Pipelines, politics and the ‘Pinocchio rating’ for those who stretch the truth

It doesn’t seem like much of a “cross-country tour.”

Premier Rachel Notley’s propipeline expedition took her to Toronto and Ottawa on Monday and Tuesday, and is now taking her all the way to, um, Calgary on Friday. She’ll be speaking to the city’s chamber of commerce.

Next week, she’ll travel to Vancouver to speak to the city’s board of trade before delivering her final pro-pipeline speech Dec. 7 to a group not noted for its anti-pipeline stance: the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce.

But there is method to her “cross-country” madness.

This is not a shotgun approach to promote any old pipeline to as many people as possible. Notley is targeting business leaders on Bay Street and federal politicians in Ottawa, as well as B.C.’s business elites in Vancouver.

This is a tour to highlight the expansion of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline designed to pump more of Alberta’s oil and bitumen to the West Coast for shipment to Asia.

Notley needs construction of the project to begin in 2018 to have a fighting chance in the 2019 provincial election. She wants to point to her government’s work, specifically its climate leadership plan and carbon tax, as having won “social licence” to get the pipeline done.

At the same time, the Official opposition is happily predicting her cross-country tour will fail.

Heading up the anti-cheerleading squad is United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney, who has already said Notley’s social licence policy is a “total failure.”

That’s premature, to say the least. The federal government gave conditional approval to the Kinder Morgan expansion a year ago precisely because of Notley’s climate change policy.

The project, which seems to have stalled for now, could still get underway in 2018. If so, Notley’s policy could then be deemed a success. Not that Kenney or the UCP would ever admit that.

They’re already in election mode.

Kenney is accusing Notley of hypocrisy, of campaigning against pipelines while in opposition, but reluctantly supporting them now.

As proof, Kenney offered up an old quote from Notley on Tuesday about her apparent opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline: “In May of 2015, Premier Notley made it clear that, ‘We’re against it.’ She was against the Keystone XL pipeline.”

But here is the whole quote from Notley in a CBC interview on May 2, 2015: “We’re against it ... because the way it’s currently proposed is to ship unprocessed bitumen and that is not good for Albertans.”

Notley and the NDP didn’t oppose pipelines in general; they opposed specific pipelines that shipped jobs to the U.S.

This is not a one-off exaggeration from Kenney. When it comes to painting the truth, he regularly colours outside the lines. He claims, for example, the NDP “lied” about the carbon tax in the 2015 election. Well, you could say the NDP didn’t mention a carbon tax, but that’s not the same.

He says Trudeau “killed” the Northern Gateway project. Well, Trudeau gave up on the project in 2016 after the Federal Court of Appeal overturned approval of the proposed pipeline.

The court ruled the former federal Conservative government (the one in which Kenney was a cabinet minister) had failed to properly consult First Nations affected by the project.

All politicians exaggerate and demonize their opponents. Alberta’s NDP, for example, accuses opposition politicians of supporting the firing of teachers and nurses to cut costs. It’s true the UCP wants to cut costs and that could conceivably lead to job losses, but that’s not the same as campaigning for layoffs.

Kenney, though, seems to be making exaggeration and rhetorical overreach an art form. There is hardly a speech or even a comment from Kenney that doesn’t include a fact that has been given a deep-muscle massage.

The Washington Post uses a “Pinocchio rating” to chart U.S. President Donald Trump’s inaccuracies on a scale of one to four.

Perhaps we should do the same with Kenney using a stretchynose icon, one where the nose could stretch nice and long — maybe as long as a pipeline to tidewater.