Alberta gets left out in the cold
If you want an idea of how poorly Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is handling the crisis engulfing Alberta, take a look at Premier Rachel Notley.
Notley is a New Democrat. She’s a lifelong left-winger. Her father was a left-winger before her, and leader of the Alberta NDP for 16 years. Left-wingers think the oil business is a blight on the planet. Their goal is to wean the country off oil, whether there’s an alternative in place or not. Since coming to power in 2015, Alberta’s New Democrats have found themselves in an unusual position, given that the commodity they disdain is the key to their province’s wealth and the electorate’s prosperity. Until faced with the realities of power, Notleyites insisted Alberta could find ways to thrive without shackling itself to the sticky black crude it has in such abundance.
But now, more than three years into her mandate and facing an election against a revived and energized conservative opposition, Notley finds herself working vociferously to serve and protect that very same industry. Disabused of any notion the Trudeau government might stir itself enough to ease the crisis facing her province, Notley found herself this week on Trudeau’s doorstep in Ottawa, proposing longshot means of shipping more crude to customers in hopes of reducing the yawning price gap that is costing the country an estimated $80 million a day in lost revenue.
Given Ottawa’s failure to implement construction of the pipeline that would do much to close the gap, Notley wants to buy an emergency collection of rail cars that would increase shipping capacity until the country organizes itself sufficiently to move the product in a more sensible and efficient manner. Neither Trudeau nor Finance Minister Bill Morneau could be induced to commit to the plan, so Notley said Alberta will start buying up enough trains to move an extra 120,000 barrels per day.
Moving oil by trains is a lousy idea, more costly, complicated, environmentally iffy and potentially dangerous than a pipeline. But so effectively have pipelines been demonized, and so cravenly have “progressives” rented their principles to anti-oil activists that the best and safest way to allay the oil crisis is too frightening to Liberals to bear scrutiny. Thus they find themselves holding out against both left and right, in the persons of Notley and opposition leader Jason Kenney, while offering nothing of substance in alternative to either.
While Alberta struggles to convince Ottawa to take its crisis seriously, Ontario has had no trouble galvanizing federal attention over General Motors’ plan to close an assembly plant in Oshawa, at the cost of between 2,500 and 3,000 jobs. As the CBC noted, the oil industry is six times the size of auto manufacturing, and Alberta lost more than 130,000 payroll jobs between January 2015 and October 2016, not including small business and the self-employed who suddenly saw their work dry up. Yet such was the shock of the GM announcement that the unlikely trio of Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and U.S. President Donald Trump all found themselves in a shared chorus of helpless fulmination, denouncing, decrying and condemning the plan, with little indication there’s anything they can do about it.
Trudeau called Trump. Trump tweeted angrily. Unifor president Jerry Dias said someone should raise some tariffs on somebody, and give GM “the middle finger,” which is just the sort of remark the U.S. president can identify with. Ford came closest to dealing with reality, wondering why anyone was surprised that a major industry would find Ontario less than ideal as a place to do business, after a decade and a half of union-friendly, highcost, red-tape-heavy Liberal initiatives.
“You can’t campaign for a job-killing carbon tax on Monday and sit around and wonder why manufacturing and automotive jobs are leaving on Tuesday,” he said.
“All we hear are a bunch of powerful people grandstanding,” he said. “They’re busy picking fights and raising false hope. But in private they know the GM plant is not coming back.”
Very true. Just a week ago, Morneau assured Canadians that the economy was in such rock solid condition that he could keep borrowing money at the rate of $1.5 billion a month without any danger that the accumulated liability might some day prove to be burdensome. Adding to debt while major job providers are shutting down plants and the country’s crucial resource sector is struggling to make ends meet doesn’t sound like a promising plan for the future. But the Trudeau government has hitched its wagon to the assurance that good fortune lies ahead just as surely as it has buoyed the country in the past. Morneau has given no indication of having a Plan B should growth falter and times get tougher.
“We will continue to listen to the business sector and focus our attention where we can have the biggest impact,” he said in Calgary last week, maintaining that Ottawa has to keep its eye on the bigger picture.
That would appear to mean the fate of 2,500 jobs in a Toronto suburb commands more immediate response than 50 or 60 times that number in a province farther away, where the Liberals have few seats and soon may have none.
ONTARIO HAS HAD NO TROUBLE GALVANIZING FEDERAL ATTENTION.