National Post (National Edition)
Plenty of blame to go around
Biden's KXL decision doesn't come as surprise
No pipeline. No vaccine. Does Monday morning get any worse for an Alberta government?
The vaccine supply will be restored, eventually. There's little such hope for the Keystone XL pipeline.
Nobody should be surprised by talk that president-elect Joe Biden will cancel the $8-billion project.
Last May, Biden said in a TV interview: “I've been against Keystone from the beginning. It is tar sands that we don't need, that in fact is a very, very high pollutant.”
His campaign said then that Biden would cancel the permit on his first day in office, meaning Wednesday. This now seems almost inevitable.
As vice president, Biden was clearly an influential player when president Barack Obama denied approval in 2015.
Then Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 and reversed Obama's decision.
Unfortunately, Trump did that alone with a massive campaign to rip up environmental protection rules all over America, and completely abandon any climate change action.
That connection was not a good thing for Keystone. Entirely lost was TC Energy's emissions progress and willingness to meet dozens of state demands for mitigation.
There will now be desperate attempts by the Alberta and federal governments to catch Biden's ear — not easy to do amid a sea of worries, including the security of his own inauguration and tension over Trump's final days.
Biden may care very little, if at all, about the emissions control gains in both the oilsands and in the Keystone project, which promises carbon-neutral operations by 2023.
The president-elect is preparing to launch a $2-trillion climate action plan. Cancelling a handy Canadian pipeline is a simple symbolic action for the moment.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney can't blame this one on Ottawa. He didn't even try.
The feds have been behind the project. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he raised approval as a first priority when he and Biden talked last Nov. 9, six days after the U.S. election.
Kenney backed Keystone last March with a $1.5-billion equity stake and loan guarantees up to $6 billion.
That was three months before Biden made his anti-Keystone declaration; but still, his opinion was already well known.
“The Kenney government's stake in Keystone was always a gamble — a political gamble — that Trump would be re-elected,” says Marc Henry, Calgary pollster and political analyst.
“Biden has been clear he doesn't support it and will kill it. Now the question will be whether Albertans think Kenney's bet was a risk worth taking or a fool's wager. It's going to cost him politically.”
Trump's boosters in Kenney's base and caucus may even retire their MAGA hats, now that this appalling president has shown his true nature as an aspiring dictator.
There has never been any sense in betting on Trump. At the very time he approved Keystone, he was throwing overall Canada-U.S. trade into crisis with sudden tariffs and demands for a new pact.
Now it's end game for Keystone and Kenney is reduced to pleading.
“All we ask at this point is that President-elect Biden show Canada the respect to actually sit down and hear our case about how we can be partners in prosperity, partners in combating climate change, partners in energy security,” Kenney said at his Monday news conference.
Noting that TC Energy has already completed the cross-border leg, Kenney said cancellation will bring pressure from opponents to cancel long-standing approvals for operating export lines to the U.S., including the one that also supplies Ontario.
The situation is profoundly discouraging for the many Albertans who want to see responsible oil and gas both fuel and finance the transition.
NDP Leader Rachel Notley said: “It's clear that Jason Kenney is now swinging wildly at anything and everything to distract from his failure on Keystone XL. He's threatening lawsuits while also pleading with the U.S. to let KXL proceed.”
Notley says that early in her terms, there was an opening to convince the Americans Keystone could work. She points out that Obama himself praised the NDP's climate plan.
There will be plenty of blame to go around. Not surprisingly, Kenney calls out anti-oilsands activists.
Naturally, the federal NDP and Greens love the news. Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet, a genuine hostile, will be thrilled by anything that hurts the industry and further divides Canada.
Of course, Canada didn't need any foreign help in killing two major domestic pipelines, Northern Gateway and Energy East. The Trudeau government rescued the Trans Mountain expansion only by purchasing the whole thing.
Biden is only doing to us what this country has already done to itself. Canada is a runaway world leader in pipeline cancellation.
By Wednesday, it may be clear that Trans Mountain is the only new export pipeline that will ever be built — if it is built.
It's almost enough to make you forget, for about 30 seconds, that Alberta is out of vaccine.