Imagine you're a farmer who grows more food than your family could ever eat. Barns full of it. Fields stretching to the horizon. And then one winter, the roads ice over, the trucks stop running, and you realize you never actually kept any food in the house.

That's Canada. Except replace food with oil.

Canada is the world's fourth-largest oil producer. We sit on one of the largest petroleum reserves on the planet. We have pipelines, rail lines, ports, and a hundred years of extraction expertise.

What we do not have is a federal strategic oil reserve, and here’s the story why.

A couple of weeks ago, the International Energy Agency committed its member nations to releasing 400 million barrels of emergency oil to stabilize global markets after Supreme and Glorious leader Chairman Trump decided to attack yet another country in a mission that I’m sure has nothing to do with erectile dysfunction disorder.

Iran's war sent prices spiking by a third in two weeks. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, carved into salt caverns along the Texas and Louisiana coasts, is the world's largest. Other countries have them too, varying in size and structure, all built on the same lesson learned after the 1970s Arab oil embargo sent prices through the roof and economies into a spiral.

We looked into building one back in the mid-1970s. Pierre Trudeau's government identified sites on Bell Island in Newfoundland and along the Strait of Canso in Nova Scotia. We were working with the Americans on a shared facility. Then, out of nowhere, but completely on-brand, the Americans backed out. Decided they weren't comfortable storing their emergency reserves in another country. We just dropped it after that.

So here we are.

The reason Canada doesn't need a reserve is the same reason Canada doesn't need to worry about a lot of things: because we produce more than we use, and the market is supposedly our cushion. For Western Canada, that logic holds. Alberta and Saskatchewan aren't going to run short of crude any time soon.

But Eastern Canada is a different country energy-wise. The Irving refinery in Saint John relies heavily on foreign oil, some of it from the United States. Ontario and Quebec import. Their energy security depends on the good behaviour of other nations and the continued goodwill of trading partners, including one that has spent the last year making very clear that goodwill is no longer their policy.

A new reserve terminal would cost around a billion dollars to build. You'd have to fill it, maintain it, and staff it, all on the hope you'd eventually need it. It is worth it?

The deeper issue isn't whether Canada needs a reserve this particular week. It's that we've spent forty years assuming someone else would handle the hard part. The Americans would buy our oil. The market would sort out supply. The relationship would hold. And mostly, it did.

Energy security, like all security, gets taken seriously after the emergency, not before. The 1970s embargo built the IEA. The current crisis is rebuilding the conversation about what Eastern Canada does when the taps tighten and the usual answers stop working.

We've always been good at producing oil.

We just never quite got around to keeping any of it.

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