What Ever Happened to Petro Canada?

The rich… are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society. (Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments)

This week, OpenCanada joined The Economist, Ian Bremmer, and the other ambassadors of state capitalism to prove Adam Smith wrong. While there was disagreement over whether only the hands of the BRICs were becoming visible, all concurred that capitalism is becoming increasingly fettered by the state: global economic freedom is on the wane, the biggest companies in the world have names like Sinopec, China National Petroleum Corporation, and Japan Post Holdings.

And yet Canada remains a striking outlier. According to the Fraser Institute, economic freedom in this country is higher than in many of our peer countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Among countries with natural resources, we stick out like the oil sands in an Edward Burtynsky photograph. The graph below shows the ten countries with the greatest oil reserves in the world. Canada is the only one without a national oil company.

Shortly after the Keystone XL decision, Slate published an article titled “Saudi Arabia. Nigeria. Venezuela. Canada? Is our neighbor to the north becoming a jingoistic petro-state?” This graphic suggests otherwise.

Graphic by Cameron Tulk.