Canada, From Toronto | A Sleeping Giant, A Shorter Ship Lane, And A Very Canadian Hurdle — November 12, 2026 (Morning Edition)

Good morning from Toronto — it's properly cold out there today, 4°C and overcast with a wind that feels like winter rolled in early, and that's honestly a fine frame for today's story. Because today's story is about something frozen in place that isn't the weather: it's about Canada's LNG industry, and the very Canadian art of almost getting there. I picked this one because it asks the question I keep asking on those Greyhound-and-tim-bits drives across this country: why do we keep finding the world's treasures and then taking 27 months to file the paperwork?

Why I picked this today

I'm naming the pillar, like I promised: Pillar 2 — The Great True North (natural resources, climate stewardship, the land as character), with a Prairies/Alberta-first angle. This is Thursday's weekday lean, and I'm rotating regions on purpose — BC yesterday morning, Ontario yesterday afternoon, Alberta today. A new S&P Global report landed this morning, and it turns "Canada could be an energy giant" from a pub argument into a set of numbers we can argue about in public.

The Story

There's a tanker in Kitimat, B.C., and if you want one image for how big this could be, that's the image. CBC's Kyle Bakx, filing from Calgary at 5:00 AM EST today, reports that Canada's only liquified natural gas (LNG) facility — LNG Canada at Kitimat — began operating last year, and that a brand-new S&P Global report, released Thursday, says the country has an opportunity to scale up that industry and become one of the top natural gas exporters in the world. One plant running. Fourteen million tonnes a year of capacity. And a federal government target of upwards of 100 million tonnes a year. That gap — 14 to 100 — is the whole story, if you're willing to look at it as a capacity question instead of a slogan question.

Let's do the gap properly, because the report does. Reaching the federal goal could have a significant economic impact, CBC reports: nearly a quarter million jobs annually, and nearly $1 trillion of investment in the natural gas industry by 2050. Not $1 trillion of GDP. Not $1 trillion of revenue. Nearly $1 trillion of investment over a quarter-century — pipelines, plants, terminals, port infrastructure, communities built around them. It's a number that sounds like a press release until you remember what a quarter-million jobs a year means for places like Kitimat, Terrace, Prince George, Fort St. John, and the Indigenous communities whose lands the routes actually cross. That's not a spreadsheet. That's towns.

S&P Global vice-chairman Daniel Yergin — and I want to be careful here, because Yergin is a man who has been reading energy maps for decades — put it this way in an interview with CBC News: "If Canada can address its permitting issues and its cost issues, Canada can play a very big role in global LNG, which would be obviously beneficial for the Canadian economy and would help to globalize its economy and make its economy less dependent upon on its neighbour to the south." Read that again. The world's energy establishment is telling Canada the offer is on the table — less dependence on the neighbour to the south — and the condition is boring: fix the process.

Photo source: Maggie MacPherson / CBC News

So why is the table so hard to sit at? Western Canada has a vast amount of natural gas, which can be produced at some of the lowest costs in North America, CBC reports. The gas is cheap. The geography is generous. What's not generous is the building. Pipelines from Alberta and northeast B.C. to the West Coast have been, in CBC's words, a complex and expensive process. The Coastal GasLink project — developed by TC Energy, partly owned by local First Nations — faced several delays and cost overruns, was opposed by various Indigenous communities and environmentalists, and crosses about 625 lakes, rivers, creeks, wetlands and streams in northern B.C. Six hundred twenty-five. I counted the number twice against the article, because it's the kind of number that does the real work: this isn't a pipeline across a parking lot.

And the permitting clock is the number that should keep an investor awake. Canada's permitting process has taken 27 months longer compared to Texas, and pipelines cost 160 per cent more to build, according to the S&P Global report. Twenty-seven months longer. One hundred sixty per cent more expensive. You can be right about the resource, right about the market, right about the climate case — and still lose the project to a spreadsheet in Houston, because capital doesn't wait for committees. The federal government has introduced new legislation aimed at speeding up regulatory reviews, and Yergin says Prime Minister Mark Carney has a lot of credibility on the world stage, but investors will want to see proof of permitting reform because lengthy wait times are very costly for companies. Proof. Not promises. Proof.

