Anyone who spent more than ten seconds before dismissing Success Machine's wild rant about Canadian Oil supply and demand might care to review the following:
BP Statistical review of world energy 2001

This is updated every year and has more statistics than you can shake a stick at.

An extract of info from this report regarding Canada's oil position:

(Figures for end 2000)

Proven reserves 6.4 Billion Barrels
Production 2710 Thousand Barrels per day (k bbl/day)
Consumption 1775 k bbl/day

Thus about 935 k bbl/day is produced, surplus to consumption

At this production rate, the 6.4 G bbl will last some 6.5 years, while if production is throttled down to match domestic consumption only, the supply will last ~10 years.

Crude Imports 909 k bbl/day
Product imports 161 k bbl/day

Crude exports 1290 k bbl/day
product exports 413 k bbl/day

As with most oil-producing countries, Canada both imports and exports crude and product to balance different grades of oil and the types of product produced by its refineries.

The nett trade balance is an export of 634 k bbl/day. You may notice this is less than the nominal 935 k bbl/day surplus. This is due to losses in refineries (1 bbl of crude does not make 1 bbl of product)

For Natural gas, Canada has reserves of 61 Trillion cubic feet (Tcf). It produces 16.2 Billion cubic feet (Bcf) per day and consumes 7.5 Bcf/day. This gives over 10 years supply at current production rates and 22 years supply for domestic needs only.

In the year 2000, Canada exported 3.5 Tcf of gas to the USA, which is 15% of US consumption.

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OK, those are the numbers. Contrast this to SM's hysterical "2 years supply". he's clearly wrong, but perhaps only by a few years. Any country with less than 10 years energy supply needs to look to its energy policy carefully since it can take that long to drive an upswing in oil exploration, and the trouble with world oil markets is that you don't get a *local* price increase as you run out of *local* oil, so there's no real incentive to drill for oil in Canada.

Although SM is going over the top, there is still a need for something to be done from Canada's perspective.

Things that might happen are:

1) Canada continues to find oil, but not enough to keep pace with production. Canada slowly moves from nett oil exporter to nett oil importer (as the USA did decades ago). This will effect the balance of payments, but the country will stay afloat.

2) Canada finds enough oil to push the problem another ten years into the future.

3) Canada adopts a defensive energy position and bans oil exports to the USA, which buys it some time but leads to diplomatic problems (but since this is only 3% of USA consumption, it isn't too hard on the USA).

4) Some unconnected major dislocation in world oil markets happens anyway - like the '73 oil crisis. This changes all the rules for the next 5-10 years.

5) The biggest risk the USA might face is if Canada decides to build synthetic gas to oil plants and restrict natural gas to internal use only. A 15% loss of gas supply to the US market would trigger a major upheaval.