Protests don’t alter people’s opinions

Here’s what should be in today’s provincial budget: two-for-one whale watching for Albertans. Also, give them 50 per cent off grizzly bear viewing. Salmon charter discounts. Ditto for sea kayaking.

Throw in a nice bottle of Okanagan Paint Thinner just to show there are no hard feelings, even if there are. Or maybe a bag of weed instead, because Albertans seem kind of edgy and we don’t want them simultaneously drunked up and angry.

If this approach seems overly conciliatory, given the recent bellicosity of Rachel Notley and her B.C.-bashing pals, consider this: if intimidation and purple-faced ranting hasn’t worked for them, why would it work for us? Would it not be better to extend an olive branch, or perhaps a bong? Pushing people around doesn’t change their minds. It just makes them mad, makes them dig in their heels.

In fact, the one thing Notley might have done is unite British Columbians who have not, in fact, been united on the pipeline question at all. An Angus Reid Institute poll taken last September showed 47 per cent of B.C. residents were in favour of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion project, 33 per cent opposed and 20 per cent undecided.

The same polling company expects to release updated data soon. It will be interesting to see how people react to Notley’s wine war. Anecdotally, there are plenty who still favour the pipeline but are ticked off at both Alberta and Ottawa because of the way the project is being jammed down B.C.'s throat.

Albertans who are still smarting over the way Pierre Trudeau forced his National Energy Program upon them in the 1980s should relate to such a backlash. It’s particularly galling to listen to Justin Trudeau’s attempts to twist the B.C. government’s position into an attack on Canada’s climate change plan. Really? Kinder Morgan opponents just thought they were worried about a bitumen spill turning the coastline into the world’s longest uninterrupted tar pit. It’s not their fault that the only way Trudeau 2.0 could win support for his carbon tax was to approve the pipeline expansion.

There are, in truth, solid economic arguments for increasing Canada’s capacity to ship oil abroad. Chris Turner’s excellent book The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands details the economic impact of Canada’s oil industry: three per cent of the country’s gross domestic product and 14 per cent of its exports. That builds a lot of school and hospitals and funds a lot of social programs. The “carbon bomb” claims about the environmental impact of the oil sands appear to have been overstated, too.

Hence the frustration in Alberta, and all those online comments about lazy, shrubby B.C. hippies who throw up roadblocks to absolutely any kind of economic activity that doesn’t involve growing dope. Facebook is littered with posts saying things like: “Pipelines have been in the ground for 65 years, you idiots” and “Don’t you drive a car, you hypocrites?”

Well, yes, they have and yes, we do, but such comments really just serve to underline the fundamental misunderstanding in this dispute: It’s not about the pipeline. Nor is it about the wisdom of burning fossil fuels or about B.C. extorting some of the economic benefit out of Alberta.

Instead, at its core, this fight is fuelled by fears that one of the tankers carrying the diluted bitumen after it leaves the pipeline will run aground and bust open in a howling sou’easter or get T-boned by one of the other 10,000 vessels that transit the waters off southern Vancouver Island each year. The fact that these 10,000 do so safely is reassuring to some; others think those numbers make disaster inevitable.

On Monday, B.C. launched a formal challenge to Alberta’s wine ban, using the terms of the Canadian Free Trade Agreement. That’s fine, but it’s not the sort of thing that will end the pipeline conflict. Court rulings and trade dispute-resolution mechanisms don’t change people’s minds. Nor does holding a protest march and yelling at them. Nor does intimidation.