ALBERTA PULLING OUT OF NATIONAL CLIMATE PLAN.
Notley pulls out of climate change plan
EDMONTON • In a fiery speech Thursday evening at the Alberta legislature,
Premier Rachel Notley said she is pulling the province out of the federal Liberals’ signature climate change plan.
“Without Alberta that plan isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” she said. “Successive federal governments created the mess we’ve gone through, it was broken in Ottawa and now Ottawa needs to fix it. When Alberta’s economy is held hostage, Canada is not working.”
The press conference came hours after the Federal Court of Appeal halted the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, saying Indigenous consultation and consideration of marine life had been inadequately considered.
Notley called on Ottawa to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Within her heated demands are echoes from Alberta’s past, a long history of feuds with the rest of Canada, especially over energy policy.
For a decade, the West was in. In 2006, Stephen Harper, having brought the Conservative party to power, said almost exactly that, in front of party faithful in Calgary.
But now, there’s little doubt that Alberta’s feeling aggrieved. Western alienation, always there, is now located somewhere at the nexus of a Venn diagram featuring the economic downturn, the carbon tax, equalization payments and the struggle to get pipelines built.
“There is that overall sense that when central Canadian issues — steel or autos or dairy — are in play, they’re a priority, and when western issues are in play they’re either not taken seriously or they are of such a secondary nature that they’re not thought through carefully enough and they are essentially botched,” said Faron Ellis, a political scientist at Lethbridge College in southern Alberta. And that’s not helped by Thursday’s ruling, which ensures that pipe, while it may be laid eventually, in Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline, isn’t going to be done soon.
“We’re getting to the stage where Trans Mountain is just botched,” said Ellis. Consider, he mused, if the response would be different if a Quebec hydro project had been stalled by the courts.
This pipeline is an atypical case, with unusual enemies, complicating any strict analysis of western discontent. And while Trans Mountain may not be, alone, enough to create an enormous opening for a browbeating, pro-Alberta populist, in the context of the rest of the Venn diagram, there’s political opportunity. And tapping into that sentiment might not be a foolproof strategy — but it’s out there.
“Elements of western alienation, for lack of a better term, run deep, and also just below the surface in Alberta political culture,” said Ellis. “There’s room for a provincial premier to champion the west, his province’s interests, but the west more generally.”
If time’s a flat circle, it might be that politics is, too. There are echoes here of Alberta’s past feuds — “let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” was the refrain when the Pierre Trudeau Liberals introduced the National Energy Program — with the rest of the country.
“We’re at about the middle of the third iteration of this cycle,” said Ellis.
The complication, this time, experts told the Post, is that this fight isn’t between west versus east — the normal axis for western alienation — but rather Alberta versus British Columbia with the federal government backing Alberta. (It wouldn’t be the first time, pointed out University of Alberta political science professor Jared Wesley: former premiers Alison Redford and Christy Clark, in 2013, met for the “Starbucks Summit” photo op to try to patch up B.C.-Alberta differences on energy policy.)
“I’m not saying that this is this generation’s turn to slag Ottawa … we’ve got this weird animosity between Alberta and B.C. that we haven’t seen for years,” said Wesley.
And western alienation, always tied intimately with populism, said Wesley, is rising up at a time when conservative populism is enjoying a surge in popularity. It’s fuelled by a sense that people are being left behind, and, he said, it’s an opening for United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney.
Speaking to reporters in the parking lot of a Calgary diner, Kenney took issue with the decision, saying the questions pondered are not “academic questions,” but rather have real-world consequences for Albertans and Canadians, with jobs that will be lost because of the ruling. Kenney, saying he had just met with energy CEOs, said he’d heard expressions of western alienation among them.
“This (ruling) damages national unity, let’s be clear about it,” said Kenney. “I’m never going to give up on Canada, but those of us who believe in the promise of federation, the rule of law, this is a bad day for us.”
The court decision means that the federal government’s proposal to buy the pipeline, and Notley’s brawler’s tactics standing up to a hostile Premier John Horgan in British Columbia, didn’t really work, at least so far. Just weeks ago, Notley said the government was “batting a thousand” on Trans Mountain; Kenney pointed to her push for “social licence” — it was supposed to be obtained via a carbon tax — that was to get pipelines built.
“I have considerable regard for our premier, a capable person with good intentions, but she has been wrong on this since day one,” he said.
Whoever’s to blame, and whatever comes next, the Trans Mountain pipeline risks being heaped in with “a long litany of grievances,” said Ellis, where Albertans perceive their issues as under-appreciated in Ottawa and elsewhere. And the blame could land, fairly or not, with the federal Liberals and Alberta’s NDP, in upcoming elections.
Yet — not everyone sees it that way. Martha Hall Findlay, a former Liberal leadership candidate and now president of the Canada West Foundation think-tank, said Albertans should look for the positives: “If the court had come out and said ‘no, everything was fine, project go ahead,’ then a lot of the activists ... would have continued protesting,” she said. “They can’t say that they’re not being listened to anymore. Yet, the fixes are not horrendous.”