If Alberta is going to ‘fight,’ we need to focus

Efforts to save Bill 12 and to hold vote on equalization are simply distractions

While it’s true that the two parties most likely to prevail in the Oct. 21 federal election are both publicly committed to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (TMX), there is still cause for concern for Alberta when it comes to possible postelection scenarios.

Both the NDP and the Green party explicitly oppose TMX, and both parties support other policies that could make future energy infrastructure projects a total non-starter. The odds of either an NDP or a Green government are long, but a scenario where either or both hold the balance of power in a minority parliament is all too plausible.

Therefore, it’s possible that Alberta may have a big problem on its hands (or, an even bigger problem, depending on one’s assessment of the Liberal record on this point) with the next federal government and needs to be ready to respond in a focused and meaningful way.

Our current provincial government has made no secret of its eagerness to “fight back” against opponents of our oil and gas industry. But when it comes to dealing with other governments within Canada, we’re picking the wrong fights and deploying the wrong strategies.

Take the B.C. government, for example. It certainly did appear at one point that B.C. could be a serious irritant when it came to moving forward with TMX. However, it’s now clear that the B.C. government was more bark than bite.

John Horgan’s government suffered a resounding legal defeat on the question of whether it could regulate the flow of bitumen across its territory, which turned out to be basically its only gambit. When the B.C. Court of Appeal recently sent some environmental permits for TMX back to the B.C. government, the province’s attorney general acknowledged that it had no power to block or delay those permits. For all intents and purposes, B.C. has waved the white flag.

So why are we still holding onto Bill 12, our so-called “turn off the taps” legislation? B.C. last week won a temporary injunction against the law so that its constitutionality can be further scrutinized. Premier Jason Kenney has suggested that the law may be “tweaked” if necessary, but he remains supportive of it.

The law was always constitutionally problematic and at this point seems to have been rendered totally moot. The existence of the law has done nothing to advance the cause of TMX and was irrelevant in B.C.’S realization of its own limitations.

We should take the L

(which in this case is really a W) and move on from Bill 12. Instead, it appears as though we’ll continue wasting money “tweaking” and fighting for a law that we don’t need in the first place.

And in addition to an unnecessary court fight for an unnecessary law, we are also, it seems, hell bent on an unnecessary referendum.

Kenney vowed last week that a referendum on equalization could still be in the works regardless of who prevails in the federal election, if the equalization formula isn’t overhauled. The premier has suggested that a coastal pipeline and the removal of C-69 (Ottawa’s new regulatory process) and C-48 (the west coast tanker ban) might negate the need for the referendum, but still believes equalization needs to be fixed.

There are other federal programs that may indeed be shortchanging Alberta (the Fiscal Stabilization Program stands out as an obvious one), but there is no change to equalization that would send or leave a single dime here in Alberta.

The equalization program might symbolize our frustration with how Alberta is taken for granted in this confederation, but a referendum is a pretty costly way of essentially just shaking our fist at the rest of the country.

If we’re going to “fight,” we need focus. The push to save Bill 12 and the push for an equalization referendum represent needless distractions that don’t help our cause. Hopefully we can regain some focus for the fights that lie ahead.