Trudeau owes Biden a favour (or two)
Do not expect either leader to say so publicly, but Joe Biden did Justin Trudeau a favour when he cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline last week.
Everyone knew this second cancellation was coming. Barack Obama killed Keystone on his watch, only to have Donald Trump revive it. Biden promised to kill Keystone on Day 1 of his presidency; no one who paid attention to his campaign could have been surprised when he kept the promise.
No one, that is, with the apparent exception of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who bet on the wrong pony when he invested $1.5 billion of Alberta taxpayers’ money in Keystone. Kenney reacted with rage — “a gut punch for the Canadian and Alberta economies” — and he called on the federal government to retaliate by imposing trade and economic sanctions on the United States.
That’s not going to happen. There will be no trade war between the Liberals in Ottawa and the Democrats in Washington. Trudeau said he was “disappointed” — the mildest objection he could have registered. His new foreign minister, Marc Garneau, will be saying the same as he introduces himself to officials in the Biden administration.
There will be no all-out lobby like the one Stephen Harper’s Conservatives mounted between 2012 and 2015 when Obama was reconsidering then vetoing Keystone. (According to Washington insiders, members of Obama’s administration became reluctant to accept any calls from Ottawa because they knew they would get an
earful about Keystone.)
Trudeau and Biden are on the same page. Both have committed their government to the Paris climate accord and to reducing their country’s carbon emissions. Biden will be doing what Trudeau has been doing since he came to office in 2015 — trying to strike a balance between environmental protection and resource development.
The U.S. is effectively energy selfsufficient, importing enough oil to offset its exports. It does not need additional Canadian oil, especially not crude from the “tarsands,” as the new president calls them (eschewing the Canadian “oilsands” euphemism). For Biden, Keystone was an easy call and an obvious move to please the environmentalists among his supporters.
Yet, the new president is not ready to ban “fracking” — the controversial practice of pumping a water-sand-chemical mixture into wells at high pressure to fracture the rock and release the natural gas. Fracking is a major industry in Pennsylvania, a swing state that Biden barely won in November. So fracking gets a pass for the moment.
For Trudeau, striking an environment-resource balance has been a juggling act — with one hand, create a national carbon tax, accept ambitious Paris accord targets for emissions reduction and invest heavily in green technology; meanwhile, with the other hand, offer encouragement to the resource sector by buying the stalled Trans Mountain pipeline.
Both Biden and Trudeau know their governments must reduce their countries’ reliance on fossil fuels. The oil (or tar) sands of Alberta are the largest source of CO2 emissions in Canada. The writing is on the wall — scale back production heavily in the coming years to meet Canada’s Paris targets and prepare to phase it out eventually. Construction of Keystone would have taken Canada in the wrong direction: to greater production (800,000 barrels of crude every day to be pumped from Alberta to Nebraska and on to Gulf of Mexico refineries).
By killing Keystone, Biden helped reduce the size of one obstacle in Canada’s uphill struggle to meet its Paris targets, while enabling the prime minister to avoid carrying the political can for a controversial action — an action taken in Washington, not in Ottawa.
Biden did Trudeau another favour on Day 1. By going out of his way to announce, unprompted, that his first call to a foreign leader would be to his friend and ally in Ottawa, the president sent a signal that the two countries once again stand together in the world. That has to be music to the Trudeau’s ears as he contemplates another re-election campaign.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens, an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail, retired this month from teaching political science at the University of Guelph. His column appears Mondays. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com