Skanda Amarnath linked the Canadian oil sector's slide to a turn in late 2015, saying it began after Trudeau won and as the U.S. kept taking market share through fracking. His comment, later deleted, pointed to a shift that was already reshaping oil markets before the political change became the headline.
Readers are looking at fracking here because the claim is not just about one country's politics. It is about how faster U.S. output changed the balance of power in oil and, by extension, the assumptions behind Canadian investment and production. In Amarnath's framing, the sector did not stumble in a vacuum. It ran into a market that had already moved on.
That matters because he said much of the Canadian oil business had been built on the idea that high prices would last. Instead, oil prices had already been in freefall for over a year by the time late 2015 arrived. That left companies chasing a future that no longer existed, even as the U.S. was gaining ground through advances in fracking.
The friction in his account is plain: the sector's investment and production were shaped by expectations of sustained high prices, but those prices were already weakening well before the political moment he marked as the turning point. That makes the decline look less like a sudden policy shock and more like a delayed adjustment to a market that had been changing for months. Amarnath has previously pointed to similar corporate behavior elsewhere, including reliance on financial engineering and shareholder buybacks when profits came up short.
The deleted tweet leaves one thing unresolved: how large the U.S. market-share gain actually was, and how sharply it fed through to Canadian spending and output. What Amarnath did make clear is the direction of travel. By his account, the damage was already underway after late 2015, and fracking was part of the reason the old oil-price assumptions stopped working.
