This is the ninth post in a series on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, edited by Mark Stoller.

Alfred Rabisca viewed his job at Imperial Oil with some detachment. Testifying before the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry in August, 1975, he explained that he’d taken the position because he needed work. Working for Imperial, he said, didn’t mean he was “pulling for the oil companies or the pipeline.”¹ Like many members of the Dene Nation, he opposed the construction of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline before a comprehensive land claims settlement had been reached. Still, his job had given him an insider’s view of Imperial’s imprint on the North. Imperial had built cutlines across the territory, leaving “total destruction in their path.” The Company had felled trees and never replanted them. As the sun began to melt the ice in springtime, garbage left by the seismic operators would sink into the thawing permafrost. When winter returned, the scrap would be frozen in place. He spoke of Tununuk, a small island near the mouth of the Mackenzie Delta where Imperial had established a staging port. Tununuk was located on an Inuvialuit burial ground. Rabisca recalled an instance when Imperial workers had come up from the south and stolen a human skull.

Imperial Oil, the Canadian arm of ExxonMobil, was one of 27 firms that united to form the Canadian Arctic Gas Pipeline Ltd. (CAGPL) in 1972 to compete for rights to build the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. The period between the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968 and the commissioning of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (MVPI) in 1974 had been characterized by an upswing of interest in Northern development. But most of the companies involved had established their stake in the North much earlier. Imperial’s presence was the largest of all. Founded in London, Ontario in 1880, the Company was integrated into John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1899. By 1944, it had been granted formal rights to the oil fields in Norman Wells under the War Measures Act.² Three years later, the Company found oil in Leduc after trying 133 times, initially to no avail. 

The firm hoped that their strategy of drilling, which proved profitable in Alberta, might lead to further finds in the Northwest Territories. All across the Arctic, Imperial drilled and then abandoned dry holes, often digging up to four kilometres deep into the earth’s crust. Between 1958 and 1970, the company, alongside the other oil majors, drilled 64 holes in the Mackenzie Delta.³  In 1970, a spokesman for Gulf Oil Canada, Ltd., looked toward the future, anticipating “thousands of holes.”⁴ Though critics recognized that 95% of these would be dry, the future seemed rosy for the oil companies as the start of the 1970s. In the winter of 1970, 32 rigs were expected to drill more than ever before.⁵ 

The oil crisis in 1973 transformed the position of the oil majors in the Arctic and altered the race for resources that had developed there. In October of 1973, the Arab states of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) declared an oil embargo in response to the Arab-Israeli War. The embargo limited exports to consumer countries supporting Israel, which resulted in price hikes of up to 300%. The United States, a major oil importer, tried to respond by working with western oil producers, including Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, and called upon them to increase territorial and frontier expansion.⁶ Henry Kissinger’s Five Points approach called for consumer cooperation and the development of alternative energy sources, partly through territorial expansion. The oil crisis continued unabated through the 1970s. In 1977, Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for telling American consumers in his so-called “sweater speech” to “waste less energy.”⁷

In Canada, the oil crisis generated a fundamental contradiction that framed the MVPI’s findings. On one hand, the crisis shifted Canada’s oil and gas policy to align better with the new demands of an increasingly mobilized national polity, most significantly the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories (later the Dene Nation) and the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee (CARC).⁸ Yet, it also activated Canadian nationalists around a new energy policy less dependent on its “special relationship” with the United States. In the years leading up to the oil shock, Canada was in the unusual position of being a net exporter of energy but a net importer of oil, largely due to its economic integration with the U.S.⁹ Canadian energy companies at this time were largely owned by American multinationals. This meant that the US could buy Canadian oil and gas at a fixed price, allowing it to skirt the vagaries of the international market. Consequently, Canada sold most of its oil and gas to the US and relied on cheap imports from North Africa and Venezuela to meet domestic demand. This made economic sense for Canada, as transporting its domestic oil from the Northwest to the energy-hungry East was more expensive than shipping it to the American Midwest.

The oil crisis troubled this status quo. The embargo raised foreign prices and made the fixed-price arrangement with the US unsustainable. This led to increased calls from developers like Bob Blair for a “Canada first” policy.¹⁰ Ottawa created a plan to phase out American exports altogether by 1982, while demands for nationalization of the oil industry grew louder.¹¹ In 1975, Ottawa issued guidelines requiring 90% Canadian participation in all Arctic oil and gas projects, including attacks on multinationals like Imperial, which would now be asked to justify their decision to issue contracts to American companies.¹² Reporters discussed the fates of Texaco, Gulf, Exxon, and Aramco, envisioning a new and subdued role for the “seven sisters.”¹³ Imperial in particular came “under fire as a symbol of the tightening United States stranglehold on the Canadian economy.”¹⁴ Together, organizations such as the IB-NWT and CARC, alongside the Committee for Justice and Liberty (CJL) and Pollution Probe, mobilized against the project so effectively that passage of the pipeline would have amounted to a major political blunder for Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government. Canada would no longer produce oil and gas solely at the behest of its southern neighbour.