Here's the part I want to underline, because it complicates the chest-thumping. Even if Canada built everything it has currently lined up, it still wouldn't hit the federal goal. LNG Canada is the only operating export facility in the country, although six others are either under construction or in development. Together, they would produce just over 50 million tonnes of LNG each year. Just over 50 — call it half the fabled 100. So the "opportunity" headline hides a smaller, harder truth: the projects that exist cover roughly half the target, and the other half does not yet have a private-sector proponent at all. CBC's summary is blunt: there are several hurdles, including a lengthy permitting process and a lack of proposed projects by the private sector. Canada doesn't just have a permitting problem. It has a belief problem — the private sector hasn't yet believed the permitting problem is solvable.

And yet — and this is why I picked the story — the demand side really is pulling. Yergin calls the size of Canada's oil and natural gas "one of the big secrets in the global energy industry," and points to Canada's short shipping route to Asia as a genuine geographic advantage. "Asian buyers want that LNG from Canada," he told CBC. Demand for natural gas is expected to grow over the coming decades due to, among other things, the growing population and power demand from AI data centres and air conditioning. Add the disruption of the global gas market by the conflict in the Middle East this year, and European concerns about the cost of heating homes as winter approaches, and you get a buyer market that is actively looking for suppliers who don't have to sail through a chokepoint. Yergin's framing is worth quoting in full, because it's the clearest version of the argument: "There's a strong interest in diversification. There's a conviction that you have to build security and resilience into your system. You need a diversified portfolio, and it would be beneficial to have resources that don't have to go through choke points. And so all of those things point to advantages that Canada has right now."

Why It Matters

The climate angle is where the story gets interesting, and where you need to hold two thoughts at once. Canadian LNG has 55 per cent lower greenhouse gas intensity compared with similar projects in other countries, according to S&P Global. That's not zero. That's not "clean." But in a world that is going to burn natural gas for decades whether Canada likes it or not — because the alternative is coal, and I've seen what that does to a sky — supplying that gas from the lowest-intensity source available is a defensible Canadian position. It's also a position that only works if we are honest about the emissions upstream of the tanker, and about what "lower intensity" does and doesn't claim. I am not a chemist, and CBC does not hand me a lab report. But I can hold the report's claim at arm's length — S&P Global says 55 per cent lower — and say: if that's even roughly true, Canada has a product the world is actively shopping for, and a story about being responsible suppliers is one we can tell without blushing.

The geography matters too, and this is where the sketchbook-in-one-hand part of me gets a little loud. A tanker leaving Kitimat for Asia does not thread the Strait of Hormuz. It doesn't queue off a canal. It sails down a cold, short lane from a coast that has more harbour than it has people. That is not a small thing in a year when shipping lanes are headlines. It means a Canadian cargo can be a resilience cargo — the exact thing buyers say they are building systems for. The land as character isn't just scenery in this story. The land is the advantage. Lakes, rivers, tundra, forest, coastline — the True North isn't where the gas sits. It's why the gas can reach a customer nobody else can reach as easily.

But I want to give the hurdle its full weight, because the blog rule is people first. Those 625 water crossings on Coastal GasLink aren't a punchline. They're places where First Nations, fishers, trappers, and small towns live, and where "consultation" has too often been a word we use to mean "we told you." The opposition from Indigenous communities and environmentalists that CBC mentions is part of the real cost picture — not a public-relations obstacle to be cleared, but a legal and moral reality to be reckoned with. A quarter-million jobs a year is a magnificent number on paper. In Prince George this week, where a tree fell on a family's house and people are still without power after a series of storms (that was a different CBC story today, and it sits in my head as the truer sense of "infrastructure"), a job is a person. And a person whose river gets a pipeline under it gets a say that is more than a comment box. If Canada fixes permitting by steamrolling the people who live on the land, it will have fixed nothing. The lesson of the last decade of Canadian energy politics is that legitimacy is also infrastructure. Build it slowly or lose the project for a generation.

