Trudeau’s Grits swerving sharply back to centre

Make no mistake: The federal cabinet’s approval of Malaysian stateowned Petronas’s $36-billion Pacific Northwest LNG project is a template for things to come. The Liberals’ longevity in power depends on it and they know it.

This is the fruition of a strategy that dates to 2012 before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau became Liberal leader when he and his team were casting about for a lever by which to persuade skeptical kitchentable conservatives in Ontario to take him seriously.

The gambit needed to appeal to economic pragmatism. It needed to be pan-Canadian — at least enough to resonate in Southwestern Ontario without annoying Quebec or the West. And it needed to account for the lingering blast residue of Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program of the early 1980s, which transformed Alberta into a barren moonscape, from a Liberal electoral point of view.

The solution they arrived at was both novel and obvious: Cast Justin Trudeau as a champion of resource development, within an environmentalist frame. Put him between Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who’d be painted minions of Big Oil, and Thomas Mulcair’s New Democrats, whose squeamishness with pipelines would feed into the stereotype of them as Trotskyites bent on killing your job.

It worked rather well — until, early in the 2015 federal campaign, the Liberals perceived an even more tantalizing opening in the NDP’s pledge of balanced budgets, and zigged sharply to their left, promising deficits and spending..

That upended Canadian political orthodoxy in a morning. It began the Liberal absorption of the left that won Trudeau his majority.

Now click forward to Tuesday’s statement about the Petronas decision. It tosses out impressive dollar figures — $11 billion in direct investment, rising to $36 billion including upstream natural gas development — and promises more than 5,000 jobs. It then boasts of the 190 “legally binding conditions, determined through extensive scientific study, that will lessen the environmental impacts,” including safeguards for wildlife and a cap on project greenhouse gas emissions.

Taken together, this decision reads like a thematic footnote to Trudeau’s first leadership foray into Alberta, when he joked he’d had “nothing to do with the national energy program — I was 10 years old.” While on the same trip, Trudeau said “there is not a province in this country that would find 170 billion barrels of oil and leave it in the ground.”

Granted, that was oil, this is gas — easier politically than bitumen, because it can be argued that anything moving big emitters such as China away from coal, as large volumes of Canadian natural gas would, is a net win from a climatechange perspective. But the template for further approvals of oil pipelines, including the proffered carbon-pricing offsets, is now in place.

After a halcyon first year of puttering about in the wading pool of the centreleft, the Liberals are now grinding their way back to the centre, where Trudeau began his leadership run. They’ve begun sloughing off the party’s new left fringe. The prize is an Ontario constituency that, partly courtesy of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s deepening unpopularity, is primed to swing back to the centre-right.

The next break in this process will be cabinet approval of the twinning of Kinder Morgan’s Trans-Mountain pipeline, a decision expected in December. Further out will be an accommodation with Quebec on Enbridge’s Energy East project. Twothirds of that pipeline — all but the Quebec and New Brunswick portions, essentially — is already in the ground. The environmental frame, or cover, will be a national carbon-pricing scheme, details to be determined.