PM takes right tack on Trans Mountain

Justin Trudeau discussed climate policies with French President Emmanuel Macron Monday in Paris while the oil pipeline debate continued to rage back home. British Columbia. It was Justin Trudeau who, campaigning for office, gave his imprimatur to the extralegal, anti-democratic doctrine of “social licence,” telling pipeline opponents that “governments might grant permits, but only communities can grant permission.”

It was Trudeau, too, who lent support to the notion that Indigenous communities have, not merely a constitutional right to be consulted on projects affecting lands to which they have title, as the since at least the time it took office that it had no constitutional authority to do so. But if Horgan had hoped to walk back the promise, in the grand tradition of Canadian politics, after he was elected, he finds his way blocked by his partners in power, the Green Party.

So he has instead opted to stall for time, delaying permits, threatening legislation, and — someday, maybe — referring the whole business to the courts, hoping the project’s sponsor, Kinder played this game: before Horgan, there was Christy Clark and her constitutionally odious “five conditions” for “approving” the Northern Gateway pipeline, and before Trudeau there were decades of federal governments that allowed the provinces to run the jurisdictional table against them, in the name of “co-operative federalism.”

Trans Mountain marks the final terminus of that process: as it is not possible for the feds to cave, so they are forced to act, in spite of themselves. That holds great peril — not for nothing did the government of Quebec, sensing a precedent, warn the feds not to intervene — but also great promise. But it will require great dexterity: a mixture of firmness and delicacy. Ottawa cannot simply snap its fingers and force the pipeline through — not at acceptable political cost, at any rate. But it can prevail, if it is patient and wise.

In this regard, the mix of measures emerging as federal strategy, belated as they are, show much promise.

The first: legislation explicitly asserting and defining federal authority over the pipeline, in some detail. That doesn’t abolish B.C.’s recourse to the courts — nothing can — but leaves less room for it to exploit any ambiguities about federal intentions.

The second: some form of financial backstop to Kinder Morgan, to assure it that its investment in a lawfully approved project will not be devalued, in whole or in part, by B.C.’s dilatory tactics. I have seen this denounced as a subsidy or bailout. The details will matter (a loan or equity stake would be inferior to a simple promissory note) but in principle it seems rather in the nature of compensation for expropriation — though it would be appropriate for the feds to recoup any payout from B.C.

And the third: some sort of face-saving sop to the B.C. government — more spending on protective measures in the event of a spill, for example. It may seem galling to reward it for its intransigence, but it is also probably necessary to smooth the path of eventual acquiescence, and gives it something to wave at the Greens.

Oh, yes. There is a fourth, unstated, part: legislation, now before the Alberta legislature, empowering the province to throttle supplies of conventional oil to B.C. The feds, to be sure, would have no part in such a flagrantly unconstitutional exercise, nor should they. But every good cop needs a bad cop.