Canada exported so much gold and oil in June that it got a surprise trade surplus

https://qz.com/canada-exports-oil-gold-surprise-trade-surplus-1851614284

Canada just got a commodity-driven economic surprise. The country’s data hub, Statistics Canada, released numbers Tuesday that said the country exported C$638 million ($432 million) more in goods and services than it imported in June, far more than the C$2 billion trade deficit that Bloomberg reports economists had been expecting. The products driving the increase? Oil and gold.

“In June, crude oil and unwrought gold accounted for more than three-quarters of the increase in the value of total exports,” Statistics Canada noted in its release.

Canada’s Financial Post business newspaper reported last month that Canada for months has had steadily rising gold exports because central banks — especially China’s — have been increasing their stockpiles of the precious metal amid global economic uncertainty.

But the even bigger surge comes from a big jump in oil exports. And that jump is thanks to the expansion of a controversial pipeline to the United States.

“While prices for crude oil exports rose in June, volumes were the largest contributor to the increase,” Statistics Canada said. “The higher exported volumes were driven in part by higher exports of crude oil to Asian countries. The rise in exports destined to this part of the world reflects increased deliveries of crude oil from Western Canada via the Trans Mountain pipeline, whose expansion was recently completed.”

Construction to enlarge the pipeline, which has been in operation since 1953, began in 2013. It has faced opposition from environmental and indigenous rights groups that decry its impacts on both plant-and-wildlife and its incursion into native lands. Still, the project was completed in May. The Calgary Herald reports that its output rose from about 300,000 barrels per day to 890,000 barrels per day