‘Social licence’ being used to block resource projects, Oliver says
Conference about conservatism favours discretion over debate
Finance Minister Joe Oliver says resource development opponents are using the notion of “social licence” as a way to try to block projects that have received regulatory approvals after lengthy environmental reviews.
Speaking Friday at the Manning Networking Conference in Ottawa, Oliver also used the gathering of conservative thinkers to stress that national security and the threat of terrorism are emerging as major issues for Canadians leading up to the scheduled Oct. 19 federal election.
Oliver, the former natural resources minister, said the concept of social licence — the idea of deep consultation between corporations, government, the public and First Nations before moving ahead on large projects — has some appeal, but a small minority of opponents to resource projects are trying to use the notion as a reason to halt developments.
He said the critics will insist that a project has no social licence even after “the independent regulator has said that it’s fine for the environment (and) the elected government of Canada approves the project.”
The attempt by opponents to use the concept of social licence “is really to say that a small minority have a right to block a project which is in the national interest (and) which a lot of people actually support,” Oliver said in a panel discussion at the conference.
“So we have to be careful about these concepts and where they lead us.”
“(The government) won’t go ahead with any project which isn’t safe for Canadians and safe for the environment. But when we come to the conclusion that it is (safe), and the project is in the national interest, I think it’s time to move ahead.”
Obtaining unanimous support for energy projects “is not possible,” Oliver said, and if Canadians insist on that, Canada’s resources will be “stranded” — and an enormous economic opportunity lost.
Michael Binnion, chairman of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and president of Questerre Energy Corporation, participated in the panel discussion with Oliver and said the term “social licence” is actually becoming a “de facto regulatory burden.”
“You’re 100 per cent right that we need to address it,” Binnion said.
Provincial premiers such as Alberta’s Jim Prentice and British Columbia’s Christy Clark, who come from energy producing provinces, have regularly said in the past that social licence is needed for natural resource projects like the Enbridge Northern Gateway oilsands pipeline to proceed.
Both Prentice and Clark participated in a panel discussion Friday at the conference on energy, environment and the economy.
Clark told reporters she has no problem discussing the importance of social licence in the debate around natural resource projects. Acquiring social licence for energy development means finding consensus, not unanimity, she said.
“The danger is when people assume that social licence is something that’s impossible to get so they stop trying. I think that’s the danger because we live in a world where you need to find it,” she told reporters.
“Social licence is a way of ensuring that you have community support for the projects you’re hoping to move ahead.”
Oliver said the federal government clearly must garner public support for energy projects, but it should not always go on the defensive in the case of developments that have regulatory and public approval.
The minister claimed Canada has an environmental record that “we should actually be proud of and not defensive about.”
“We have allowed a narrative to be created that doesn’t match with reality, and that can cost this country a great deal,” he said.
Oliver also addressed what he said is becoming an increasingly important priority for the government and Canadians in the lead-up to the federal election: national security.
He served notice that combating terrorism will be a key election issue for the Conservatives in the campaign, along with the top priority of the economy.
Oliver’s comments came the same day that RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson briefed parliamentarians about Michael Zehaf-Bibeau’s attack on Parliament Hill and the cellphone video he recorded minutes before he shot and killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial.
He said there’s no greater obligation for a government than to protect its citizens and sovereignty.
“The reality is there’s a war being conducted by international terrorists, by jihadist terrorists, and we have to be strong, we have to recognize who they are and we have to participate in an international effort to eradicate the threat that they represent,” Oliver told the crowd, arguing the government’s new antiterrorism legislation is needed to protect Canadians.
“While the economy is always front and centre — it’s pocketbook issues that concern people the most — I think it will be in this election the issue of national security (that) is also emerging as a concern for everybody.”
I felt as if he were speaking in some ancient tongue I could barely comprehend: it had been so long since I had heard a practising politician speak with such thoughtfulness, sincerity, reforming ambition or moral seriousness . — Andrew Coyne Another session was devoted, without apparent irony, to building a ‘Perpetual Fundraising Machine.’ Which would more or less describe the modern Conservative party.
