Canada’s biggest oil sands producers are sending a large share of their profits out of the country to their shareholders in the United States, the CEO of the Trottier Family Foundation warns in an opinion piece for L’Actualité, just as polling shows wide public support for protecting national sovereignty over natural resources.

The lead members of the Pathways Alliance—Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Cenovus Energy, ExxonMobil subsidiary Imperial Oil, and Suncor Energy—are behaving like a Trojan horse for Donald Trump’s pro-fossil, anti-climate politics, Karel Mayrand writes. The four companies represent 80% of Canadian oil sands production, and they’re 73% foreign-owned, 60% American-owned.

Rhetorically, they’re positioning themselves at the heart of the economic nationalism and push for trade diversification triggered by Trump’s tariff war and annexation threats, he writes, even as they lobby aggressively to eviscerate federal climate regulations and promote new fossil fuel infrastructure.

That degree of foreign control might run counter to the finding released this week by the non-profit Angus Reid Institute that 59% of Canadians favour domestic investment in “critical resources such as oil and gas, copper, nickel, and key minerals,” even if it means slowing down development.

“Three-in-five (59%) say ‘losing sovereignty’ over these resources is a bigger threat to Canada than ‘missing out on development and jobs because of a lack of investment’,” Angus Reid reports.

When the pollster asked a pool of 1,607 online respondents whether they would ban foreign ownership of specific industries or resources, 55% listed freshwater, 27% cited oil and gas, and 25% named uranium. As for specific countries that should be prohibited from owning Canadian resources, Russia led the list at 69%, while its current ally and enabler the United States came in at 37%. Majorities of survey respondents said they would prohibit ownership by North Korea (67%), Iran (60%), China (59%), and Saudi Arabia (53%), while 20% said all countries should be welcome to invest.

The survey carries a margin of error of ±1.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

But domestic ownership is not what’s happening in the oil sands, Mayrand writes, citing a report last month by Canadians for Tax Fairness. “While the affordability crisis hit Canadian households hard, partly due to rising oil prices, the four largest oil sands companies reaped record profits of $131.6 billion from 2021 to 2024.”

But “rather than reinvesting those profits in the Canadian economy, the four companies paid out $79.7 billion in dividends and share buybacks, nearly three-quarters of which went to foreign shareholders, including 62% to American shareholders,” he adds.

With $6 of every $10 in profits crossing the border, never to return, Mayrand said the Canadian oil sands majors produced $12.3 billion worth of capital flight per year.

The industry still creates jobs in Canada, and brought $20 billion per year in tax revenues to Alberta between 2021 and 2023. But Canadians for Tax Fairness calculated that they paid an effective tax rate of just 14.3%, compared to 19.1% for other sectors of the economy, and they paid at a lower rate than they did a decade ago.

“Without denying the importance of the oil sector to the Canadian economy, we can still question the oil lobby’s outsized influence on Canada’s energy, economic, and climate policies,” Mayrand writes. “As our country asserts its sovereignty in the face of the American giant, isn’t it troubling to see that American companies have a direct influence on our policies, and use that influence to extract profits that enrich the United States at our expense?”

[Energy Mix Productions is proud to be a partner of the Trottier Family Foundation.]