Déjà vu over Trudeau’s treatment of the West. Brad Wall,

LIBERALS’ PREVIOUS ENERGY MISSTEPS ECHOED IN CURRENT NATIONAL EMERGENCY

Remember the last time Canadian energy CEOs, investors and industry commentators, even those famous for avoiding hyperbole, used words like “national emergency” to describe the state of their sector?

Remember hearing them very publicly call out the federal government for its seeming indifference to Canadian energy jobs and investment under threat and in retreat? How about those who have for decades invested in the vital and entrepreneurial energy sector using words like “treasonous” to describe the federal government’s action and inaction on the file. Do you remember that happening before?

If you were born at the time of the last Leafs’ Stanley Cup win or before, you might. You’d have been around for the elder Trudeau’s assault on the West and Canada’s energy sector in the form of the National Energy Program (NEP). And you’ll know that what we are hearing now from the usually staid and circumspect energy-sector leaders is not without at least one historical precedent.

I was around then. I was that guy in high school who nerded out on all things political; from running for student council vice-president on a platform to install chalkboards in the bathrooms as an acceptable alternative to more permanent graffiti and mark-leaving, to all the happenings in provincial, federal and U.S. politics. I remember supper discussions when my otherwise calm and collected small businessman dad would become uncharacteristically animated discussing what the federal government was doing to the West.

I remember seeing hats emblazoned with the map and name of a brand-new and possible country, the Republic of Western Canada, being worn in numbers that rivalled the usual millinery fare: John Deere, Roughriders, Ford Trucks, Pilsner and Roughriders.

Largely in response to the NEP and fed by a growing belief that the federal government just didn’t care about the West, the footings of this feeling found enough purchase to spawn a political party, the Western Canada Concept, sweep the Liberal party from Western Canada in the 1983 election and set the stage for the Reform party.

There is no NEP today, you might note. Or anything quite like it. True. There is not one initiative or program of government that is the root of the growing alienation. There is however a long list, the cumulative destructive effect of which is similar. And it all starts with pipelines.

Canadians own the natural resources. This would be Peter Lougheed’s oftrepeated reminder to me when I would travel to Calgary to meet him. I was an opposition leader with a lot of questions for the possible day when I might have the other job. This was his reminder to me again when I sought his counsel during the Potash Corp-BHP takeover affair. Canadians today are all but giving their heavy oil away. The discount that measures the gap between what every other country gets for similar oil and what you are getting for yours has now reached more than $40 per barrel.

The costs to Canada, to our ability to fund qualityof-life programs and transfer payments, to our investment climate and to jobs, are huge. The direct discount cost was estimated at $13 billion in the first 10 months of 2018 alone. The industry is in an emergency situation.

CAPP, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, will tell you there are two principal reasons for the great Canadian oil giveaway today: lack of access to markets and that we have but one customer — the United States. These are two sides of the same coin. And this is at the core of the echoes of the NEP we’re now experiencing.

The Liberals, with the support of the Alberta NDP, abandoned the Northern Gateway pipeline. Federal changes to regulations effectively killed Energy East. Canada has stuck to environmental regulations that the Americans are walking away from, putting our producers at a serious disadvantage. Keystone and Trans Mountain both remain viable in theory, but neither is anywhere close to completion.

The net result of all this is as much as $60 billion in job-creating, social-programming-funding investment lost to our energy sector over the past 18 months. All the while, Eastern Canada continues to import its oil from such countries as Saudi Arabia, while Canadian product is warehoused for lack of pipelines.

During the NEP, there was a dawning of understanding from the elder Trudeau, precipitated by premier Lougheed’s curtailment legislation to effectively turn off the taps to Canada. Pierre Trudeau asked then-energy minister Jean Chrétien to consider some measure of adjustments to the NEP. The election of Brian Mulroney in 1983 made that moot, but there was still a moment of pragmatic reflection from the first Trudeau government.

Is there hope for a similar dawning in the minds of this current generation of federal Liberals? There’s no sign of that yet. Indeed, against the backdrop of all the above, the government introduced Bill C-69 to create an entirely new environmental-impact assessment regime (just when we are close to figuring out the existing one). The energy sector has been very clear about this bill. Unchanged and enacted, it will make the construction of new pipelines in this country essentially impossible. The Liberal government has to date refused to make amendments or, better yet, withdraw the bill.

The dissonance is breathtaking and strongly suggests that this iteration of Trudeau Liberals may lack the pragmatism that provided solid economic and fiscal policies under Jean Chrétien and at least some circumspection by the Pierre Trudeau-led NEPers. Not this current crew. Not so far.

Last week in Calgary, federal Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi betrayed a near complete disconnect from the travails of the energy sector, and all of Western Canada. He observed that, in the long run, greater pipeline capacity was the surest way to end the near giveaway of our energy products.

He’s quite right of course. But it’s his government that has killed two pipelines and has introduced a bill that makes future pipelines unlikely. And we in the West, of course, recall the apparent Freudian utterance of the prime minister about his desire to “phase out” the oilsands, and that of his senior adviser, Gerald Butts, who said as recently as 2012 that he hoped there would be no hydro-carbon industry in Canada by 2050.

Still, I am hopeful. Canadians must get involved, understanding that this sector provides for so much in our country that must surely be worthy of their engagement with the federal government to at least stop C-69. But time is of the essence. I’m seeing those hats pop up again.