Premier offers defiance but not much else
Premier Rachel Notley came out swinging. Or maybe it was just flailing.
Because, in the face of the Federal Court of Appeal’s cancellation of the Trans Mountain pipeline approval, there’s not much she can do.
Notley said in a televised speech she will withdraw Alberta from the federal climate change plan.
This is not a shocker. She’s always said that without the pipeline Alberta won’t be able to afford higher carbon pricing.
Notley also asked for Parliament to be recalled to deal legislatively with the issues raised by the court ruling.
How? It’s unclear. But the NDP appears to think Ottawa could pass legislation exempting the National Energy Board from considering marine transit.
The feds, meanwhile, say only that it’s solidly behind the project.
But legally, there’s no longer a project. And there can’t be until Ottawa fulfils more demands for First Nations involvement and (this is the really big one) takes marine transportation into account.
This is a disaster — economic, political and even constitutional.
After winning 17 straight court rulings, the Trans Mountain pipeline lost the big one, and the whole deal is suddenly legally void.
And this happened Thursday, at the very moment Kinder Morgan shareholders were voting to dump the project on Canadian taxpayers, in return for $4.5 billion.
The Federal Court of Appeal panel of three judges rejected the project thunderously but also said the problems can be rectified fairly quickly.
Are they joking ? It took them nearly a year to reach a decision with dire consequences for the Canadian economy and even national unity.
A Supreme Court challenge to the ruling, or the necessary further consultation with First Nations, will not soon be resolved, if those efforts can succeed at all, and then escape further legal challenge. Construction is now halted. The earliest Notley sees it restarting is early next year. She instantly added that this is optimistic.
She’s angry, she said, and possibly embarrassed too.
The Notley government has been trumpeting the ramp-up to full construction.
The premier appears at staging points for photo ops. Now this pipeline could become a hideously expensive white elephant.
Both Ottawa and the Alberta NDP assumed that federal court approval, based on the failure of many earlier legal challenges, was a sure thing.
On that basis, the NDP committed up to $2 billion in backstop investment.
The rejection is poisonous for any NDP chances for re-election.
Jason Kenney and the UCP, as well as the federal Conservatives, are fiercely critical, and they have a point.
In retrospect, the crucial error may have been the Trudeau government’s decision to drop the Northern Gateway project after a similar court rejection.
That left one alternative — a pipeline terminal in a densely populated Lower Mainland area where serious resistance was inevitable. The court made a big deal about how many people are potentially affected. Now, the consequences for the Trudeau government are clear and dangerous. This was the signpost project — the federal statement that Canada can secure new energy markets and national works can be built.
And it’s stopped cold, with no alternatives, at the very moment Trump’s America is making it obvious that Canada desperately needs a truly national economy.
The panel judges had two main reasons — inadequate consultation with First Nations, and the refusal to consider maritime shipping as part of the approval process.
“The (National Energy) Board made one critical error,” the ruling said. “The Board unjustifiably defined the scope of the Project under review not to include Project-related tanker traffic.
“The unjustified exclusion of marine shipping from the scope of the Project led to successive, unacceptable deficiencies in the Board’s report and recommendations.”
The irony in this is both bitter and brutal.
Ottawa is already dishing out the $1.5 billion it promised to improve coastal spill protection, as part of the pipeline agreement.
On holiday in Nanaimo recently, I counted seven vessels in the harbour bearing a big “Spill Response” logo.
Nanaimo is the main base for the Vancouver Island spill response. Ottawa has released $150 million, including $10 million for construction of a headquarters building. In total, the feds will spend $1.5 billion.
The island effort includes secondary bases in Sidney, Beecher Bay and Port Alberni.
There will be two major bases on the Lower Mainland, with a total of 40 new vessels overall.
All this is new and federally funded. By the time it’s all done, B.C.’s coastal waters will almost certainly have the best spill response system on the planet.
All in return for a pipeline that is now officially invalid.
Kenney told reporters the spill spending should be halted because it was meant to respond to increased tanker traffic from Trans Mountain.
People in B.C.’s Interior, meanwhile, are deeply concerned by the escalating volume of oil shipments by rail.
On our travels, we saw dozens of trains with hundreds of tanker cars. This is the true spill danger in the making.
Both Notley’s office and the PMO have been nervous about the ruling for months, given the extraordinary delays.
Nonetheless, the worst they expected was a divided court with one judge dissenting.
But this? Flat rejection on two separate grounds — consultation and marine concerns — either one of which would have killed the approval?
Nothing in an unbroken string of earlier court rulings gave a hint of this. This is self-destruction of a purely Canadian kind.
The Board unjustifiably defined the scope of the Project under review not to include Project-related tanker traffic.