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If this country really wants to help the millions of Rahaf Mohammeds …what we should be doing is putting the corrupt Saudi government out of the oil business

Today, Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest oil exporter selling nearly three times Canada’s oil exports to the world. And the Saudi elite is wildly rich and indifferent to global norms of human decency as a result. Without competition for their share of global oil markets, that will continue. If we want to influence Saudi Arabia, we have one — and only one — lever to do so: erode its economic power.

By competing directly with Saudi Arabia for the world’s oil markets, depriving it of billions of dollars that fuel and export its values, Canada can shape the world for the better.

With the world’s third largest oil reserves — and the world’s best, most innovative energy sector workforce — Canada has the capacity to double or triple its oil exports, if given the domestic support to do so.

Photo by Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images

Yet Saudi Arabia is outselling us because Canadians won’t let Canadian oil compete.

As though following a playbook for developing the Saudi economy, the Canadian government has brutally hamstrung the Canadian oil industry. By vetoing widely supported pipelines west and east, implementing a West Coast ban on Canadian oil tankers, and setting unspecified “gender” standards on Canadian energy projects as Saudi Arabia’s gender-apartheid oil is held to no standards at all, Canada has sabotaged its energy sector.

In a single year, Saudi Arabia exports $96 billion in crude oil to the world. Over time, that adds up to a trillion-dollar prize that could be Canadian jobs, profits and tax revenues. Instead, it is Saudi Arabia’s.