Prime Minister Mark Carney boards a government plane in Ottawa on Thursday.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Mark Carney arrives in Oslo on Friday just as Norway is facing questions about whether the energy-rich country is once again profiteering from war.
Mr. Carney will spend three days in Norway, meeting Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, watching a North Atlantic Treaty Organization military exercise in the country’s far north, and holding talks with leaders from Denmark, Iceland, Finland and Sweden.
Canadian officials said part of the discussions will focus on energy security given the spike in oil and gas prices since Israel and the United States launched air strikes at Iran.
Profiting from war has been a sensitive topic in Norway ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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The Nordic country has long been a major producer of oil and gas, and nearly all of its production is exported. Its output has become even more critical to the European Union since Brussels began cutting back on Russian imports. Norway currently supplies nearly one-third of the EU’s natural gas needs and accounts for 14 per cent of the bloc’s oil imports.
In 2024, a pair of leading economists estimated that Norway reaped a US$109-billion profit in the first year of Russia’s invasion, but spent only a fraction of that amount supporting Ukraine.
The report sparked a public outcry, and the government responded by announcing a US$30-billion program in humanitarian and military support that runs to 2030. Mr. Store has said that Norway is now among the biggest contributors to Ukraine on a gross domestic product basis.
“What he is not saying is that we started later than the others,” said Knut Anton Mork, a professor emeritus of economics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who co-authored the study.
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“He is also not saying that, relative to our government wealth, we’re way at the bottom.”
Since the war in Iran began, the government has gone to great lengths to insist that it views the military action as illegal, and that Norway is not profiting from the fighting.
“We strongly distance ourselves from the attacks, and that civilians are being hit hard,” Mr. Store told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation last week.
Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg recently said the war has actually resulted in a net loss to Norway. According to Mr. Stoltenberg, any gains from an increase in the price of gas and oil have been more than offset by a drop in the value of Norway’s massive sovereign wealth fund as global stock markets recoil.
“Norway has gone from being an oil nation to an investor nation where a significant part of our income comes from investments in the stock market,” Mr. Stoltenberg told reporters this week in Oslo.
He also said that Norwegians were feeling the effects of rising prices because of the higher costs of imports. This week, the government lowered its forecast for economic growth in 2026 to 1.8 per cent, down from an earlier forecast of 2.1 per cent.
Still, Norway has certainly benefited from the rising price of energy.
The European benchmark for natural gas has climbed more than 60 per cent since the first air strikes and Brent crude is up 40 per cent, to around US$100 a barrel.
The impact on Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, officially known as the Government Pension Fund Global, or GPFG, is less clear.
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Nearly all the revenue the country generates from energy production, through taxes on oil companies, has been stashed in the GPFG since the 1990s.
It has grown into the world’s largest investment fund, with more than US$2-trillion in total assets. Around 70 per cent of the money is invested in equities, and more than half of its stock portfolio is made up of U.S. holdings.
By law the government can only take out a small portion – less than 3 per cent annually. But, given the size of the fund, that still represents around 20 per cent of the annual budget. Market fluctuations, therefore, can have a far more significant impact on government programs than energy prices, Mr. Stoltenberg argued.
Dr. Mork isn’t convinced. “He is putting a very good face on it.”
He pointed out that the GPFG’s value has held up well since the war started and that the fund has benefited from the strengthening of the U.S. dollar.
“So far, I don’t think we can see that the fund has fallen in value because of this,” Dr. Mork said.
He added that the government will definitely profit from increased oil revenue. “And that will become a new political issue. There will be parties to the left of the government who will be arguing that this isn’t ours to keep.”