Roughly 97 percent of Canada’s energy exports go to a single country: the United States. If you wanted to point at the object that makes that dependency physical, you would point at Enbridge’s Mainline — the pipeline system that carries most of Canadian crude to American refineries, and which in 2025 ran at record volumes averaging around 3.1 million barrels a day. The system has been effectively full for most of two years, apportioned month after month because demand for space on it exceeds what it can carry. There is no better single measure of how tied the two economies are than a Canadian pipe that cannot be built fast enough to move Canadian oil into America.

Enbridge is enormous and diversified — liquids pipelines, gas transmission, gas distribution, a growing renewable-power arm — with a sanctioned capital backlog near C$39 billion and a further pipeline of unsanctioned opportunities behind it. But its strategic significance is simpler than its balance sheet. It is the artery. And an artery is a vulnerability as much as an asset.

The tariff exposure that wasn’t

That vulnerability got tested when the Trump administration floated tariffs on Canadian energy. On paper, a company whose business model is shipping Canadian oil to the U.S. should be acutely exposed to a tax on exactly that flow. Enbridge’s 2025 guidance, though, judged the impact “not expected to be material” — and the reason is instructive. Its pipelines run on take-or-pay contracts: shippers pay for capacity whether or not they use it, which insulates Enbridge from volume swings even when the politics turn hostile. The company that most embodies Canada’s energy dependence on the U.S. is, by contract design, one of the better-hedged against that dependence being weaponized. The exposure lands on Canadian producers and governments, not on the toll-collector in the middle.

The Indigenous ownership template

The more forward-looking development in Enbridge’s recent history has nothing to do with tariffs. In mid-2025, the Stonlasec8 Indigenous Alliance — a group of 38 First Nations in British Columbia — acquired a 12.5 percent equity stake in Enbridge’s Westcoast natural-gas system, for total proceeds of around C$700 million, backed by a loan guarantee from a federal Crown corporation. It is being cited as a template for what economic reconciliation in the resource sector can look like: not consultation or benefit-sharing at the margins, but actual ownership, with the state helping de-risk the financing. Whether the model scales — whether it becomes the norm rather than a landmark exception — is one of the more consequential open questions in Canadian resource development.

Building for both sides of the transition

Enbridge is also a study in strategic hedging. It is expanding gas infrastructure toward LNG export — projects moving Canadian and U.S. gas toward terminals for sale to Asia and beyond — while simultaneously building renewable assets, including large solar-plus-storage and wind projects contracted to power the data centres of major technology companies. This “all of the above” posture lets it present itself as a player in the energy transition rather than a casualty of it.

It also means the company has a direct financial interest in both prolonging fossil-fuel demand and accelerating the shift away from it — a contradiction Enbridge would call diversification and its critics would call having it both ways. Both descriptions are accurate. A company this large, sitting astride the single most important economic relationship Canada has, does not get to choose a side of the transition; it monetizes the whole thing. That is either prudent or evasive depending on where you stand, and Enbridge is content to let you decide, so long as the barrels keep moving.

Reading list

  • Enbridge 2025 annual results and Q1 2026 commentary
  • Enbridge announcement: First Nations investment in the Westcoast system (2025)
  • Enbridge Annual Report / Form 10-K (2025)
  • Reporting on proposed U.S. tariffs on Canadian energy and their pipeline implications