According to the National Energy Board (NEB), Canada imports approximately 80,000 barrels of oil a day from the kingdom, about 12 per cent of our total oil imports.

That amounts to about $2 billion a year that we pay Saudi Arabia for oil that is refined in New Brunswick and consumed mostly in Eastern Canada as gasoline, diesel, or airplane fuel. The Irving refinery in St. John, N.B., counts on Saudi Arabia for forty per cent of its crude oil.

Maybe we should be calling that oil “dirty oil.”

Given that Canada is the fourth largest oil producer in the world and has more than enough oil to supply the whole country, it has long irked Western oil producers that while opposition to pipelines and tanker traffic on the West Coast has met with vociferous opposition, oil tankers from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Nigeria, and Norway regularly unload on the East Coast and yet there is not the same outcry.

Sure, the oil imported on the East Cast is a lighter, sweeter crude than the tarry diluted bitumen that would be exported from the West Coast.

But given that we might want to think about cutting off Saudi Arabia, which supplies the second highest volume of oil imports after the U.S, because of its mafia-like behaviour, perhaps we should reconsider that Energy East pipeline project TransCanada mothballed a few months back.

It looks pretty good right now given that both the Trans Mountain and the Keystone XL pipelines are stalled indefinitely.

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