In 1990, the Imperial Oil Company described Canada in concise terms: “Canada is to a large extent a country of commodity producers whose prosperity flows from a resource-driven, energy-intensive industrial economy that relies heavily on international trade.”¹ As a single sentence description of the country, this is awfully good, then, as now. But there is a telling ambiguity in the sentence. It is not exactly clear whether it was the prosperity of the commodity producers, in particular, or of the country-at-large that was, in Imperial’s view, so tied to the resource economy.

Of course, it’s not necessary to speculate on a single sentence about how Imperial saw the relationship between its own prosperity and the national wellbeing. The company was keen to promote the view that what was good for commodity producers, fossil fuel producers especially, was also good for the country. Especially in the twenty some-odd years from the 1973 oil shock through rise and fall of the of the National Energy Program (NEP) and the grudging national embrace of neoliberalism into the early-1990s, a generally frustrated Imperial sought to capitalize on crisis and see that a country bound for transformation did so in amenable ways.² It did this, in large measure, by insisting on the synonymity of its own corporate interests and the broad Canadian public interest.

This perspective was on full display, to give just one example, in the address of J.A. Armstong, Imperial’s Chairman and CEO, at the firm’s Annual General Meeting on 21 April 1981. Describing a “deep-rooted economic malaise that affects the standard of living, and the day-to-day morale, of all Canadians,” Armstrong then went on to suggest a flourishing energy industry as a panacea for these problems. “There is scarcely a sector of the economy that does not stand to gain substantially from a program of resource development on the scale required to meet our energy needs,” he claimed. “Unemployment, our international balance-of-payments position, federal and provincial budgets would all benefit,” he added, alongside “a wide variety of businesses, large and small, throughout the length and breadth of this country.”³

Energy could lead the way to Canadian utopia, if only we’d let it. The key question for Imperial, then, was how to develop policy that could make this happen. And at least in broad terms, the company had an answer. The path to our energized idyll ran through the so-called free market. From the 1970s, as Canada struggled around what we can recognize with hindsight as the neoliberal turn, paved with crises of energy and otherwise, Imperial sought transformative policy influence. The firm was a key actor agitating for policy that would, as they saw it, unleash the putative power of the market and usher Canada out of the crisis into which the postwar economic settlement had slipped.

“From the 1970s, as Canada struggled around what we can recognize with hindsight as the neoliberal turn, paved with crises of energy and otherwise, Imperial sought transformative policy influence.”

On the doorstep of the 1980s, in 1979, Armstrong and Imperial were advocating for what they described as a new relationship between government and the energy industry. They had a clear view of what they wanted this relationship to be. In the first place, as Armstong conceded in his address at the 1979 shareholder meeting, government and industry did not have identical priorities. Firms like Imperial ultimately cared about profitability, or a “business environment that encourages entrepreneurial initiative and risk-taking,” where “the rewards for success have to be sufficiently appealing to attract investors to high-risk projects.” Oil and gas exploration, after all, was hugely capital intensive and thus inherently risky. Government, on the other hand, had to balance various priorities, not just economic ones, which meant that policymakers operated from a different perspective.⁵

But Armstrong was not content just to let those distinct perspectives be; he had recommendations for policymakers. And those recommendations bore the hallmarks of neoliberalism. There was, for instance, a call for liberated capital markets, access to which “should not be restricted by undue government capital demands on these markets.” Regulatory reform and reduction were advocated to avoid delays and speed the development of industrial projects. Economic policy had to be developed with “due regard for capital productivity.” Armstong also espoused the virtues of what he described as limited government because, as he saw it, “government intervention, no matter how constructively conceived, can easily lapse into destructive meddling.”⁶ I would call this a demand for capital- and market-friendly rather than limited government, but the point is clear.

Armstrong’s list of policy priorities concluded with a broad demand that he misleadingly described as “one essential action of government.” By that action, he meant “a strong commitment by government to reinvigorate our whole economic system.” That, of course, would be no single action, but a structural overhaul that would, in Armstong’s language, reflect a “commitment to wealth creation, rather than simply to wealth redistribution, and to a recognition of the key role that resource development can play in that wealth creation.”⁷

