Alberta could tax or block B.C. gas shipments
Premier Rachel Notley’s threat to cut petroleum shipments to B.C.’s Lower Mainland got national attention — but there’s more to come, much more.
Notley plans to create very wide powers when the NDP’s enabling legislation comes to the legislature this spring.
First, she confirms that the law will allow restraint on oil shipments to the east as well as to B.C.
Second — and, so far, barely noticed — the law could also be used to block or tax B.C. natural gas shipped across Alberta to the U.S.
Notley was asked about both these points in an interview last Friday.
“It will restrict oil and gas moving in either direction?” asked Postmedia’s Chris Varcoe. “Exactly,” Notley said.
I asked if the law could restrict or toll B.C. gas at the Alberta border.
“You will see that when we come forward with it,” she said.
Industry players are nervous, just as they were when Premier Peter Lougheed cut oil shipments in 1981.
Some experts argue it’s no longer practical to restrict exports to other provinces. Everything is too complex these days to do that, they say.
Well, the province can do it. A law to administer exports would be constitutional under section 92A, passed in 1982.
Like almost any sharedjurisdiction law, it would also be subject to challenge.
But that’s how Canada seems to work these days. Provinces pass laws and enforce them until they’re tested in court.
Lougheed, a Progressive Conservative, defied his industry friends and donors with a boycott they didn’t want. They cheered up fast when he won a deal for higher prices.
Does anybody imagine an NDP premier wouldn’t tweak the industry’s nose? There can’t be much doubt she’d cut shipments, if only to make sure the pipeline crisis is constantly in Ottawa’s face.
UCP Leader Jason Kenney, in his first question period facing Notley, started out by taking credit for the plan to throttle oil shipments.
“We were very flattered with the throne speech and seeing the government do a complete 180 and accepting the strategy that we have long advocated to fight for our pipeline by being prepared to turn off the taps.
“The question is: why did it take so long ?”
He’s right, of course — the UCP has been calling for choking off oil and blocking B.C. gas for months. The NDP came to this strategy at an interesting moment — just before the legislature sat, with Kenney as official Opposition leader.
Notley responded to his initial blast:
“We’re not going to (take) lessons from the leader of the UCP on our energy future.
“We had Conservatives in Ottawa, we had Conservatives in Edmonton and we had Conservatives in Victoria for nine years and they couldn’t get a pipeline built.
“No pipeline, no diversification. They had their chance and they blew it. That won’t happen again. We will get that pipeline built.”
In the emergency pipeline debate that started soon afterward, Kenney began with the usual homilies but quickly soared into the international realm.
He argued that the pipeline isn’t an environmental matter at all, but an existential and moral one for Canada.
The environmental issue is spurious, he said, because the oil Alberta can’t sell through the unbuilt pipeline will simply be supplied by repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
He said B.C.’s whole modern economy “has been fuelled for six decades” by Alberta oil. What it doesn’t receive from Alberta, he added, B.C. buys from the U.S. by tanker.
The speech was extremely long for the Alberta legislature. Eighteen months after leaving the House of Commons, Kenney was busting with pent-up rhetoric.
But he’s some skilled speaker, this new MLA. The momentary harmony on tap-turning won’t last the week.