank McKenna. In a video posted on the Internet he called for discussion instead of outright opposition. 

“These are important discussions because, as former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna said in 2014: ‘We cannot refuse to exploit our resources and continue to believe that we can balance our budgets, pay our doctors and social workers and other civil servants and continue to fund a social safety net.’”

In Equal as Citizens I devoted part of a chapter to Frank McKenna, Premier of New Brunswick from 1987 to 1997. His push for entrepreneurship and reduced reliance on federal transfer payments made him the darling of Bay Street and the financial press, and helped launch his post-politics career of corporate directorships and high profile government appointments. 

What one business mag described as McKenna’s “relentless search for jobs, industry and self-respect for his province” failed to permanently alter New Brunswick’s arc – its economy is currently even worse than Nova Scotia’s according to the GDP per-capita metric Houston uses to highlight Nova Scotia’s dire straits. But all that hard work by “the energizer premier” did pay off for McKenna post politics. 

Houston’s high profile energy-focussed campaign may also help him pursue a post-politics career in big business. But if the future of oil and gas development follows the pattern of the past, Nova Scotians will not be better off economically and, thanks to Houston’s rhetoric, critics in the rest of the country will feel justified in putting the blame squarely on our lack of “courage and confidence.”

-30-