A COSTLY BUT CRUCIAL BUY

The federal government has announced it is buying the Trans Mountain pipeline, the expansion project to twin it, and all of Kinder Morgan’s core Canadian assets for $4.5 billion, plus other costs.

That’s one way to get a pipeline built. Nationalizing a major infrastructure project from Canada’s private sector is not how the process is supposed to work, but little about the Trans Mountain expansion has gone the way it ought to, according to either rule of law or convention.

Instead, an energy company that has followed the rules in good faith, spent more than a billion dollars in development and undergone exhaustive vetting to win regulatory approval has been impeded at every turn by opponents, including the government of British Columbia and the cities of Burnaby and Vancouver with what amount to nuisance court actions, given how Kinder Morgan has so far won 16 of these legal challenges in a row.

For its part, the Trudeau government greenlighted Trans Mountain in November 2016 and has long insisted the project is in the national interest because Canada loses $15 billion every year as a result of currently limited access to export markets outside the U.S.

But before Tuesday’s announcement, Ottawa had done little to advance the project. Despite its constitutional authority over the interprovincial pipeline, the federal government brushed off the impasse as a sibling spat between B.C. and Alberta — ignoring or failing to recognize that by stalling Trans Mountain, B.C. Premier John Horgan was thumbing his nose not at Alberta, but Ottawa.

Perhaps when the federal government is paying the bills, it will take B.C.’s stonewalling of Trans Mountain more seriously.

So instead of settling these jurisdictional issues or enforcing its will, the Trudeau government has decided to spend its way out of trouble.

Direct government investment is far from the preferred solution, but not entirely unprecedented either. Justin’s father, Pierre Trudeau, created Petro-Canada in the 1970s to further domestic energy interests, while the Alberta government rescued Syncrude by bringing in other government partners to take ownership stakes.

And let’s not forget 2009, when the federal and Ontario governments spent more than $13 billion to bail out North American automakers.

Nationalizing Trans Mountain is a drastic and costly step, but this is a case of the end result justifying the means, so vital is this pipeline to the Alberta and Canadian economies.

What’s ironic is by obstructing Trans Mountain so effectively, Horgan and other pipeline opponents will now be among its part owners.