"Natural gas must compete against other fuels."

Really?  Sort of like saying that oil has to compete against other fuels.  Putin is stupid for promising the west anything.  If he was the sort of man the frothing-at-the-mouth western media hacks make him out to be, he would set a policy of sitting and waiting for the pompous west to come grovelling.  The Globe and Mail openly states that Canada has eight years of gas left.  The US production is going to expire before 2020 also.  Prices are going to be stratospheric before 2012.  Around this time the hard math of insufficient discoveries of oil and gas is going to start sinking in (as production mirrors discovery with about a 40 year lag).

The Globe and Mail openly states that Canada has eight years of gas left.

The reserve/production ratio is eight. This does not mean natural gas is running out in 8 years. It has been between 7 and 11 for the last 25 years. In 1980 the reserve/production ratio was 9, obviously we didn't run out of natural gas in 1990.

So you are saying that the Globe and Mail is being alarmist in its claim.  It's a new thing for conservative mainstream media to behave this way.
The MSM have a long history of using R/P ratios despite the fact that they are not useful for estimating the remaining resource.

Sometimes the effect is alarmist and sometimes it is comforting (eg the numbers often quoted for coal). It matters not. It is a simple statistic which is easy to understand, and it is probably for this reason that it is most often used by the MSM.