Notley assures shovels will soon turn ground for Trans Mountain
Kinder Morgan is starting to put the “pipe” in pipeline. Not only will workers begin this summer to survey the route, flag the right-of-way and relocate rare plants, the company is beginning to stock up on steel pipe.
That word comes from Premier Rachel Notley, who invited the news media to listen to her opening remarks at Monday’s cabinet meeting during the Calgary Stampede.
“Shipments of pipe are arriving pretty much as we speak in Alberta, located at stockpile yards in Acheson and Edson,” said Notley.
Nothing says “yee-haw” during Stampede like good news over a pipeline.
Notley’s remarks came a few days after Trans Mountain announced its construction schedule for the next six months. That includes installing temporary work camps, laying down gravel and clearing the route of trees and vegetation (as well as digging up and moving those pesky rare plants).
This is all important preparation work — but the pipeline construction schedule doesn’t mention actual construction of the pipeline with trenches and pipe.
That’s where Notley’s Monday morning weare-going-to-get-that-construction-underway reassurance comes in. She knows that although she has been claiming victory for the past year on Trans Mountain, we haven’t seen the project dig a trench or bury a pipe.
When the federal government announced at the end of May it would be buying the entire Trans Mountain project from Kinder Morgan, a jubilant Notley declared, “The deal announced today puts people to work building this pipeline right away.”
But Albertans could be forgiven for thinking that putting up flags and laying down gravel doesn’t have the same satisfactory thunk as sticking a good old shovel in the ground. That is coming, we are told.
We’re like characters in Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot. It feels absurd, frustrating and filled with existential angst — which at times seems to sum up the whole tortured Trans Mountain adventure.
Or, more to the point, sums up the Alberta government’s relationship with the on-againoff-again project.
It is a truism by now to say the fate of the Notley government is tied inexorably to the fate of the pipeline. Should the pipeline project get underway with trenches dug and pipeline laid, Alberta’s NDP has a fighting chance in the 2019 provincial election.
In that case, the government can point to its climate leadership plan (with its carbon tax) as having opened the way for the project.
Should the project be waylaid again — either by decisions from the courts or through the actions of environmentalists — Notley (and her climate plan) will be pilloried by the United Conservative Party all the way to and through the election campaign.
Notley’s response is to say the UCP wants Trans Mountain to fail. That’s not true, of course. The UCP wants the expansion project to succeed. It just doesn’t want the project to succeed while the NDP is in power.
You’d have to think at this point the federal government and the Notley government have so much at stake in the pipeline that the project is too big to fail. (Notley now fully expects Alberta to invest its own money for an equity share to help get it built).
Both governments have argued that a failure to get it built will jeopardize the federal government’s pan-Canadian climate plan. The implication is that the government of British Columbia and environmental groups such as Greenpeace should be aware that their anti-pipeline tactics will backfire. They might inadvertently help defeat the Notley government (which takes climate change seriously) and replace it with a UCP government (that doesn’t).
But what if the B.C. government and Greenpeace don’t mind if that happens? What if they are quite happy at the thought of using the election of a carbon-tax-killing Conservative government in Alberta as a foil to raise political support and money in B.C.?
This might sound a tad too Machiavellian. But when it comes to the twisted journey of the Trans Mountain pipeline project, it really doesn’t sound so bizarre.