In the same week that the Bank of Canada raised interest rates citing the rise in energy costs, Canada’s economy disappointed, showing anemic growth for the month of August.

Statistics Canada reported that real GDP was essentially unchanged for a second straight month, and its own early estimate already shows a 0.1 per cent decline in September.

Analysts fear October will see the outlook turn negative too.

While some will quickly conclude our weakening economy is the product of a recent trade standoff between Canada and the U.S., affordability and productivity concerns have less to do with trade policy and everything to do with the policy direction the government has pursued over the last 11 years, and in particular, the pursuit of net zero.

To achieve this questionable objective, an energy-intensive nation began to impose restrictions and conditions on itself for the production and use of all carbon-emitting forms of energy, in the firm belief this would mitigate the effects of global variances in weather patterns.

Caps on emissions, carbon taxes, tanker bans and rigorous permitting for pipeline and takeaway capacity, including a stringent impact assessment with no global equivalent, much less in a producing nation with some of the planet’s greatest proven reserves, effectively chased away critical capital and escalated energy prices to intolerable heights.

They now threaten the purchasing power of every Canadian.

In the midst of an energy crisis marked by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, Canadians can no longer rely on the more than 40-year protection of the “Petro Loonie” to offset rising energy costs, which are priced in U.S.

The evidence is hard to miss.

Benchmark Canada, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute project that measures Canada against its peers, tracked the loonie through the five most recent oil-supply shocks, from the 2019 attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq facility to this year’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

A month after each one, the dollar had moved somewhere between a 1.8 per cent loss and a 1.6 per cent gain.

When Hormuz closed, disrupting about a fifth of the world’s oil, the loonie gained 0.4 per cent for a moment, then slid 3.6 per cent.

Since January 2015 it has lost 13.2 per....