In its seven years, the Manning Networking Conference has served as a kind of haven for what one might call a normal conservatism — a gathering, as I put it last year, of the Conservative Party in exile: the Conservatives who see politics as something other than a constant search for fights to pick, and policy as something more than just another vehicle for raising funds.
It was the place where Conservatives, starved for talk about ideas by a leadership that long ago declared its contempt, not just for ideas, but even for the idea of ideas, mingled with conservatives, the broader movement outside the party, and recalled a time when it was still permissible to think that governments are elected to change things, not just to perpetuate themselves in power; that elections are opportunities to win a broad mandate from the public, not to dangle a few precisely crafted baubles of nonsense in front of the right micro-demographics; that governing is something done openly and through Parliament, not secretly and by any means at hand; and all the rest of what we have been educated, after these many years of misrule, not to expect.
And yet, as the years have passed, the party’s presence at each conference seems to have grown, but the movement’s declined.
The more open the conflict between what conservatives are supposed to believe and what the Conservatives have tended to produce, the more it has been resolved in favour of the party. As late as last year, when the party was at its lowest point in the polls, there was still a useful tension in the air, the odd veiled suggestion that the Conservatives had lost their way. But this is an election year, and the party is back in contention, and so this year’s conference has thus far broadly favoured politics over ideas, discretion over debate.
No fewer than seven separate sessions at this year’s conference are devoted to social media and other campaign tools and tips: How Facebook Can Help Power Your Campaigns, How Digital Engagement Will Determine the Next President, Introduction to Media Relations, Capturing Voter Attention Online, and so on. On the panels, academics and policy wonks have this year given way, not just to ministers and MPs, but to lobbyists (hello, Hill & Knowlton!) and sponsors (take a bow, Google, Facebook, Spectra Energy, etc. )
Treasury Board president Tony Clement and Industry Minister James Moore were invited, not to share their thoughts on the critical challenges facing the nation and the exciting new initiatives they had planned to address them, but to burble on about “Technology and Politics,” to which task they took with enthusiasm. Still another session was devoted, without apparent irony, to building a “Perpetual Fundraising Machine.” Which would more or less describe the modern Conservative party.
At the day’s nadir, premiers Christy Clark of British Columbia, Jim Prentice of Alberta and Darrell Pasloski of Yukon were assigned nearly 90 minutes to say, as it turned out, absolutely nothing of consequence.
Clark was her usual jolly, incoherent self, asserting by turns her unshakable belief in “free enterprise” and her designs for a planned economy, boasting that her government had “identified eight sectors” as part of a policy of “investing in diversification” that involved “focusing on all those sectors.” A “thriving private sector” was named as “the source of all wealth,” unless it was “the people in the public sector” that “enabled economic growth,” though of course it was “the provinces that drive economic growth.” I suppose I should add that she also expressed the hope that we might find “a new place in the world forever,” but by this point you will probably already have guessed.
Prentice, for his part, was confined to a couple of weak jokes about “looking in the mirror” while professing a similarly devout belief in “free markets” although of course “diversification of the economy is so important” and by the way it was time for the feds to spend gobs of money on infrastructure. (“I realize that much of what I’m saying today has a déjà vu feeling about it.”)
It fell to an outsider, however, to really drive home how vapid Canadian conservatism has become. Listening to Iain Duncan Smith, the British Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, describe his radical welfare reforms and even more far-reaching plans for “social investment bonds,” I felt as if he were speaking in some ancient tongue I could barely comprehend: it had been so long since I had heard a practising politician speak with such thoughtfulness, sincerity, reforming ambition or moral seriousness. We have been drifting on such an oceanic expanse of cynicism for so long, that the sight of terra firma can be quite startling.
It wasn’t all emptiness and careerism. There were panels on income-splitting and market-based environmentalism.
And the conference’s second day promises to be meatier, with discussions of euthanasia, Islamic extremism, municipalities and the runaway Supreme Court. Defence Minister Jason Kenney, a Manning Conference regular, will give a speech on “defending Canada’s values and interests.”
But the highlight, surely, will be Manning Centre chairman Chuck Strahl’s address on the “State of the Conservative Movement.” It’s scheduled for 45 minutes. It will be interesting to see how he fills the time.