TRUDEAU’S IN TROUBLE ON THE PIPELINE BATTLE
“The Trans Mountain expansion will be built.”
With the nation mourning Humboldt’s loss, pecking out an obstinate tweet about an oil pipeline buried in political grief wasn’t at the top of Justin Trudeau’s to-do list. Yet the prime minister tweeted it out before joining members of the shattered prairie community for last Sunday’s vigil.
Welcome to government, where events never pause and most days are an endless series of bad and worse choices. Trudeau is certainly down to bad and worse on the question of Kinder Morgan’s crown jewel, which happens to double as his fig-leaf on oil and gas policy.
Trudeau the green carbontaxer might really, really (really) want this singular pipeline built, but if the company building it is now wavering, and the Green party dependent NDP premier of the province through which it must pass hasn’t yet found a body he won’t chuck in front of it, at what point do you call a spade no spade and concede the Earth will not be moving ?
Perhaps fearing for its economic and constitutional credibility, the answer from Team Trudeau is a ringing “not now, not ever.”
“We are determined to see (Trans Mountain) built,” Trudeau has told reporters. “It is in the national interest. It doesn’t make any sense for us to continue to have a $15-billion discount on our oil resources because we are trapped with an American market. We need to get our resources to new markets.”
Indeed. The same words could have — and did — come out of Stephen Harper’s mouth. Trudeau now has to bell the cat.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. Harper’s confrontational “cramthem-down-your-throats” pipeline policy was to be replaced with Trudeau’s more charismatic approach that would accrue the “social licence” needed to grease construction, a canard that happens to be, despite the environmental hysteria, the only fauna killed to date along the pipeline’s route.
To frame the debate as proeconomy versus pro-environment is to miss the point.
What Trans Mountain ultimately proves is the past 20 years of debate in Canada has split people into two irreconcilable camps: pro-oil and anti-oil. Preening at climate summits and taxing carbon won’t make exporting oil kosher to those who are resolutely opposed. Over their dead bodies is the message being passed to Trudeau at the minute. It’s not a question of law, it’s a matter of will.
Giddy though the opposition parties might be, now is not the time for them to revel in Trudeau’s mire. Seeing your opponent hoist with his own petard is satisfying, but if the pipeline really is in Canada’s national interest — and it is — the opposition should offer some constructive suggestions along with any withering scorn.
Given the rather shouty and petty state of modern politics, this won’t happen.
The partisan urge to nannynanny-boo-boo is too strong and besides, Conservatives will say, the Liberals didn’t exactly lift a finger of support in opposition before assuming office and turning the matter into a constitutional crisis. Further disincentivizing bipartisan efforts is the Trudeau carbon tax, a big part of the government’s social licence play that is not particularly well-read by any capital-C Conservative.
Here, Trudeau shoulders a good chunk of the blame. For all his talk of kumbaya, Trudeau’s Pan Canadian Framework for Clean Energy and Climate Change — with its plan for carbon “pricing ” — was effectively crammed down provincial throats. And with Rachel Notley and Kathleen Wynne’s governments now in severe financial distress, voters there and across Canada will surely begin to wonder why the hell they’re on the road to higher taxes if those uppity British Columbians aren’t holding up their end of the social-licence bargain.
This is where federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh should have a useful intervention to make, given it’s his provincial brethren on opposite sides of the Kinder Morgan dispute. But to hope for substance from Singh is to wish for unicorns. Singh has done the easy thing and sided with B.C. and its brighter federal electoral prospects.
Where does this leave Trans Mountain? Shorn of friends and solutions, but all is not yet lost.
The government can, and should, re-assert its constitutional right to build the pipeline. And yes, the feds can join Alberta in slapping down money and insurance guarantees. But that’s only half the battle.
If the communities along the pipeline route remain ready to obstruct its construction it’s going to take a lot more than bucks and words to clear the way. Even the stern words of a judge urging protesters out of the way might not do the trick. What then?
Do the sunny ways of Trudeau the son even allow for a hint of the army steel flashed by his father? Do we just ... watch him?