PROGRESSIVES SHOULD SUPPORT THE PIPELINE
Halting Trans Mountain expansion won’t benefit Canadians: Benn Proctor.
Most B.C. residents support the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, but they appear far less raucous than the protesters who are risking arrest at the pipeline’s Burnaby terminus.
B.C. Premier John Horgan, who campaigned against the expansion in last year’s election, appears to be siding with the resistance by slow-walking the approval process and throwing sand in the gears with court challenges. As any investor knows, including those in Texas boardrooms, enough sand can derail a project.
I bet that some pro testers see themselves in the rich history of peaceful civil disobedience that advanced many 20th-century progressive goals. Defining ideology is tricky, but what can we say about progressivism? Let’s start with something every Canadian political party agrees with: “growing the middle class.”
As the UBC’s Kevin Milligan recently wrote, exploiting Canada’s natural resources has been the most important contributor to Canadian middle-class earnings. Between 2000 and 2015 the median worker in resourcerich Alberta and Saskatchewan saw their income grow by 27 per cent and 44 per cent respectively. In less resource intensive provinces, like Quebec, median income growth was six per cent, while Ontario saw an outright decline of four per cent in earnings after accounting for inflation.
Progressiveness is about more than the middle guy or girl. It’s also about ensuring that everyone has a fair shot. With opportunities for good jobs, 350,000 Canadians moved to Alberta over the first 15 years of this century. No surprise then that growing up in a boom town helps one go from rags to riches. Work done by Miles Corak at the University of Ottawa shows that if you’re born into the poorest 20 per cent of Canadians, your odds of rising to the richest 20 per cent are highest if you’re an Albertan. These aren’t just roughneck opportunities, but good-paying jobs in the private and public sectors.
These higher salaries are taxed at a progressively higher rate, which partly explains why the federal government could generate nearly $189 billion more in revenue from Alberta businesses and individuals than Ottawa spent in the province between 2007 and 2015. Bountiful resource revenue enables another aspect of progressivism by ensuring that governments can spend on social programs when the market fails its citizens.
Opportunities to climb the income ladder, plus a strong middle class are key, but they do not complete a world view. Protecting the environment is crucial and human-made climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. However, stopping a Canadian oil pipeline is unlikely to leave future generations with a healthier planet.
Canadian oil makes up about five per cent of global production, but slowing one country’s production won’t dent world consumption. Mexico and Venezuela are good evidence of that. At the turn of the millennium when the world used 76 million barrels daily, these two countries supplied nine per cent of global oil. Since then, their combined production has declined by about two million barrels per day, and they now supply only five per cent of global crude. But in 2018, global oil use is actually up to 100 million barrels per day because the world found that Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, and yes, Canada could satisfy its needs.
Efforts to halt Alberta oil, which is produced under a broad-based carbon tax that incentivizes both producers and citizens to reduce their carbon footprint, will be stymied by the inconvenient truth that Alberta oil will be replaced by foreign oil. Much of these new sources will be produced in theocratic or authoritarian regimes, and some production will head south to Texas where there is no carbon tax. Canada will continue to produce some of the oil that was previously destined for the Trans Mountain expansion, but in smaller amounts and shipped by second-best arrangements from environmental and cost perspectives.
Can we count on protesters to stand up for the Canadian grain farmers competing against the oil industry for railcars or for homeowners facing an increase in air pollutants from diesel locomotives? The 47 killed in Lac-Megantic are a tragic reminder that shipping oil by rail is unambiguously worse for public safety.
Of course, Canadians and B.C. residents in particular have every right to demand that oil transported across mountain ranges and carried on ocean-going tankers minimize the risk of spills. But saying full stop to the pipeline is at best a virtue signal that they’re willing to make Canada poorer while our competitors continue the global carbon party.
In Alberta, Rachel Notley’s NDP government is facing a serious challenge from Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party. The UCP opposes the broad-based carbon levy and the rebates that give more cash to lower income Albertans than the tax takes from them. The loss of Alberta’s carbon tax and the billions in revenue for green technology, energy efficiency, and transit projects will make it even harder for Canada to meet its international commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. And, as UCP convention goers demonstrated recently by voting in favour of policy that notifies parents if their kids join a gay-straight alliance at school, Kenney’s UCP is unlikely to advance the social justice goals of progressives either.
To have any chance of retaining government next year, Premier Notley must have the pipeline expansion but her NDP counterpart in B.C. is doing his best to stop it. With progressive friends like that, Notley doesn’t need enemies.
Canadian oil makes up about five per cent of global production, but slowing one country’s production won’t dent world consumption.