Trudeau won’t admit Trans Mountain is dead: Scheer
CALGARY The federal Opposition leader is likening the stalled Trans Mountain pipeline expansion to a famous Monty Python sketch in which two men argue over whether a parrot is actually dead.
“Justin Trudeau has bought a pipeline with no plan to actually build it. Conservatives will build pipelines without having to buy them,” Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer told the Energy Relaunch conference in Calgary on Thursday.
“I believe it is Justin Trudeau’s strategy to not have this pipeline even started to be built by the next election. He just can’t admit that it will be dead by the next election.
“It’s a little bit like the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. He just wants everyone to believe that it’s not quite gone yet.”
The Liberal government purchased the existing Trans Mountain pipeline from Kinder Morgan earlier this year for $4.5 billion after the U.S. firm became frustrated by political roadblocks, mainly put up by the British Columbia government.
An expansion to nearly triple capacity on the line stretching from Alberta to the B.C. coast is in limbo following a Federal Court of Appeal ruling in August that requires more Indigenous consultation and research into increased tanker traffic.
Scheer said if he were to become prime minister, he would repeal the carbon tax and Bill C-69 to overhaul energy project reviews. He called the proposed legislation the worst thing to happen to the industry since Pierre Trudeau’s national energy program of the 1980s.
Scheer highlighted what he sees as the need to go on the offensive against foes of Alberta energy development.
Scheer said nothing frustrates him more than protesters from elsewhere trying to block exports of Canada’s “safe and responsible and secure” energy.
“And yet I don’t see them lining up and down the St. Lawrence (River) trying to block tanker after tanker of foreign oil coming into our markets from countries with terrible human rights records, without anywhere near the same level of environmental standards that we have in this country.”