WESTERN ALIENATION AND PIPELINES
FEDERAL COURT OF APPEAL’S RULING, EFFECTIVELY HALTING EXPANSION, DOESN’T HELP PERCEPTION
For a decade, the west was in. In 2006, Stephen Harper, having brought the Conservative party to power, said almost exactly that in front of party faithful in Calgary.
But now there’s little doubt that Alberta’s feeling aggrieved. Western alienation, always there, is now located somewhere at the nexus of a Venn diagram featuring the economic downturn here, the carbon tax, equalization payments and the struggle to get pipelines built.
“There is that overall sense that when central Canadian issues — steel or autos or dairy — are in play, they’re a priority, and when western issues are in play they’re either not taken seriously or they are of such a secondary nature that they’re not thought through carefully enough and they are essentially botched,” said Faron Ellis, a political scientist at Lethbridge College in southern Alberta.
And that’s not helped by Thursday’s Federal Court of Appeal ruling, which ensures that pipe, while it may be laid eventually in Kinder Morgan’s Transmountain pipeline, isn’t going to be done soon.
“We’re getting to the stage where Transmountain is just botched,” said Ellis. Consider if the response would be different if a Quebec hydro project had been stalled by the courts, he mused.
This pipeline is an atypical case, with unusual enemies complicating any strict analysis of western discontent. And while Transmountain alone may not be enough to create an enormous opening for a browbeating, pro-alberta populist, in the context of the rest of the Venn diagram there’s political opportunity. And tapping into that sentiment might not be a foolproof strategy, but it’s out there.
“Elements of western alienation, for lack of a better term, run deep and also just below the surface in Alberta political culture,” said Ellis. “There’s room for a provincial premier to champion the west, his province’s interests, but the west more generally.”
If time’s a flat circle, it might be that politics is, too. There are echoes here of Alberta’s past feuds with the rest of the country — “let the eastern bastards freeze
in the dark,” was the refrain when the Pierre Trudeau Liberals introduced the National Energy Program.
“We’re at about the middle of the third iteration of this cycle,” said Ellis.
The complication this time, experts told the Post, is that this fight isn’t between west versus east — the normal axis for western alienation — but rather Alberta versus British Columbia
with the federal government backing Alberta. (It wouldn’t totally be the first time, pointed out University of Alberta political science professor Jared Wesley. Former premiers Alison Redford and Christy Clarke, in 2013, met for the “Starbucks Summit” photo op to try to patch up B.c.-alberta differences on energy policy.)
“I’m not saying that this is this generation’s turn to
slag Ottawa … we’ve got this weird animosity between Alberta and B.C. that we haven’t seen for years,” said Wesley.
And western alienation, always tied intimately with populism is rising up at a time when conservative populism is enjoying a surge in popularity, said Wesley. It’s fuelled by a sense that people are being left behind, and it’s an opening for
United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney, he said.
Speaking to reporters in the parking lot of a Calgary diner, Kenney took issue with the decision, saying the questions pondered are not “academic questions,” but rather have real-world consequences for Albertans and Canadians, with jobs that will be lost because of the ruling. Kenney, saying he had just met with energy CEOS, said he’d heard expressions of western alienation among them.
“This (ruling) damages national unity, let’s be clear about it,” said Kenney. “I’m never going to give up on Canada, but those of us who believe in the promise of federation, the rule of law, this is a bad day for us.”
The court decision means that the federal government’s proposal to buy the pipeline, and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s brawler’s tactics standing up to a hostile Premier John Horgan in British Columbia, didn’t really work, at least so far. Just weeks ago, Notley said the government was “batting a thousand” on Transmountain; Kenney pointed to her push for “social licence” — it was supposed to be obtained via a carbon tax — that was to get pipelines built.
“I have considerable regard for our premier, a capable person with good intentions, but she has been wrong on this since day one,” he said.
Whoever and whatever’s to blame, and whatever comes next, the Transmountain pipeline risks being heaped in with “a long litany of grievances,” said Ellis, where Albertans perceive their issues as underappreciated in Ottawa and elsewhere. And the blame could land, fairly or not, with the federal Liberals and Alberta’s NDP in upcoming elections.
Yet not everyone sees it that way. Martha Hall Findlay, a former candidate for leadership of the federal Liberal party, and now president and CEO of the Canada West Foundation think tank, said Albertans should look for the positives in the ruling. “If the court had come out and said ‘No, everything was fine, project go ahead,’ then a lot of the activists ... would have continued protesting,” she said. “They can’t say that they’re not being listened to anymore. Yet the fixes are not horrendous.”
IT’S QUITE A SLAP TO THE GOVERNMENT BY THE COURT ON THE GROUNDS OF RECONCILIATION WITH FIRST NATIONS. THEY’VE COMMITTED BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TAXPAYERS’ FUNDS DOUBLING DOWN ON A PROJECT THAT THE COURTS HAVE JUST QUASHED. — KATHRYN HARRISON, UBC PROFESSOR
THIS (RULING) DAMAGES NATIONAL UNITY.