That's why the report's most important sentence, to me, isn't the trillion dollars. It's Yergin's conditional: if Canada can address its permitting issues and its cost issues. The whole golden future sits inside an "if" that Ottawa and the provinces have to earn, project by project, community by community. That's a less glamorous story than "Canada becomes an LNG leader," but it's the one worth telling. Glamour doesn't pour concrete. Trust does.

One Thing To Know

Here's the hopeful closer, and the caveat, in one breath. The hope: none of this requires a miracle. It requires a clock that runs faster than 27 months longer than Texas, and a cost curve that doesn't sit at 160 per cent more to build. Boring things. Things a government can actually fix. The caveat: even if Ottawa fixed both tomorrow, the projects on the books still produce just over 50 million tonnes a year — half the federal goal. The other half has to be proposed, financed, permitted, and built by people who don't yet exist in the queue. Canada's LNG future isn't a wave we ride. It's a road we have to build, in the rain, with everyone who lives along it.

We will know it's working when the second phase of LNG Canada — which CBC notes could double the facility's exports — actually moves steel, and when the next company files a project because it believes the clock will keep. Until then, the honest headline is the one the report already wrote: the opportunity is real, the hurdles are real, and the deciding variable is whether we can make "someday" mean "soon."

🇨🇦✨ Trending Watch

Canada today, in a few quick scenes — trends, not headlines.

🌤️ Weather

Toronto is 4°C and overcast right now, feels like −1.2°C, with 87% humidity and a northeast wind — first real coat weather of the season. The five-day forecast stays chilly and cloudy: today 4–7°C, Friday 3–6°C, Saturday 2–6°C (OpenWeatherMap, today).

🎬 On Screen

"Rivals" season 2 is the streaming conversation today — David Tennant headlines the Hulu/Disney+ Jilly Cooper adaptation, and his New York Times interview today has him comparing Cooper's novels to Dickens. Period romp, big cast, very winter-binge (The New York Times, Nov 12).

🎤 Live Stage

Mumford & Sons will headline Churchill Park Music Festival in St. John's on July 17 next year, with a Saddledome show during the Calgary Stampede also teased — the 2027 summer festival announcement season is officially open (VOCM, Nov 11; Calgary Herald).

🏒 On Ice / On Field

Team Canada takes on Czechia in the women's worlds quarter-finals today on TSN, with the USA still sitting top of the power rankings heading into the elimination round — a proper hockey day for Canadian fans (TSN, Nov 12; Yahoo Sports, Nov 12).

💻 Tech

Retro tech is driving holiday shopping lists: from VHS players to iPods, younger Canadians are hunting nostalgia as gifts this season — expect it at every gift guide (Global News / National, Nov 12).

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— Lucy, from Toronto. Sketchbook in one hand, coffee in the other. ✍️🍁 Canada, From Toronto: peace-first, people-first, fact-checked. General information, not advice.

Sources: Canada has the opportunity to become a global LNG leader, new report says — CBC News, Kyle Bakx, Calgary, Nov 12, 2026 · Series of storms leaves B.C. woman with tree stuck on her house for days — CBC News, Nov 12, 2026 · Canada-Czechia, USA-Denmark headline women's worlds quarter-finals on TSN — TSN, Nov 12, 2026 · World Championship Power Rankings — Yahoo Sports / The Hockey News, Nov 12, 2026 · From VHS to iPods, retro tech is driving this year's holiday shopping season — Global News / National, Nov 12, 2026 · How 'Rivals' Helped David Tennant Fall for Romance — The New York Times, Nov 12, 2026 · More Acts for Churchill Park Music Fest to be Announced Soon, Says Promoter — VOCM, Nov 11, 2026 · Mumford and Sons coming to Scotiabank Saddledome for Calgary Stampede — Calgary Herald · Toronto weather — OpenWeatherMap, Nov 12, 2026