Yet, at the same time, the oil crisis generated increased calls across the West for the extension of the extractive industries within a national framework. While the crisis led to immediate shortages and fears of consumer crises, the long-term effect was a robust program of territorial expansion, including intensive investment in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, and the North Sea, as the U.S. and other non-OPEC countries sought new sources of supply. One historian noted that the “The immediate and huge impact that the shock of 1973 had on propelling oil companies into new territorial and technological frontiers.”¹⁵ The crisis encouraged Western oil-consuming countries to expand production in non-OPEC states, creating demand from the U.S. and an opportunity for Canadian firms.

The oil crisis gave rise to new calls for regulation over Canada’s extractive industries, while simultaneously exacerbating fears of oil shortage and generating calls for territorial expansion. In the end, all this newness would depend on the very same oil and gas companies already present in the Arctic. “The companies’ greatest asset,” as one article put it, “is their massive concentration of industrial expertise, plant and machinery.”¹⁶ Thomas Berger, the commissioner of the MVPI, recognized this. Even as he called for the creation of environmental sanctuaries and a moratorium on pipeline construction, he wrote that, “in due course, the industrial system will require the gas and oil of the western Arctic, and that it will have to be transported through the Mackenzie Valley to markets in the South.”¹⁷

As groups mobilized against the construction of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, their claims testified to the 1970s as a period of optimism and change. Yet, here we also witness the growing demands of the global economy, one where multinationals increasingly viewed states as intermediaries toward their end of profitable enterprise. The history of the West since the oil crisis suggests that Berger’s intervention was a respite on the road to neoliberal capture of the regulatory state. But the conflict between the democratic impulses of liberal governance and its capitulation to corporate power is ongoing. 

Notes

1. Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry Transcripts, C-20, 7 August 1975, p. 2060-61. RG 126, Volume 68, Library and Archives Canada (LAC). ↩︎
2. Fred Gudmundson, “Exxon and the Dene: Who Owns the Resources,” Canadian Dimension vol. 16 no. 9 (February 1986), 5. ↩︎
3. “Treeless Tundra, a Forest of Rigs” The New York Times, 25 January 1971, 48. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Murrey Marder, “U.S. Suggests ‘Global’ Plan On Oil Crisis: Kissinger Bids West, Japan Act On Oil Prices” The Washington Post, 15 November 1974. ↩︎
7. Jimmy Carter, “President Jimmy Carter’s Report to the American People on Energy” 02 February 1977. ↩︎
8. Tina Loo, “Pipe Dreams: Imagining Different Futures for Canada in the 1970s” vol. 116 The Canadian Historical Review (2025). https://doi.org/10.3138/chr-2024-0065 ↩︎
9. “Imperial Oil’s Ills as Big as Canada: the Exxon Unit Even Fears Talk of Takeover,” The New York Times, August 1976. ↩︎
10. The term “Canada-first” is used here in Paul Lewis, “Imperial Oil’s Ills” The New York Times, 01 August 1976, 85. ↩︎
11. Bernard Gwertzman, “Canadian Oil Cut ‘Disappoints’ U.S.” The New York Times, 24 November 1974. ↩︎
12. Robert Turnbull, “Canada Sets Guidelines for Arctic Oil,” The New York Times, 26 July 1975, 32. ↩︎
13. “New Role for the Seven Sisters” The New York Times, 17 February 1977, 177.The “Seven Sisters” was coined in the 1970s to describe Big Oil’s largest firms. In 1974, these included Exxon, Royal Dutch-Shell, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf, British Petroleum, and Standard, which together controlled 85% of the oil industry. Today, after corporate consolidation, the Big Five comprises ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies, Chevron, BP. Exxon recorded 49 billion USD in profits in 2024. In 2022, these companies, alongside the smaller ones, had 119 pipelines under development, totaling 350,000 km (circling the earth 8 times), with 477 planned (24 times around the planet). Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, Overshoot: How the world Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso, 2024), 16. ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. Tyler Priest, “Shifting Sands: The 1973 Oil Shock and the Expansion of Non-OPEC Supply” in Oil Shock: The 1973 Oil Crisis and its Economic Legacy, edited by Elisabetta Bini, Giuliano Garavini, and Federico Romero (London: I.B. Taurus, 2016), 134. ↩︎
16. “New Role for the Seven Sisters,” The New York Times, 17 February 1974, 144. ↩︎
17. Thomas Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: The Report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry: Volume One (Ottawa: Minister of Supplies and Services Canada, 1977), viii. ↩︎

Featured image: Independent Dealers and Major Oil Company Dealers Began to Close Some Stations Permanently During the Gasoline Shortage in the Winter of 1973-74. Pumps Such as These in Shelton, Washington West of Olympia Became More Common as Shortages Affected the Economy From Various Angles 04/1974. U.S. National Archives, 412-DA-13059.

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Alice Louise Gorton

Alice Gorton is finishing her PhD in history at Columbia, where she wrote a dissertation about dispossession and the grain trade in the British Empire. In the fall of 2025, she will be a post-doctoral associate at Rutgers University.

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