Pipeline rage in Alberta, but what does it amount to?

What are the consequences of the Federal Court of Appeal’s Trans Mountain pipeline delay for electoral politics in Alberta? The FCA ruling has created undoubted consternation and rage here — perhaps not least among provincial New Democratic politicians, who had been posing proudly with shovels and hardhats at Trans Mountain’s Alberta work sites, and who obviously did not foresee that these photo-ops would immediately be transformed into an infuriating joke. Alberta has always had a couple hundred people who are well to the left of the Alberta NDP, and for decades these people have been insisting that a resource economy is incompatible with healthy social democracy — that oil is a sort of Original Sin, corrupting everything it touches with Satanic corporate influence and literal pollution.

These are, of course, some of the same people who will not shut up about how much they admire Norway. But it is hard to deny that Rachel Notley has become something of a tragic figure as the Trans Mountain all-in bet turns negative, or grows more so. She decided, probably contrary to the instincts of her caucus and many of her friends on the left, to govern Alberta without arguing too radically against its accepted nature and selfimage. She has followed a pro-oil, pro-oil-worker, prooilsands line all along, without facing resistance from any part of the provincial NDP or the domestic labour movement.

She did this while taxing carbon, running enormous deficits, hastening the abolition of the thermal coal business in the province, hiking the minimum wage pretty harshly, and regulating farm labour in a provocative, careless way that has doomed her party in the deep countryside. One pipeline to nearby, west-facing tidewater was supposed to be the reward, and if the Trans Mountain expansion is still in limbo on the date of the next provincial election, that will definitely be a problem. One longs to interview the Notley of 20 years hence — the Bob Rae version of Rachel Notley, chastened by experience of governing and freed from her original ideological loyalties.

But has the electoral situation changed very much practically? On Thursday, Alberta opposition leader Jason Kenney warned CTV’s Don Martin of a rise in angry separatist sentiment in the province, and Martin concurred. But even if Alberta separatism was a good practical answer to the problem that it is hard to cross B.C. with a pipeline, there seems to be no party or movement prepared to exploit this wrath — none, that is, aside from Kenney and his United Conservatives. Kenney knows that the idea of having a Checkpoint Charlie in the centre of Lloydminster to keep out foreigners from Macklin and North Battleford is strictly for kooks.

He has not even revived the old Harper-Morton Quebec-inspired “firewall” agenda, auditioned in this newspaper in 2001, which proposed applying pressure to an unfriendly Confederation by pulling Alberta out of the Canada Pension Plan and federal tax collection. The UCP boss has talked of fighting the federal government on interprovincial equalization, but the chief advantage to Kenney of that battlefield is probably that it would be impossible to gain any actual ground. It provides an opportunity for noisemaking, even a phony referendum, without any real risk of fiscal or constitutional conflict. (Alberta will vote to diminish equalization if given the chance, just as I would vote for a zero income tax on newspaper columnists.)

Premier Notley would obviously have preferred for the Federal Court to wave the pipeline builders through, and the same is surely true of the prime minister. Trudeau did not create the rules on environmental review and Aboriginal consultation of which the National Energy Board allegedly ran afoul: he didn’t even pick two of the three judges that reached this conclusion. It is openly acknowledged by bar and bench that Canadian administrative law is in bad shape, beset by unclear standards for judicial review of regulations. Our economic problem is not really that the FCA applied a strong, well-understood standard incorrectly.

If the court had deferred to the NEB, the problem of regulatory-judicial “uncertainty” would still exist, and there is, frankly, no means of wishing it away entirely. Stroppy coastal NIMBYs will always have some avenues of litigation, and have hardly used up all their opportunities to protest. What can a prime minister do, short of sending in tanks? If Trudeau’s response to the court ruling proves unconvincing in a province where distrust and contempt for him are already fairly widespread, the maximum possible cost is three Liberal seats. Even from an Alberta vantage point, the woes of the increasingly shabby and confused federal NDP seem like a more important strategic development.

JASON KENNEY WARNED ... OF A RISE IN ANGRY SEPARATIST SENTIMENT IN THE PROVINCE.