Welcome to Economic Insights, your weekly deep dive into the major projects and policy shifts shaping the Canadian economy.

Stories we are following:

– AI data centre deal. 

Why build pipelines stretching thousands of kilometers when you can feed AI data centers natural gas directly, on-site?

The tech behemoth behind Facebook and Instagram says it plans to make Alberta home to its first artificial intelligence data centre in Canada and its largest outside the United States. Meta announced Wednesday that the $13-billion-plus project is to be built in Sturgeon County, in the Industrial Heartland region north of Edmonton. 

The one-gigawatt, nearly 270,000-square-metre data centre would be powered by a natural gas-fired plant to be built by a consortium that includes Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Ltd. A Meta executive claimed the gargantuan data centre would use less water annually than a typical Alberta golf course thanks to a closed-loop cooling system. This comes as Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said no to a proposed AI data centre, citing concerns about impacts on the environment and the community. Read more here.

– Pipelines, pipelines, pipelines.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith say their governments will begin studies for a proposed Northern Shield Energy Corridor that would transport crude oil along a 3,300-kilometre route stretching from Hardisty, Alta., to Sarnia, Ont. 

“The Alberta oil sands have gone from a target to a national treasure,” said Smith during the announcement Monday. 

The proposal comes on the heels of a separate one announced last Thursday, when Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled a route to B.C.’s southern coast that would follow the existing Trans Mountain corridor. Ottawa and Alberta would initially hold the majority interest, with Pembina Pipeline the only private-sector partner so far, at a 10 per cent stake. No oil producers have committed to shipping on the line yet. We have that story.

– BP bows out of Bay du Nord.

BP is out and Equinor is all-in on Bay du Nord — but is that good news for Canada’s first deepwater oil project?

The Norwegian giant now holds 100 per cent of the development after buying out its partner, a move Newfoundland’s premier interprets as a vote of confidence and the company frames as proof it believes in the project.

Commodity Context founder Rory Johnston tells iPolitics it’s a mixed bag. Less capital behind a $14-billion investment, a looming oil surplus, and a final investment decision expected in a year when announcing growth plans will be a tough sell. Yet with Equinor pivoting back to oil and Bay du Nord’s low-carbon pitch fitting neatly into its strategy, the project may be better positioned than one would think. Read the breakdown here.

By the numbers:

$43.7 billion: The upper end of the estimated cost for the recently proposed West Coast Oil Pipeline. 

3,300 kilometres: The distance that would be covered by another, separate proposal to build a pipeline connecting the oil sands to Sarnia.

33: The number of football fields Meta’s proposed data centre campus in Edmonton could fit into.

Major projects watch:

– Nova Scotia has approved the largest wind energy project in the province’s history. The Ocean Lake Wind Project in Guysborough County received its environmental assessment approval on July 2, clearing the way for up to 158 turbines capable of generating about 1,264 megawatts of electricity — enough to power the equivalent of roughly 404,000 homes. Construction is expected to begin in 2029 and take about five years, creating 400 to 500 construction jobs, 40 to 50 permanent operations positions, and about $11 million in annual tax revenue for the Municipality of the District of Guysborough. The approval comes with 61 terms and conditions aimed at protecting the environment and human health.

– Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Major Projects Office told a visiting UAE delegation in mid-June that Canada had no shovel-ready projects to deploy capital into, according to a Financial Times report citing three officials familiar with the matter. The response related to a $70-billion commitment the UAE announced in November 2025 during Carney’s official visit, earmarked for critical minerals, energy, ports and artificial intelligence. Former Quebec premier Jean Charest — who co-chairs the UAE-Canada Business Council — downplayed this, while a UAE official similarly pushed back on the delay framing, characterizing the investments as simply moving through standard due diligence. This lands as Carney faces mounting pressure to present investment-ready projects at a Toronto investor summit in September aimed at generating $1 trillion over five years. 

– The Canada Growth Fund, a federal arm’s-length cleantech investment vehicle, is making an “equity-like investment” of up to $400 million into Teck’s facility in Trail to support the expansion of the company’s smelting and refining complex. The federal government also plans to buy some of the future supply coming out of the operation using the $2-billion Canada Critical Mineral Accelerator announced in Budget 2025. The announcement was billed as the ‘first transaction’ to be undertaken under the program, although spokespeople for Energy Minister Tim Hodgson could not provide a dollar figure, saying negotiations are ongoing. 

–  Northland Power has installed the first turbine at Baltic Power, a 1.1 GW offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea set to become Poland’s first operating offshore wind facility. The Toronto-based company, which is developing the project as a joint venture with Poland’s ORLEN Group, said the 15 MW Vestas V236 unit — among the largest turbines in the world, with blades over 115 metres long — was installed safely as the first of 76 planned turbines. Once complete, the wind farm is expected to generate enough clean electricity to power more than 1.5 million Polish households, or about 3% of national demand. Minister Hodgson is travelling to Gdańsk this Friday, July 10, where he’s expected to announce progress on a “significant clean electricity project.”

– A new C.D. Howe Institute analysis casts doubt on whether Alberta’s proposed West Coast oil pipeline can attract the private capital it needs. Independent energy analyst Dmitriy Frolovskiy argues a new one-million-barrel-per-day line may be unnecessary, since Western Canadian production already runs below existing capacity and operators like Trans Mountain and Enbridge are adding volumes more cheaply. Combined with loading constraints at tidewater, construction costs that ballooned to roughly $34 billion for Trans Mountain, and a decade of mixed federal signals on pipelines, he concludes the project’s profitability is hard to see.

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