Donald Trump\u2019s Venezuelan oil deal is a flex aimed first at Caracas, but its message travels north: America can find another source of heavy crude. Canada had better build choices of its own.<\/p>\n
Start with the one already working.<\/p>\n
Canada spent about C$34 billion building the Trans Mountain Expansion. Now the proposed C$3.97-billion Mainline Optimization Project would add approximately 210,000 barrels a day to the system, and the Resource Works model I prepared estimates that increment would generate C$33.5 billion in Canadian income over 25 years, discounted to today.<\/p>\n
Almost dollar for dollar, this efficient enhancement could create an additional stream of economic value equal to the entire headline cost of the giant expansion that made it possible.<\/p>\n
The Mainline Optimization Project should be approved. Promptly.<\/p>\n
But that conclusion is almost too small.<\/p>\n
The bigger story is what the number tells us about Trans Mountain itself. Canada did not merely buy 590,000 barrels a day of added capacity at a painfully high construction cost. It bought a platform: an established corridor to the Pacific whose value can keep compounding as more oil moves through it, more buyers compete for Canadian barrels and less costly increments of capacity are added.<\/p>\n
The expansion\u2019s cost was one number. Its value is a stream.<\/p>\n
Cash flow and record performance at Trans Mountain<\/p>\n
Trans Mountain\u2019s latest quarterly report<\/a> makes that distinction hard to miss. In the second quarter of 2026, the system carried a record 840,000 barrels a day and operated at 94 per cent of capacity. It produced C$808 million in revenue, C$606 million in adjusted EBITDA and C$138 million in net income.<\/p>\n Then it paid its owner.<\/p>\n Trans Mountain transferred C$450 million to Canada TMP Finance, the federal company holding Canada\u2019s investment, during the quarter: C$300 million as a cash dividend and C$150 million as interest. The first-half total was C$898 million. Since the expanded system entered service in May 2024, those dividends and interest payments have exceeded C$2.6 billion.<\/p>\n The ultimate owner happens to be you, the Canadian taxpayer.<\/p>\n That is not a full reckoning of Canada\u2019s C$34-billion investment, and it does not erase the construction overruns. It establishes something more immediate. The asset is nearly full, profitable and generating cash for its public owner.<\/p>\n A white elephant does not generally run at 94 per cent capacity and send C$450 million upstairs in three months.<\/p>\n Market diversification and the heavy oil discount<\/p>\n The pipeline is also doing the strategic job for which it was built. By the end of the quarter, 610 vessels had loaded at the Westridge Marine Terminal since the expansion opened, and 65 per cent had sailed for Asia. Canadian oil is reaching customers other than the United States at commercial scale.<\/p>\n That competition matters even for the barrels that continue moving south. Before the expansion opened, the Western Canadian Select discount to West Texas Intermediate averaged about US$18.70 a barrel<\/a>. Afterward, it averaged about US$12. Alberta Central estimated<\/a> that the narrower discount generated approximately C$13 billion in additional Canadian oil revenue during the expansion\u2019s first year.<\/p>\n No serious analyst would attribute every dollar of a changing oil differential to one pipeline. Prices, inventories, production and refinery conditions also move it. But the economic mechanism is not mysterious. Give a seller another route to another buyer and the original buyer has to bid more seriously.<\/p>\n Market access is hardly a Canadian eccentricity. Ask Vladimir Putin. He spent years making Europe dependent on Russian gas, then invaded Ukraine and discovered that pipeline dependence runs both ways. Europe found other suppliers. Russian pipeline deliveries to the European Union fell 87 per cent between 2021 and 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n Russia found China. Beijing, however, has choices Moscow no longer possesses. China is now Russia\u2019s largest gas export market, and Russian government forecasts show it paying roughly 30 per cent less than the remaining European market<\/a>. Immediately before Trans Mountain opened, the US$18.70 Canadian heavy-oil discount was about 23 per cent of average WTI prices over the period<\/a>.<\/p>\n The numbers are not identical, and neither are the commodities or contracts. But the rhyme is unmistakable. Putin thought his pipelines had trapped Europe. He discovered that a pipeline can trap the producer, too. A seller with one practical customer does not possess a market. It accepts the buyer\u2019s price.<\/p>\n A pipeline\u2019s most valuable cargo may be the rival bid it creates for oil that never enters the line.<\/p>\n Counting real economic gains<\/p>\n Philip Cross\u2019s new Resource Works study<\/a> supplies the wider view. His canvas is British Columbia\u2019s completed energy build-out, including Trans Mountain, LNG Canada, Coastal GasLink and upstream development. It does not assign every provincial gain to TMX alone. It asks a better question: what did the build-out actually deliver?<\/p>\n Earlier studies had to forecast. Cross can now count.<\/p>\n Using published Statistics Canada data, he found that Canadian energy exports to China rose from C$3.2 billion in 2023 to C$9.7 billion in 2025, almost offsetting the decline in energy exports to the United States over the same period. He found increased production, high-wage employment and a resource economy that helped absorb the shock as tariff-exposed manufacturing weakened.<\/p>\n This is what diversification looks like after the speeches end: investment in the ground, ships on the water, income in the economy and a little more room for Canada to say no.<\/p>\n Now comes MOP.<\/p>\n For C$3.97 billion, Trans Mountain proposes to add roughly one-quarter to the system\u2019s current capacity by making more efficient use of the corridor Canada has already built. The expensive groundwork exists. MOP extracts another large increment of value from it.<\/p>\n Our central estimate is C$33.5 billion in Canadian income over 25 years. It is not a C$33.5-billion cheque to Ottawa. It is value that does not arise at all if the capacity is not built.<\/p>\n The model will be debated, as it should be. Even at half the central estimate, however, the economic benefit would remain more than four times the project\u2019s filed capital cost.<\/p>\n This exposes an old distortion in Canadian infrastructure debates. Construction costs arrive as one large, alarming number. The cost of not building is dispersed through lower prices, forgone production, missing wages and taxes never collected.<\/p>\n One becomes a scandal. The other simply disappears.<\/p>\n Building options to secure Canadian sovereignty<\/p>\n Which brings us back to Donald Trump and Venezuela.<\/p>\n Venezuela is Trump\u2019s flex. Washington is displaying its ability to cultivate another enormous source of the heavy crude that American refineries need. Rebuilding Venezuelan production will take years, the reported deal is opaque and its political durability is anyone\u2019s guess. But the message to Canada is uncomplicated: America has alternatives.<\/p>\n In a Canadian remake, Kevin O\u2019Leary might play Alejandro Betancourt \u2013 casting, not comparison \u2013 arriving with a government term sheet and a century-long option on Fort McMurray. It would be a wonderfully bad movie.<\/p>\n Fortunately, Canada needs no such character. We already own the first strategic instrument.<\/p>\n And a much larger Canadian effort is beginning to appear on the map.<\/p>\n It is visible in the proposed Northern Shield Energy Corridor<\/a>, running from Hardisty to Sarnia and reducing the vulnerability created when Canadian energy moving to Canadian refineries must depend on routes through the United States.<\/p>\n