Pipeline battle descends to farcical level
Silliness and grandstanding have reached new heights
All that’s missing is someone who’s just had a bucket of water poured over him while facing the snickering audience, red-faced and soaking wet, his trousers bunched forlornly around those big ankles.
Yes folks, we’ve finally succeeded in dragging economic, political and environmental stewardship of this country down to the level of a classic British farce from the 1960s.
The final straw — a naughty word these days in Vancouver — in our dreary descent into cheap giggles and confused head-scratching is the latest move launched by those friends of starving lawyers everywhere, the provincial government of British Columbia.
It comes, of course, in the seemingly endless fracas over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and the standoff between a desperate-for-revenue NDP government here in Alberta and a Green-dependent one in our neighbouring province across the Rockies.
We’ve sort of got used to silliness and grandstanding, but last week, the bar was either lowered or raised, depending on your sense of humour.
To get some outside perspective on the latest comedic episode, try explaining to some distant relative or friend living in a far-flung land this new manoeuvre by the attorney general of B.C. — suing Alberta to make sure our province keeps sending them oil via a pipeline as they continue fighting to stop us sending them oil via a pipeline. Oh, and the pair of pipelines in question involve the same route and belong to the same company.
B.C. is hardly alone in wanting it both ways.
This latest mind-stretcher of a legal challenge follows Premier Rachel Notley’s threat to turn off the oil taps to B.C. if they keep delaying the federally approved Kinder Morgan expansion pipeline that would take Alberta crude to Pacific tidewater. The result of such action would be to jack up the already-high gasoline costs in the Lower Mainland, with some experts suggesting a resulting $2-a-litre pump price not being out of the question.
Despite the ludicrous legal games being played, there is a message in all this bluster that gets to the heart of what is in essence an environment versus economy battleground.
B.C. is hardly alone in wanting it both ways — the sanctity of feeling superior and wise in doing its bit to fight the climate-changing effects generally attributed to more carbon being pumped into the atmosphere, while continuing to live high on the hog in a First World city with high employment, big wages, ever-increasing home equity and all the energy gobbling such lifestyles involve.
Sooner or later, however, there comes a choice, and no amount of semantics or silly legal challenges can avoid such an eventual moment.
Are you willing to see your standard of living drop, your employment end, your house value plunge and your mobility and choices curtailed in return for a serious decline in the amount of energy you and your society are using ?
Answer yes and then no reasonable person can take moral offence. They can question your choice, of course, but as the saying goes, “fair-do’s.”
What annoys people — and this is why our good buddy David Suzuki gets so much grief
— is when the rich and famous, already living a lifestyle well beyond most working stiffs, lecture the rest of us about our planet-destroying behaviour. When Leonardo DiCaprio starts taking the No. 26 bus to work, I’ll pay him more heed and afford him more respect. (Hey, maybe Al Gore can keep him a seat near the front.)
Same with greedy governments, who search endlessly for more tax revenue to expand yet another sacred social program, while increasingly biting and abusing one of the hands that’s feeding them, while continuing to shake the other paw hoping there’s a few more bucks to be snared.