Pipeline spat could kill last chance for green plan
Ottawa fears nation’s commitment will fall apart from clash between Alberta and B.C.
The great pipeline debate has finally gone national.
The Trudeau Liberals say the death of the Kinder Morgan expansion would also kill any hope of a national climate change plan.
A fight that only a week ago was regional, economic and environmental is now existential. The Liberals are casting the pipeline issue on a much larger stage of climate and country.
Which is pretty much what Premier Rachel Notley wanted them to do months ago.
The Liberal audience is progressives and environmentalists who may not like the pipeline, but are suddenly terrified by the thought of a future with Prime Minister Andrew Scheer, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
The Liberals ask if Canadians want to lose national climate measures in order to kill one pipeline expansion on B.C.’s Lower Mainland.
And from their perspective, they have a point, because the threats to Canadian climate agendas are serious and growing.
Federal Conservative Leader Scheer says his first act would be to ditch the national carbon tax.
Kenney, Alberta’s UCP leader, would abolish the province’s carbon levy and fight Ottawa’s tax to the Supreme Court.
PC Leader Ford, now the shock favourite to become Ontario’s next premier on June 7, says he’ll kill the province’s cap-and-trade system of carbon control, without substituting a carbon tax.
Even Notley warns that if the pipeline project dies, Alberta will not agree to carbon price increases to $40 and $50 per tonne in 2021 and 2022.
She feels those hikes are part of the bargain she struck with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — a rigorous Alberta attack on emissions in return for access to tidewater via the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
Notley’s plan was the core of the climate agenda that Trudeau triumphantly showed off in Paris in late 2015. Alberta’s withdrawal would collapse it.
But it would likely be dead long before then, killed by Ontario, Alberta and federal elections that will be done by late 2019.
Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna raised the alarm in a CBC interview on the weekend.
“I worry that we’re going to lose the opportunity if we’re not focused and we just put all our attention on one project,” she said.
"And we’re working with Alberta, and I’m very concerned right now that we’re at risk of losing our climate plan.
"You have two progressive NDP governments in Alberta and B.C. who are absolutely committed to climate action.
“But in one province they’re trying to figure out the transition and we might lose this climate plan, weirdly, because progressives are fighting.”
It would be bizarre indeed — a whole national policy blown up by a clash between governments that like the policy.
McKenna suggests that plays right into the hands of leaders who want to make sure a national climate policy never returns.
As the feds raise the stakes, they’re also softening their tone toward B.C.
Last month, Trudeau blasted B.C. Premier John Horgan as the personal wrecker of the national plan.
“John Horgan is actually trying to scuttle our national plan on fighting climate change,” he told an online publication, the National Observer.
That was clearly a test run. Apparently, it didn’t play too well.
Now, the Liberals are making the national point without assigning blame.
“People want a solution — they don’t want a winner and a loser,” says pollster Bruce Anderson, chairman of Abacus Data.
A detailed Abacus poll shows that B.C. opinion, far from being irretrievably divided, is quite fluid and nuanced.
Most people support the pipeline, or lean to it. But a large number — 20 per cent — are undecided.
Many British Columbians who oppose the pipeline are also deeply uncomfortable with the thought of blocking goods from another province.
Others are against a pipeline that encourages fossil fuel use but worry that stopping it could reduce national commitment to climate change.
That’s exactly the point Ottawa now makes.
Unlike all the others, it may have some impact.