GIVE JUSTIN TRUDEAU CREDIT FOR SIMPLY SHOWING UP TO SPEAK TO CALGARY BUSINESS LEADERS. BUT THERE WAS NO SENSE OF URGENCY ABOUT THE OIL INDUSTRY CRISIS, WRITES KELLY MCPARLAND.
You have to give Justin Trudeau credit for turning up to deliver remarks on his energy policies in Calgary, where he’s made himself about as welcome as an expenses claim from Adrienne Clarkson.
Since 1972, when Trudeau’s father began a string of four consecutive elections without winning a seat in Alberta, the Liberals have elected a grand total of 10 Alberta members of Parliament spread over 14 elections. The four Trudeau won in 2015 tied the 1992 highwater mark in that string. Yet Jean Chrétien, previous holder of that record, grew so oblivious to Albertans he didn’t bother to have his plane land there in his final campaign.
The current prime minister seems more likely to match his father’s goose-egg than his 2015 tally. But he showed up to take the heat. Give him that.
Less impressive was his response to a suggestion that his government has no concrete plan for dealing with the gap between the price other oil producers get for oil, and the price Alberta gets. Premier Rachel Notley calculates the difference between Canadian and U.S. crude is costing the Canadian economy $80 million a day. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers figures the loss adds up to $13 billion in the first 10 months of 2018 alone.
Trudeau acknowledged the situation is “very much a crisis.” But then, pushed on Ottawa’s plans, he delivered a response that seemed to suggest the poor unenlightened locals didn’t understand the difficulties he faces.
“You think there’s a supersimple easy answer and there’s not,” he told Chamber of Commerce president Sandip Lalli.
“There’s a multi-faceted complex issue and as much as there is a tendency out there in the world to give really simple answers to really complex questions, unfortunately the world doesn’t work like that,” he said.
“We need to make sure that we’re moving forward in the right way and that is where actually listening to the experts is sort of the best way to make policy.”
If the prime minister had been speaking to a Grade 5 class in Ontario, or some other province where oil isn’t part of the local lifeblood, his remarks might have made sense. But he was speaking in Calgary, centre of the Canadian energy business. It’s a fair guess his audience contained quite a few executives who have spent a lifetime finding, extracting and shipping oil and gas. Their job requires a high level of expertise in negotiating the hoops and high jumps set up for them by regulators at various levels of government, which are regularly changed as new figures arrive on the federal and provincial stage.
Just three years ago, the arrival of Notley’s New Democrats represented a wrenching change in an industry accustomed to four decades of compliant Tories. That Calgary’s oil executives managed it is evidence of their skill set and ability to adapt. To be lectured on the complications of the business by a prime minister who was still giving snowboard lessons when they were dealing with one of the world’s most volatile and unpredictable commodities must have seemed a bit rich.
Not to the prime minister, however. One of the things we’ve learned about Justin Trudeau over his three years in office is that he occasionally slips loose from the official spin to reveal what’s actually running through his mind. It’s often embarrassing, such as his recent rush from the House of Commons to mock the opposition as “ambulance-chasing politicians” over their demand that childkiller Terri-Lynne McClintic be sent back to prison. (That one looked particularly foolish when his government buckled to public pressure and did exactly as suggested.) Or his belated discovery, when accused of groping a young woman, that men and women can see experiences in different lights.
It seems likely that when Trudeau suggested Lalli couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies of the oil business, he believed what he was saying. Because it’s very clear that those complexities have come as a revelation to Trudeau himself. Over the past six decades, Liberal governments in Ottawa have made crystal clear how little they understand the energy business. Usually their ignorance has been accompanied by a level of ambivalence that does a lot to explain their continual failure to deal effectively with one of Canada’s most crucial industries throughout those years. During his run for office, this prime minister treated the province’s long-standing distrust in the same way he handled other challenges: it would all be solved with good fellowship and honest discussions between wellmeaning Canadians.
“I understand how energy issues can divide the country,” he said in Calgary in 2015.” “But I also know that strong leadership can see us through the challenges we face. Not leadership by fiat but leadership that listens, that respects our differences while bringing people together and keeps the door open to new and innovative ideas.”
That being the case, wouldn’t it make sense for the prime minister to listen to the people in the industry who have decades of firsthand experience when they say that Bill C-69, which is to overhaul the review process for energy projects, will make a bad situation worse, ensuring pipelines and other essential infrastructure become impossible to build? Such is the desperation of the situation that Notley has suggested an emergency fleet of railcars be assembled to transport oil, given the government’s inability to get a pipeline built. It’s an unlikely plan that would barely count as a stopgap measure, but wouldn’t be suggested if the province hadn’t lost all faith that Ottawa knows a pipeline plan from a hole in the wall.
Trudeau did sit down with 11 oil and energy executives after his Calgary speech, but Lalli noted that “the sense of urgency was still not there.”
Why would it be? The Liberals haven’t seen anything urgent in Alberta in 60 years. Who else but a Liberal prime minister could suggest Calgary isn’t able to grasp the complexities of the energy business as acutely as the mandarins and aides who advise him in Ottawa?