Energy for the War Room: Infrastructural Imaginaries and Contradictions in the Albertan Staples State.

This article examines the Canadian Energy Centre (CEC), also known as the "energy war room," a 2019 initiative by Alberta’s United Conservative Party (UCP) designed as a rapid response communications body to defend the province’s oil and gas industry against online criticism. The authors situate the CEC within the historical and economic context of Alberta and Canada as staples states—economies reliant on resource extraction—highlighting how the war room reflects ongoing contradictions between claims of provincial strength and weakness, victimhood and protection. Drawing on the military origins of war rooms and Harold Innis’ staples thesis, the article argues that the CEC functioned less as an effective communications tool and more as a symbolic infrastructure aimed at deferring deeper tensions around identity, security, and economic dependency in Alberta’s petro-political landscape. Ultimately, the war room’s brief existence underscores broader challenges in reconciling settler colonial state projects with the volatile politics of fossil fuel extractivism.