Tim Harper

A string of “ifs” that stretches longer than the pipeline route,

Justin Trudeau will be hauling a huge pipeline with a huge price tag into next year’s federal election campaign.

It’s guaranteed to break some furniture on his way to potential re-election because he is now the Pipeline Prime Minister who has just taken a multi-billion dollar risk with our money.

This is dangerous business, both politically and financially.

The Liberal government will own the Trans Mountain pipeline twinning project on the West Coast, but it will also own all the baggage that comes with a project that is still not guaranteed to be built.

Buying the pipeline was the least palatable option available to a prime minister who has repeatedly called the project a matter of national interest.

But every other option had turned dry.

Certainly no Liberal strategist in the wake of the 2015 election glow could plot a course in which the environment and economy going “hand-in– hand” meant buying an aging pipeline for $4.5 billion. This is merely the down payment before construction on the pipeline twinning, estimated by Kinder Morgan to cost $7.5 billion, has even begun. Unless it can quickly unload the project on private investors — and they don’t appear to be in ready supply — this issue will transcend the environment versus economy debate, will go far beyond Alberta versus British Columbia, beyond the debate on Indigenous rights and beyond the public protests which seem certain to make this one hot, emotional summer in B.C. We all own it now. Finance Minister Bill Morneau sold the move Tuesday as a shrewd investment, a temporary nationalization that may end up costing taxpayers nothing, perhaps even making money.

If this works, it will protect jobs, it will help the chances of the re-election of Rachel Not- ley’s New Democrats in Alberta and with that, improve the chances of Trudeau forging a national climate pricing program. It will open up the Asian market for land-locked Alberta bitumen.

And Trudeau can tell voters, “I built it.’’

If, in fact, it gets built and legal challenges or civil disobedience do not eventually kill it.

That is just the first risk. There is a string of “ifs” longer than the pipeline route.

Maybe they can find a pension fund or another energy company or a First Nations community to buy this project, but if no buyer is found, Ottawa has a pipeline project that is going to run into the billions of dollars with an uncertain payout.

This does not send a message to international investors that Canada, as Morneau, put it, can get big things done. It tells the world that to get big things done, the government has to step in as the foreign investor takes its money and runs.

A prime minister who styled himself as a progressive envi- ronmental champion will now be known as the leader who purchased a pipeline to ensure it was built.

Although the expansion does have some Indigenous support, this action will make mockery of Trudeau’s reconciliation efforts and Indigenous opposition was redoubled Tuesday in the wake of this announcement.

As British Columbia Premier John Horgan reminded reporters Tuesday, Alberta and the federal government have both purported to embrace the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples but are now skating away from that commitment — and the spirit of reconciliation — by ignoring the rights of Indigenous communities along a pipeline corridor.

And then there is the opposition on the ground in Burnaby.

The country will be watching as emotional protests are no longer centred on a federally-approved project being built by a company from Texas, but are now centred on a federally-owned pipeline and the federal government itself.

Confrontation in Burnaby will build and Trudeau will have to answer for that.

If there is a major spill on the coast, that could cement Trudeau’s legacy.

The Liberal government should have seen this train bearing down on it a year ago, but it ultimately had to bow to a timetable set by the energy company.

If this expansion is being built by a private company this time next year, Trudeau may find some relief, but this will cost him both in British Columbia and Quebec where the steamrolling of provincial wishes by the federal government do not sit well with voters.

Tuesday was a great day for a Texas-based energy behemoth, but it was something less than that for Canadian taxpayers.

And for Trudeau’s Liberal government, nationalizing a pipeline may simply be a precursor of tougher days ahead.