European Parliament president says there’s a market for Canadian oil and gas in Europe

Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, says Europe is looking at who their friends and allies are amid uncertain economic times.

European Parliament president Roberta Metsola says there is a market in Europe for Canadian oil and gas, and signalled European Union (EU) nations may be willing to pay a higher price for Canadian conventional energy, as member states work to divest further from Russian energy.

In an interview on CTV Question Period that aired Sunday, when asked directly by host Vassy Kapelos whether there is, in her view, a customer in Europe for Canada’s conventional energy exports, Metsola said: “yes.”

“If you see how we have pivoted over the last years, we found ourselves when Russia invaded Ukraine, that we were completely, to a certain extent, reliant on a very unreliable partner for gas and oil, and that meant that we have had to divest, uncouple ourselves, and we’re almost completely done,” she told Kapelos. “To do that, we need to find alternative sources.”

Metsola was in Ottawa last week for a meeting of the G7 countries’ speakers.

She added that while the EU has “doubled down” on its climate goals and plans for renewable energy, “that’s not enough.”

“And where do we go? Where do we look? We have to look across the Atlantic, and the discussions are absolutely in that direction,” she said.

The federal government, meanwhile, has signalled it will start announcing approved so-called nation-building projects in the coming weeks. In June, Parliament passed Bill C-5 — dubbed the Building Canada Act by the Liberals — aimed at giving government sweeping new powers to approve major projects of national interest.

When asked whether Europe is prepared to potentially absorb a higher cost of importing oil and gas in exchange for those products coming from a trusted partner, such as Canada, Metsola told Kapelos those discussions are happening “right now.”

“Where do we go? How do we pivot? At the end of the day, what do you mean by cost? We have had to go into very, very expensive divestment when we had to uncouple from Russia,” she said. “We also have other perhaps more unreliable partners in which we are importing fossil fuels, because we need to keep our energy bills low.”

Metsola said many European countries have been forced to rely on those “more unreliable partners” because of their physical proximity.

“That’s why we talk about joint partnerships,” she added. “We don’t only talk about defence; we don’t talk about security. We talk about strategic autonomy, which also means that we need reliable and predictable sources of supply, and Canada comes into the mix.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney has been pushing for months to strengthen energy and economic ties with Europe, in large part to expand the country’s export markets amid a protracted trade war with the United States.

In separate interviews on CTV Question Period last year, both Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and then-Polish president Andrzej Duda said they would be interested in purchasing Canadian LNG.

In a recent interview on The Vassy Kapelos Show, Energy Minister Tim Hodgson also said that he is confident “there are buyers” for Canadian LNG.

The push to sell LNG is a change in tone from the previous Liberal government under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who publicly said in 2022 that there has “never been a strong business case” for LNG exports to Europe.

Canada has one major LNG export terminal up and running — LNG Canada, located in Kitimat, B.C. — which just began shipping Canadian gas in June of this year, primarily to Asian markets. There are currently six other LNG export projects in the works.