Trudeau: caught in pipeline blues

PM faces woes of own making

For the past year Justin Trudeau has been at pains to demonstrate his capacity to listen, to conciliate, to empathize: qualities he is widely supposed to have inherited from his mother. In the months ahead he will have to show more of his father’s steel.

At stake in the coming battle over the Trans Mountain pipeline is not just the fate of the project, or his own political fortunes, but how Canada is to be governed. It is a conflict we have been avoiding until now, but now it is upon us, inescapably.

That is to say: are decisions on resource use to be made by democratically elected governments, informed by impartial tribunals on the basis of scientific evidence and within a framework of law defined by independent courts? Or are we to be ruled, in effect, from the streets, in defiance of both law and democracy, under the ragged banner of “social licence?”

The merits or demerits of Trans Mountain — economic, environmental, or other — are of course open to debate, notwithstanding the National Energy Board’s ruling in its favour or its endorsement by the federal government.

Opponents are within their rights to try to block it in the courts, as they are to demonstrate, to try to turn public opinion against it and to organize against the federal Liberals politically.

But that is not the whole of the response the decision has aroused. What we are hearing as well are threats to physically block the pipeline’s construction, to create disorder, to break the law. This is most often confined to vows of non-violent “civil disobedience,” but the definition of non-violent, in the minds of those convinced their cause is not merely just but existential, often proves elastic.

Civil disobedience, for that matter, depends for its legitimacy on observing certain constraints: not merely abstention from violence but, in the classic definition, a willingness to endure the penalties prescribed for breaking the law. To which I would add a third: a sense of proportion.

It was one thing for Gandhi to have adopted this tactic against the British occupation, or Martin Luther King against the racial injustices of the Deep South. It is quite another to deploy it against a pipeline expansion, as duly authorized by the institutions of a democratic society, with all of the conditions and safeguards — 157 in all — that have been attached, and all of the lawful alternatives available to its opponents.

But that is down the road a piece. For now the challenge facing the prime minister is more one of conventional politics. On the one hand, he has been adroit in laying the groundwork for the decision. Unlike the previous government, which rarely missed an opportunity to advertise its contempt for opposition in general, and environmentalists in particular, Trudeau has gone to some lengths to establish his environmental bona fides, not only in word but in deed.

Carbon pricing, the promised phase-out of coal-fired power, the “world-leading” Ocean Protection Plan, the extension of the moratorium on tanker traffic off British Columbia’s northern coast: none of these are evidence of a government acting with reckless disregard for the marine environment or global warming. The coincident rejection of the Northern Gateway pipeline likewise inoculated it against accusations of being blindly pro-pipeline.

On the other hand, Trudeau himself has done much to incite the opposition. While he has always been forthright in declaring that it was necessary and legitimate for Canada to bring its oil to market, even as it began the transition to a post-oil economy, it is also true that his rhetoric (“governments might grant permits, but only communities can given permission”) has at times seemed to endorse the “social licence” point of view. Likewise, his pre-election promise to order a completely new review of the project pandered to claims the NEB was somehow biased or negligent in its ruling, which this week’s decision — and the unusually personal terms (“if I thought this project was unsafe … I would reject it”) in which it was presented — has clearly repudiated.

Much of the firestorm he will now endure, then, will be of his own making. And yet there is as much opportunity in the situation as there is peril. By positioning himself between those to his left, who insist that reducing carbon emissions in the decades to come precludes selling oil in the here and now, and those to his right, who suggest we should sell our oil without also taking measures to reduce our emissions — or even that we can — the prime minister has wrongfooted both of the main opposition parties.

In particular, by aligning himself so overtly with Alberta’s NDP premier, Rachel Notley, he has driven a wedge deep into the existing divisions within the NDP: for every soft-left voter who abandons the Liberals over the issue there will be more who conclude the federal NDP, by siding so forcefully against its Alberta cousins, has given itself over to its radical LEAP wing.

Meanwhile the federal Conservatives must confront the possibility that it will be Trudeau, and not them, who succeeds in building the all-important pipeline to the coast, and to overseas markets. At the moment it is only a possibility: it will take all of Trudeau’s political skills to navigate the storms to come.

But should he succeed? This is the stuff of which realignments are made.

JUSTIN TANG / THE CANADIAN PRESS By aligning himself with Alberta’s Premier Rachel Notley of the NDP, Justin Trudeau has driven a wedge into the divided NDP, writes the Post’s Andrew Coyne.