A slap in the face to the West

It was about three years ago when I proposed to the federal government what we believed to be an environmentally salutary way to get some oil workers back to work.

The month before, oil prices had fallen to their lowest in over a decade. The commodity price downturn was already a protracted misery. Energy-sector workers were not working, related small businesses were shutting down, rainy-day savings of independent contractors were drying up. The situation, for families and the provincial balance sheets, was dire.

Against that backdrop, Saskatchewan taxpayers and businesses, like all Canadian taxpayers, were paying into the federal equalization program. Our share was about $500 million annually. Alberta taxpayers were kicking in approximately $2 billion to the program. Under the current formula, there was no prospect of Saskatchewan and Alberta getting anything back from equalization any time soon — if ever.

I believe the people of Saskatchewan were, for the most part, fine with that. There’s a certain psychological lift that comes with a “have” status. But if nothing else, we hoped that our troubles, combined with our contributions, might leave Ottawa of a mind to help out if the opportunity arose.

Enter two young Saskatchewan oilpatch entrepreneurs, brothers Matt and Dan Cugnet, with an idea they wanted me to hear. I was in their hometown of Weyburn at an event when they first presented the idea with their MLA and my former colleague (now Saskatchewan environment minister) Dustin Duncan. Their plan was to get oilpatch workers working again, cleaning up old wells that were no longer in service. It was a win-win — good for the environment and good for the workers.

We turned their idea into a proposal for a $156-million federal investment. Our officials estimated that the plan would create 1,200 jobs and clean up approximately 1,000 abandoned wells. The cost to the federal government would be about a third of what Saskatchewan taxpayers were forwarding to the equalization program.

The program proposal was not perfect. No program is. But it was something tangible that would meaningfully help Saskatchewan while also aligning with the Liberals’ environmental agenda. The federal government rejected it out of hand.

Compare this now-forgotten $156-million proposal against the Snc-lavalin scandal.

The prime minister is confident defending his alleged efforts, and those of his officials, to politically interfere with a criminal case against an admittedly large employer in Quebec in the name of saving 9,000 jobs (3,400 in Quebec).

The loss of 110,000 energy-sector jobs in the West was obviously not so compelling to him and his team. Quebec jobs were apparently worth the brazenness the former attorney general so deliberately and unflappably testified to before the Commons justice committee.

But never mind this modest ask. More concerning is the fact that those Western energy jobs were apparently not even worth something so basic as the federal government doing no further harm.

At a time of historic job losses and dimming prospects, the federal government has actually sought to make things worse. Juxtaposed against the existential risk the federal government took to save far fewer jobs at Snc-lavalin is its apparent determination to pass Bill C-69, which industry has said will make it harder if not impossible to secure approvals for future pipeline proposals. It sure seems that no PMO effort was made to Environment Minister Catherine Mckenna or Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi to “influence” and assure the scrapping of C-69 for example.

And then there’s C-48, an oil-tanker ban that applies only to the West Coast, where Canadian oil can be exported, not to the East Coast, where Saudi oil can be imported. Add to that methane regulations, a nationally imposed carbon tax and Northern Gateway’s abandonment and it’s not hard to understand why Western Canadians have cause to follow the unfolding SNC-LAVA-lin affair with jaws dropped a little bit more than their fellow citizens.

What the prime minister was prepared to do to save Snc-lavalin is staggering in its own right. And let’s be clear here — it is the Quebec company as an entity that was to be saved. The engineering and technical jobs surely would be absorbed by other firms, possibly in other provinces. The efforts of the prime minister and his inner circle to protect a Quebec institution stands in starkest contrast to the neglect or outright hostility his government has shown the reeling energy sector.

There have been other Quebec-based companies whose plights have captured the imagination and the attention of the federal government, that help make the point and contribute to the frustration in Western Canada. The remaining Western Canadians who were not already feeling a little secondor third-class in the eyes of the prime minister and the Liberal government have been given reason for pause by this unfolding affair.

This scandal now has life of its own and it is producing offspring: resignations, revelations, polls, more shuffles than a Saturday night game of Hold ’ em ... and the further exacerbation of Western alienation.

SCANDAL NOW HAS LIFE OF ITS OWN AND IT IS PRODUCING OFFSPRING.