It’s a slam-dunk business deal if there ever was one; strategic for both sa国际传媒 and Japan – with investment, jobs and climate change boxes all getting giant checkmarks. And, it supports democracy and further isolates Russia – a country now committed to killing as many innocent Ukrainian civilians as it possibly can.
Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, representing the world’s third-largest economy, met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week to ask for more Canadian liquefied natural gas so that it can end its purchase of Russian energy.
Kishida is asking sa国际传媒 to lay the foundation for additional investments like that undertaken by LNG sa国际传媒, the largest private investment in Canadian history, to tap into sa国际传媒’s rich natural gas reserves and bring them to market. And LNG sa国际传媒 will do this while generating emissions 35 percent lower than the best-performing comparable facility in the world.
Canadians can be deservedly proud.
Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Corp. owns 15 per cent of LNG sa国际传媒. When it comes online in the next year or two, LNG sa国际传媒 will replace nine per cent of the natural gas Japan currently gets from Russia.
That’s a lot of LNG, but it leaves plenty of room for more clean Canadian energy to be sent to Asia. Our challenge is an approach by government that seems designed to do just the opposite – turn away investors, squander billions in new capital and kill thousands of jobs.
, except for a Trudeau lecture on decarbonization. “We didn’t get any concrete commitment,” .
This follows on the heels of the visit to sa国际传媒 by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz last August. He was seeking similar commitments from sa国际传媒, only to be told not-so-subtly at a Trudeau press conference that there is no business case for sending LNG from sa国际传媒 to Europe.
Canadians taking this all in would have been surprised to read just before Christmas that the prime minister of Britain and the president of the United States signed an agreement that will see exports of LNG from the U.S. to the U.K. double next year. Apparently, there is a business case after all.
The pattern is clear and investors are looking at sa国际传媒 as a place where it is simply too difficult to do business and to get to yes on major projects. when it comes to the quality of our infrastructure, just barely ahead of Hungary and Oman. , tied with Malta and Azerbaijan. Even if the economic investment and political will could be mustered to build something, the World Bank tells us for how long it takes to approve and permit construction projects.
, international exports of goods and services used to account for more than one-third of sa国际传媒’s GDP as recently as 2000. Today, it’s 23 per cent – bucking the growth trend of virtually every other advanced OECD economy. In fact, Canadian outbound investment has exceeded inbound investment every year since 2014.
The cascading effects are significant to our long-term prosperity. Underbuilt infrastructure, choking regulations and lack of political will are key reasons why the OECD says that over the next decade, with a projected growth rate of just one per cent annually, sa国际传媒 will have among the 38 developed nations it tracks.
Such anemic growth means that it will take more than 70 years for sa国际传媒’s economy to double in size – crushing the hope that our children will be better off than we are. At this rate of growth, it will take three generations to realize this dream.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Germany, as desperate as Japan to get itself off Russian energy, is at record speed. was built and opened within 10 months. LNG now regularly ships from the United States to Germany.
This has changed so fast that Chancellor Scholz created the phrase Deutschland-Tempo as a model for how the country wants to tackle its energy and infrastructure issues. “This is now the new Germany-pace at which we are bringing infrastructure projects forward,” Scholz said at the LNG plant opening.
“The LNG Acceleration Act must be a blueprint for policy. Plan, build and modernize faster,” added German Finance Minister Christian Lindner.
Right now, Canadian-Tempo could best be described as glacial planning, less building and slow modernization. It is frustrating to see so much opportunity slip away.
It’s so bad that added in sa国际传媒 since the pandemic started have been government jobs.
It’s hard not to believe that entrepreneurs, investors and employers feel as though they are being punished for wanting to build and invest in sa国际传媒. sa国际传媒 needs to aim higher than dead last among developed economies. We have an abundance of resources, talented people and endless opportunity: Our elected officials just need to pick up the tempo.
Chris Gardner is president of the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association.
