PM helps end dream of energy self-sufficiency

What the Energy East pipeline needed was a vision that extended somewhat beyond the length of a prime minister’s selfie stick.

Yes, it is true that TransCanada cancelled the project based on today’s economics. There is the ongoing decline in overall oil prices and the $9.58/barrel differential between light and heavy oil (making heavy Western oil less economical everywhere).

There’s also the increased eastern demand for natural gas accompanied by a National Energy Board pricing agreement that greatly reduced the cost of piping western natural gas to Ontario. (Approximately 70 per cent of the Energy

East pipeline would have repurposed already-existing natural gas pipeline.)

Yes, there’s that violent shift in U.S. politics from Barack Obama to President Donald Trump, resulting in the possible go-ahead of the Keystone XL pipeline, meaning western Canadian oil potentially has a better route to tidewater. Many saw Energy East as nothing more than TransCanada’s backup plan if Keystone didn’t go through.

Coupled with the potential of Kinder Morgan’s TransMountain pipeline to Pacific waters and the Enbridge Line 3 replacement, suddenly there is much more pipeline for oil companies to move their product, anyway.

Weirdly, though, this has now become the favoured argument not of the conservative oil-supporting right, but the environmental left that is aggressively making the argument against Energy East’s economics.

Really, though, what the left is tickled pink about is its own delusion that the

1.1 million barrels of oil a day that would have flowed through Energy East will now magically stay in the ground. No more oilsands. No more oil industry, whose royalties happened to help pay for schools, hospitals and social programs here.

Energy East won’t stop the flow of oil. It will just mean more oil going to Louisiana and Texas refineries, leaving us at the mercy of the next hurricane.

Meanwhile, the environmental forward-thinkers will just have to sit and watch more oil move by rail, hoping it doesn’t result in another Lac Megantic.

And they will dutifully try to ignore that we live in a freeze-your-arse-in-the-winter country where our livelihoods — our very survival, for that matter — depend on leaving somewhat of a carbon footprint. After all, even your organic (or non-organic) produce gets here courtesy of oil.

They will ignore that we’re a net oil exporter ... even though, bizarrely, almost half the country relies on the whims of foreign oil.

That may seem great at the moment, but what if oil goes back up US$80, US$90 or (God forbid) US$100 per barrel?

What if some dictator half a world away decides to reroute tankers and not supply Eastern Canada? What if we have another 1973 ... or even another 2007 of $100/ barrel oil?

What if sunshine and wind doesn’t quite provide the energy self-sufficiency we need to move goods and services?

What if some crazed U.S. president who seems to have no problem slamming 220-per-cent duties on airplanes decides to do the same thing with Canadian oil exports?

In such highly imaginable events, does it really make sense to not have a national self-sufficient energy policy?

So how has Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — who came into office opposing Keystone XL, but supporting Energy East under the banner of energy self-sufficiency — really unified the nation? Or made it better off ?

By threatening a carbon tax on both ends of this pipeline? By tinkering with NEB rules to make Energy East less feasible?

One can rightly criticize some of Premier Brad Wall’s overblown rhetoric this week about western alienation (read: separation). But there are good reasons why he, governments as far away as New Brunswick and even the provincial NDP in Alberta and Saskatchewan argued for energy independence.

Trudeau the younger had a chance to rewrite his father’s legacy of East-West division. Instead, he opted to appease voters in Denis Coderre’s Montreal.

He needed to look beyond the selfie, at the bigger picture. He didn’t.