Trudeau bets he and Notley can push pipeline through B.C.

In the end Justin Trudeau didn’t have much choice.

He couldn’t be seen to look weak when it comes to asserting federal authority in the dispute between Alberta and B.C. over the future of a trans-provincial pipeline that would ship diluted bitumen from the oilsands to the West Coast for export to Asia.

That would have opened a Pandora’s box of problems with provincial governments across the country.

And he couldn’t throw Alberta Premier Rachel Notley under the bus after she bought into his climate change policies at great political cost to her NDP government.

Besides, if she and the NDP lose the next provincial election, Trudeau will have much bigger problems to contend with in the person of UCP leader Jason Kenney, who has pledged to repeal the Notley/Trudeau carbon tax and limits on oilsands greenhouse gas emissions.

So when Trudeau invited the bickering premiers to a meeting in Ottawa on Sunday it was pretty clear Trudeau would not be sweet talking B.C. Premier John Horgan to change his mind about the threat additional oil tankers could pose to coastal waters.

It was an opportunity for Trudeau and his ministers to dramatically cement their alliance with Notley and Kinder Morgan, the pipeline builder, by pledging some form of financial backup to nervous investors who were about to abandon the $8 billion project because of B.C’s opposition and delaying tactics.

By firmly taking a stand, Trudeau signalled he may have more of the Pierre Trudeau type of grit than he has been given credit for.

But it’s still hard to believe a Trudeau is siding with the Alberta government on a matter that involves provincial oil and gas resources. After all, it was premier Peter Lougheed and prime minister Pierre Trudeau who butted heads in the 1980s when Trudeau imposed the National Energy Program (NEP) and drained Alberta of billions of dollars in resource revenue.

To this day the NEP is cited by many Albertans as the reason they will never vote Liberal.

And as for putting federal and provincial money into energy projects; that echoes the past as well.

Lougheed invested millions of dollars of government funds in oilsands projects, pipelines, and research into oilsands extraction. At one point, when investment arrangements in the Syncrude project started to fall apart, the federal Ontario and Alberta governments all bought in to keep it going.

That early investment of public funds is one reason oilsands development is vital to the Alberta and Canadian economies.

Of course, in those days climate change and environmental issues were but small shadows on the horizon. Now, as the consequences of frenzied development become clear, they loom over all sorts of resource projects that were, and still are, the core of the Canadian economy.

And it is in this quagmire of contradictions that Trudeau, Horgan and Notley find themselves.

Who will sink and who will survive is still in question. There is no guarantee that Texas-based Kinder Morgan will agree to grab the financial life line that Trudeau and Notley are proposing and not abandon the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

If they do abandon it anyway, Trudeau and Notley will wear that failure.

If Kinder Morgan agrees and pipeline construction proceeds, the protests and civil disobedience in B.C. are likely to become even more intense and widespread.

How will that affect Horgan’s NDP government? It may make Horgan a bigger hero in the eyes of some British Columbians but he has a much shakier mandate than Peter Lougheed ever did when he took on the federal government.

And will Trudeau eventually succeed, or not, in convincing enough Canadians that Canada can significantly reduce carbon emissions while at the same time encouraging oilsands development?

Canada’s landlocked Western provinces needed B.C. to agree to the construction of the last leg of the CPR so they could ship their natural resources overseas.

A pipeline isn’t the same as a national railway but Trudeau has made it clear he’s willing to bet a lot of political capital that it too will be completed.