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The Natural Resources Economy – We’re Lucky to Have it

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Cody Battershill

There’s a lot to be said for an economy that relies significantly on Canada’s natural resources sector.

For one thing, our resources are so abundant – from water to forests, minerals to oil and gas, fish to agricultural lands – that we’ve been able to build Canada into one of the most prosperous nations on earth. 

For another, Canadians have access to the best universities, colleges and technical schools anywhere, and those institutions are geared to providing the resource economy with a highly skilled, diverse workforce. Natural resources account for 45 per cent of our manufacturing output, 58 per cent of our total exports, 19.2 per cent of our national economy – and millions of jobs. 

Our country’s home to 900 communities from coast to coast to coast that are economically reliant on at least one of the natural resource sectors. Of these communities, more than 600 are either significantly or highly reliant on either energy, mining or forestry. 

In an increasingly globalized world, this is a genuine advantage to building a strong domestic economy. 

So too is the fact that many of our Indigenous communities have expressed growing interest in joining the sector in order to build on their own economic autonomy. As of 2021, nearly 50,000 Indigenous peoples worked in Canada’s natural resources sector, up from nearly 47,000 in 2017. 

But the news isn’t all good. Since 2015, Canada has seen nearly $670 billion in natural resources projects suspended or canceled. So, it stands to reason that, at a time when policymakers are concerned with boosting economic growth and sagging Canadian living standards, one of the most impactful steps we could take is to unleash the natural resource sector’s economic power. 

It may be time we stopped shrinking from the notion that we’re just: “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” and that instead we embrace that idea as the source of Canada’s global advantage.  

Expand the phrase to include our energy resources, agriculture and agrifood, mining and forestry and you can see how poised we are to excel. Canadian energy, mining and forestry companies accounted for $86 billion, or 30 per cent of total non-residential capital investment in the country in 2021, with energy alone accounting for $66 billion. 

Canada’s oil and natural gas sector supports approximately 900,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs across the country, while Canada’s mining sector supported more than 665,000 jobs across the country in 2021. Oil and natural gas accounted for 30 per cent of Canada’s total exports in 2022, valued at $217 billion. 

It’s time to champion the men and women who work in the sector, and to view sector as not just large numbers from economic history but rather the building blocks of a stable Canadian future economy.  

Cody Battershill is a Calgary realtor and founder / spokesperson for CanadaAction.ca, a volunteer-initiated group that supports Canadian energy development and the environmental, social and economic benefits that come with it. 

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