Canada’s beleaguered energy sector suffered another morale blow as Encana Corp. — one of its marquee companies that was born out of the 19th-century railway boom — announced plans to move its headquarters to the U.S. and drop the link to Canada from its name.
The Calgary-based company said Thursday that it will establish a corporate domicile in the U.S. early next year, pending various approvals, and rebrand under the name Ovintiv Inc. The shares fell as much as 9.3 percent in Toronto, the biggest drop in a year.
The move is likely to intensify the gloom already hanging over the Canadian energy industry, which has suffered from a lack of pipeline space that has choked off prospects for growth, prompting foreign companies to ditch more than US$30 billion of assets in the past three years. Encana joins pipeline owner TransCanada Corp., which changed its name to TC Energy Corp. earlier this year.
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