Notley giving Washington, D. C., a pass on first foreign visit

Premier says she’s not convinced U. S. politicians care what Alberta says

Rachel Notley is about to make her first international trip as premier.

Like so many of her predecessors, she’s going to New York to talk to the Wall Street crowd.

But unlike so many of her predecessors, she is not going to Washington, D. C. There’s no word on why she’s not going or whether she has plans to go there later.

Maybe she doesn’t see much point. You can’t blame her. It is debatable whether any of her predecessors managed to accomplish anything on their trips to the American capital.

In November 2001, Ralph Klein managed to get a 30- minute meeting with then- vice- president Dick Cheney.

“He expressed, I thought anyway, a very sincere interest in visiting the tarsands and seeing for himself the technology that is involved to extract the oil from the sands,” a jubilant Klein said after emerging from the White House. Yes, Klein said “tarsands.” Back then, Klein also blamed climate change on “dinosaur farts.”

Klein never did get Cheney to visit the tar … um, oilsands.

Perhaps thanks to Klein, when Ed Stelmach went to Washington, he was met with environmental protesters.

Alison Redford seemed to go to D. C. so often, you wondered if she had aspirations to run for Congress. After one lobbying visit in February 2013, Redford returned home to say she was “very optimistic” the Keystone XL pipeline was going to be approved: “I have been really pleased, not at all smug, but really happy that people are engaged.”

Of course, the pipeline wasn’t approved then. And it wasn’t approved after Jim Prentice went to Washington last February.

But the trips were more about influencing the votes back home in Alberta than influencing the votes in Congress or in the White House.

They were photo ops — and the closer to a provincial election, the better.

That seems to be going through Notley’s head as she plans a D. C.- free trip that will take her to Toronto, Montreal and New York next week.

“I was never really convinced that the people in Washington were spending a lot of time listening to what Alberta had to say,” Notley told reporters this week after making a speech to the Alberta Chambers of Commerce convention in Edmonton.

The fact is Notley is not interested in promoting the Keystone pipeline. She has said so many times before. It shouldn’t come as a shock that she has no problem with Hillary Clinton’s anti- Keystone policy that popped up Tuesday.

Notley said Clinton’s position “doesn’t have a significant impact” for the Alberta government.

That’s because Notley is focused on pushing for an agreement with Ontario and Quebec to get the Energy East pipeline project completed.

As for a pipeline to the West Coast, she’s not a fan of Northern Gateway, but is interested in plans to twin the existing Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.

Most of all, Notley is interested in encouraging more upgrading and refining of bitumen in Alberta before shipping it anywhere in pipelines.

That’s a big hurdle to jump; energy companies have expressed little interest in building another expensive upgrader in Alberta.

The old PC government got us involved in the North West Upgrader, a project that one former PC cabinet minister calls a “boondoggle” that could cost taxpayers billions of dollars. There is a glimmer of hope. Notley did get Canada’s premiers to sign on to a Canadian Energy Strategy in July to help get energy products to market.

It’s a vague document, so fuzzy you could wear it to bed, but it does offer hope that Notley can influence political leaders in Canada in a way no Alberta premier has ever done in Washington.