These were the terms for Imperial’s market crusade. And as a business interest pushing for more market-oriented policy in the 1970s, Imperial oilmen (gendered language here and in the following sentence is used intentionally) were far from alone. In the United States, for example, the historian Kim Phillips-Fein has documented a decades long history of the businessmen, businesses, and business organizations that “supported and helped to build the conservative movement that brought [President Ronald] Reagan to power in 1980.”⁸ One upshot of Phillips-Fein’s work is that histories of neoliberalism (she does not use the term, but that’s another matter) focused on political (anti-)heroes like Reagan or, in the UK, Margaret Thatcher, can be misleading. Such histories tend to obscure the actual order of historical operations, in which political actors are often if not always the products or even the servants of movements and interests that existed before they came to hold office. For Phillips-Fein, the Reagan Revolution, as it’s sometimes called, was brought about by the “invisible hands” that agitated against the New Deal state for decades before 1980. In Canada, analogous hands were soaked in tar. Indeed, these were the years of development for Imperial’s venture in the Cold Lake tar sands, an extremely costly undertaking that the company frequently pointed to as an example of its willingness to take economic risk and as a justification for its policy desiderata.

“The power of those commodity producers should not surprise us. But to the extent that fossil capital’s bottom line continues to constrain and direct policy development, we ought to understand this history.”

Comprehensively accounting for Imperial’s role in Canada’s neoliberal transition, including specific histories like that of the National Energy Policy and its demise, is not possible here, of course. But finding ourselves in a country where, as Lori Lee Oates has recently argued in a discussion of Bill C-5, fossil fuel interests remain a major force in policy development, we can imagine that a firm like Imperial had quite a lot of influence indeed.⁹ After all, Imperial was exactly right when it described Canada in 1990: “a country of commodity producers whose prosperity flows from a resource-driven, energy-intensive industrial economy that relies heavily on international trade.” The power of those commodity producers should not surprise us. But to the extent that fossil capital’s bottom line continues to constrain and direct policy development, we ought to understand this history. By so doing, we might hope to again rearrange the relationship between state and industry in Canada, this time for our collective benefit rather than for the profitability of our eminent fossil-commodity producers.

Feature Image: Imperial Oil Service Stations, 1970s. Credit: Peake & Whittingham / Library and Archives Canada / PA-068212.

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Notes

¹ Imperial Oil, “A Framework for Discussion on the Environment; The Green Plan: A National Challenge,” June 1990, Imperial Oil Limited fonds, IOLpub-6-144a, Glenbow Archives at the University of Calgary. The recent NiCHE series on Imperial and climate denial is very much worth consulting as attending reading here. See Freyja Chapman, “Corporate-Government Alliances in Climate Denialism and Solutionism: The Canadian Context,” NiCHE, 25 October 2024, https://niche-canada.org/2024/10/25/corporate-government-alliances-in-climate-denialism-and-solutionism-the-canadian-context/ and Rosanna Cyr, “Pollution and Public Relations: Finding Precedents of Canadian Climate Denial in the Imperial Oil Archives,” NiCHE, 1 November 2024, https://niche-canada.org/2024/11/01/pollution-and-public-relations-finding-precedents-of-canadian-climate-denial-in-the-imperial-oil-archives/.

² On the oil shock and the energy crisis it portended, the literature is vast, but for a recent account that also addresses themes from the history of neoliberalism that are invoked here, see Caleb Wellum, Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). For a brief primer on the NEP, see the Canadian Encyclopedia: https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/national-energy-program. On some of the developments that characterized Canada’s grudging embrace of neoliberalism, see Steve Patten, “The Triumph of Neoliberalism within Partisan Conservatism in Canada,” in James Farney and David Rayside, eds, Conservatism in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 59-76. “Capitalizing on crisis” is a prominent theme in the historiography of neoliberalism, developed most directly and maybe most impressively by historical sociologist Greta Krippner in Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

³ J.A. Armstrong, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Imperial Oil Limited, Remarks to Annual General Meeting, 21 April 1981, IM 1-1-29, Glenbow Archives at the University of Calgary.

⁴ Armstrong Remarks, 21 April 1981.

⁵ Remarks by J.A. Armstrong, President and Chief Executive Officer, Imperial Oil Limited, to Annual Meeting of Shareholders, 23 April 1979, IM-1-1-27, Glenbow Archives at the University of Calgary.

⁶ Armstrong Remarks, 23 April 1979.

⁷ Armstrong Remarks, 23 April 1979.

⁸ Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: WW Norton, 2010), x. The title of this essay alludes, of course, to the title of Phillips-Fein’s book.

⁹ Lori Lee Oates, “’Trust Me’ Legislation: Carney’s Bill C-5 Could be a Disaster for the Environment,” NiCHE, 4 July 2025, https://niche-canada.org/2025/07/04/trust-me-legislation-carneys-bill-c-5-could-be-a-disaster-for-the-environment/.