Advantage Energy East
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, a champion of the Energy East pipeline, announced his retirement from politics Thursday, on the same day that the British Columbia government said it is taking legal action against Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
Canada’s pipeline politics are confusing at the best of times, and the situation hasn’t exactly been clarified by the decision of the government of rookie B.C. Premier John Horgan to intervene in court challenges aimed at stopping the Trans Mountain project.
After the Trudeau government approved a second Trans Mountain pipeline, the Kinder Morgan expansion looked like Canada’s best chance for getting stranded oil from Saskatchewan and Alberta to tidewater and world markets.
This is vital for Canada, which has massive petroleum reserves in the Western oil sands that should be produced even as the world transitions to an energy mix that includes more renewable sources.
No one in Canadian politics has understood this better than Premier Brad Wall, who earned a well-deserved reputation as a straight talker in support of resource development and Western Canadian rights.
Like Western premiers from the 1970s — former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed comes first to mind — Wall believes that his region is getting a bad deal from the federal government.
He once called the Trudeau government’s white paper on a national carbon tax a “ransom note.”
As for the Energy East pipeline, which would move Western oil or bitumen to Saint John, Premier Wall said delays to that project were a threat to national unity.
That comment was made in the context of last year’s farcical National Energy Board hearings in Quebec on the Energy East pipeline proposal, which ended prematurely in a storm of political protest.
Frankly, Premier Wall is right that the federal government should move the Energy East approval process forward in a hurry.
Canada is already developing a reputation as a nation that can’t approve or build needed pipelines.
The Keystone XL, the Northern Gateway and now the Trans Mountain expansion project all seem to be bogged down by political intrigue, legal challenges, and a changing economic environment in the energy sector.
Advantage to Energy East, then. Its approval is hardly preordained given resistance in Quebec. But a brokered peace is often achievable in la belle province, and development of the Energy East project would benefit from existing pipeline corridors, sound economics, and a welcoming terminus community (Saint John).
As Premier Wall would say, expediting this project really is in the national interest.