Good evening, readers.

We’re kicking things off with a topic that’s never short on heat: oil and gas. It’s our weekly long read series and today, we look at an oil and gas industry caught between a war premium and a push towards net zero.

Every day, oil and gas companies make or divert hundreds of millions of dollars based on projections for long-term demand for their products.

Governments also consider those different scenarios when developing their policies and priorities.

This is a sector with boom and bust in its DNA, yet even a history of navigating uncertainty isn’t preventing recent events from worsening the fracture in consensus on what comes next.

The year kicked off with global banks predicting the price of oil would average about $60 a barrel in 2026, with basic supply and demand realities weakening global prices.

But the war on Iran is a wild card that has sent prices soaring well beyond that, and the U.S. is now contemplating worst case scenarios, including what $200-a-barrel would mean for the global economy.

Just a month ago, as Iran-U.S. tensions flared, J.P. Morgan predicted there would be some geopolitically induced oil price rallies, but that those would eventually fade.

Find out more from Aya Dufour. 

Also, major changes are coming Canada’s immigration and asylum system after the Liberals’ border security bill received royal assent on Thursday.

Bill C-12 introduces sweeping reforms, including stricter eligibility rules for refugee claims, a streamlined asylum process, expanded authority for information-sharing across government departments, and new authority that allows cabinet to suspend or cancel groups of immigration documents in what it deems the “public interest.”

The changes significantly expand federal authority over how asylum claims are processed and how personal data is shared between agencies.

The Liberals said the bill was need to combat fentanyl trafficking and money laundering.

In a statement, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said the legislation is “crucial to providing our law enforcement and intelligence agencies with more tools and authorities that need to combat transnational organized crime and keep Canada and everyone who lives here safe and secure.”

It also serves as a way to fill the gaps in the current immigration regulations the system doesn’t currently have, such as addressing backlogs in the immigration system.

Sydney Ko has more. 

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s budget bill received royal assent yesterday, too.

The budget implementation act, Bill C-15, officially became law Thursday evening after the Senate gave its final sign-off on the legislation.

The bill passed the House of Commons on recorded division in February, which means members of Parliament gave it the green-light but did not offer unanimous support.

The budget implementation act puts into effect measures outlined in the Liberals’ 2025 budget tabled last fall, that saw the deficit rise to $78.3 billion for this fiscal year.

In that budget, Carney adopted a new fiscal framework that would see Ottawa eventually borrow only for new capital investments while cutting day-to-day program expenses and downsizing the public service.

The Canadian Press has this one. 

In Other Headlines

Internationally

Meanwhile, House Republicans on Friday angrily rejected a Senate-passed deal to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, threatening to extend the agency shutdown that has crippled airports in a fit of outrage over the agreement their own party struck with Senate Democrats to end the crisis.

After quickly assessing the compromise that passed the Senate early Friday, conservative House Republicans tore into it in harsh terms. They derided it for hewing too closely to the Democratic position by omitting money for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the two agencies responsible for carrying out President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

“House Republicans are not going to be any part of any effort to reopen our borders or to stop immigration enforcement,” Speaker Mike Johnson said at a news conference on Friday afternoon. “This gambit that was done last night is a joke.”

Calling the Senate-passed deal engineered by Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, “ridiculousness,” Mr. Johnson said the House would instead take up a stopgap measure to fund the entire department until late May.

The New York Times has more. 

Elsewhere, intelligence agencies in Europe believe Russia is in the final stages of preparing to supply drones to Iran for use in its war with the US and Israel, according to a senior European official.

Russia has already been providing intelligence sharing with Tehran to help it target US forces in the region, the official said, but the upcoming delivery of explosive-laden drones would mark the first evidence of lethal support since the start of the war.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to provide details on the scale of any deliveries, but confirmed an article by the Financial Times that said “western intelligence reports” found Russia was close to completing a phased shipment of drones, medicine and food to Iran.

Iranian and Russian officials began secretly discussing drone deliveries days after Israel and the US attacked Tehran in late February, the news website said, citing officials briefed on the intelligence. It said drone deliveries could be completed by the middle of next week.

Read more from The Guardian. 

In Other International Headlines

Kicker

When Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe posted a very honest photo of the city to greet the world good morning/bonjour on X, the photo went viral, with some response calling it a hellscape.

Since then, Sutcliffe has responded.

He told a local news outlet that it was just spring in progress.

Have a great weekend!