Middle ground can be slippery

Only the Liberals favour pipeline and carbon tax

Honestly, what did anyone expect? Was it ever in doubt that Justin Trudeau would approve construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion? Was it really imagined his government would reject a project it had not only previously approved, but now owns?

And yet the government was obliged to pretend it was “a difficult decision,” as the rest of us were obliged to pretend to believe them — the latest in a series of such unreal tableaus in the in

creasingly performative climate change file.

The pipeline decision, after all, came the day after Parliament passed a motion declaring a national climate “emergency” — a debate so urgent that only one of the party leaders, Elizabeth May, found time in her schedule to attend.

In its wake, the players all dutifully performed their appointed roles. The prime minister promised that all profits from the eventual sale of the pipeline would be plowed into subsidizing “Canada’s energy transition,” as if there were going to be any profits from a project that is already $2 billion over budget before it has even begun.

The premier of British Columbia announced his government would continue to pretend it has the legal authority to stop the pipeline, or at any rate to stop the heavy oil from flowing through it, as if it had any prospect of winning the case in the Supreme Court of Canada that it lost in B.C. Court of Appeal.

(If it did, Alberta pretends that it would trigger legislation empowering it to “turn off the taps” to B.C., as if such action would survive either a court challenge or the howls of outrage from the interest it would most harm: the Alberta oil industry.)