The Trans Mountain saga is nearing its end - the larger debate will go on

In November 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went to Calgary to speak to the chamber of commerce. A crowd gathered outside the venue and chanted, "Build that pipe."

Trudeau might have re‐ sponded that he was trying to do just that - at least in re‐ gards to one pipeline. Trudeau's government had actually purchased the Trans Mountain pipeline six mon‐ ths earlier, with the stated purpose of ensuring its ex‐ pansion could be completed.

Five and a half years later, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland used her budget speech to celebrate the fact that the Trans Mountain ex‐ pansion is nearing comple‐ tion - an achievement she held out as evidence of what an "activist" federal govern‐ ment can accomplish.

Rising to respond a few minutes later, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre begged to differ. The lesson, he said, was the opposite - if the government had just got‐ ten out of the way, a private company would have built the pipeline.

The pipeline is almost complete. The debate, obvi‐ ously, is far from over.

Freeland's framing is a stretch. The federal govern‐ ment didn't set out to buy a pipeline - it was just willing to do so when that seemed to be the last remaining option.

But when Poilievre says the government should have gotten out of the way, he's aiming at the wrong govern‐ ment. It was the efforts however futile - of British Columbia's provincial govern‐ ment to stymie the project that led to Kinder Morgan's decision to walk away.

And though it was sug‐ gested at the time that the federal government should have somehow compelled or cajoled the NDP government in B.C. to get out of the way, it's worth remembering that the New Democrats were de‐ pendent on a confidenceand-supply agreement with Green MLAs that committed the provincial government to using "every tool available" to block the project.

Ultimately, it was federal ownership that rendered all such tools moot.

Why an 'anti-oil' prime minister built a pipeline

On the day oil begins to flow through the new pipeline, it will finally answer the doubts raised by Poilievre's prede‐ cessor in 2019 when the Trudeau government gave the project its final approval.

"I don't believe he actually wants it built," Andrew Scheer said of the prime min‐ ister.

It takes some imagination to believe Trudeau would agree to purchase a pipeline for $4.5 billion in public funds - inviting no end of crit‐ icism from progressive rivals and environmentalists - with‐ out intending to see the ex‐ pansion completed.

But you can easily under‐ stand the cognitive disso‐ nance some were experienc‐ ing at the time. This was, af‐ ter all, the prime minister de‐ scribed by Conservatives as the most "anti-oil" leader in Canadian history.

(Nine years into Trudeau's time as prime minister, Canada's oil production is at record highs.)

To fully understand how the Trudeau government en‐ ded up buying a pipeline, it might be necessary to review decades of inaction by count‐ less governments against the threat of climate change and their slight efforts to recon‐ cile meaningfully with Indige‐ nous peoples. By the time Trudeau came to office, pipelines had taken on a symbolic value well beyond the practical.

But when Trudeau went to Calgary's Petroleum Club in 2013, he embraced two clear positions. A price on carbon emissions needed to be part of a plan to responsi‐ bly develop Canada's re‐

sources, he said, but getting Canadian resources to new markets was in the national interest and something for which the federal govern‐ ment should be held respon‐ sible.

(He also said that while governments can issue per‐ mits, "only communities can grant permission" - a simplis‐ tic slogan that did not survive contact with the reality Trudeau faced in 2018.)

There was a straightfor‐ ward economic argument for building a new pipeline. If more Canadian oil could get to "tidewater," Canadian pro‐ ducers would be less depen‐ dent on the American market and would be able to charge a higher price. And by 2019 after the government had let Northern Gateway die and Energy East had been aban‐ doned - the Trans Mountain expansion was the only pipeline proposal left stand‐ ing.

But there may also have been a question of national unity. Albertans and their government might not be big fans of the federal govern‐ ment right now. It's fair to ask how much more negative the political climate might be if all efforts to build a pipeline out of the province had been thwarted.

The federal government might not recoup all of its in‐ vestment when it eventually sells the newly expanded pipeline, but it's hard to put a price on holding a country to‐ gether.

Politically, the purchase of the pipeline obviously didn't lead to great Liberal gains in Alberta. It also didn't save Rachel Notley's NDP govern‐ ment. And it may have hurt the Liberal Party with pro‐ gressive voters in other provinces. But the purchase didn't lead to the sort of elec‐ toral wipeout in B.C. that Lib‐ erals might have feared at the time.

The pipeline's nearly done. Now what?

As Freeland noted in her budget speech, the Bank of Canada now expects that the start of operations for the ex‐ pansion will have a measur‐ able impact on Canada's na‐ tional GDP. The Liberal gov‐ ernment has estimated the project will generate $500 million in corporate tax rev‐ enues. (The government has pledged that all profits will be directed toward clean en‐ ergy.)

At the same time, the Lib‐ erals surely will be criticized if the pipeline is sold at a loss. And they risk taking the heat for any spills or accidents that follow in the years ahead.

While his critics insisted that "climate leaders don't build pipelines" - another simplistic slogan - Trudeau positioned the project within the larger cause of transition‐ ing to a clean economy.

"To those who want sus‐ tainable energy and a cleaner environment, know that I want that too. But in order to bridge the gap between where we are and where we're going, we need money to pay for it," he said in 2019. "It is in Canada's national in‐ terest to protect our environ‐ ment and invest in tomorrow while making sure that peo‐ ple can feed their families to‐ day."

A prominent Albertabased environmentalist said oil executives told him build‐ ing the pipeline would better position them financially to make emissions-reducing in‐ vestments.

In 2021 - the most recent year for which official data is available - Canada's oil and gas sector accounted for 189 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, 28 per cent of the national total. The sec‐ tor's emissions are expected to have risen in 2022. And if, a decade from now, the sec‐ tor's emissions continue to rise and Canada has missed its emissions targets, Trans Mountain might be framed, fairly or not, as part of a larger failure.

But since buying Trans Mountain, the Trudeau gov‐ ernment has proposed new rules to reduce methane emissions for the industry and a cap on total emissions from the sector. The Liberals have also pledged billions of dollars toward subsidizing the development and use of carbon capture technology.

If nothing else, the flow of oil through the newly ex‐ panded pipeline might only strengthen the case for get‐ ting on with the work of re‐ ducing the oil industry's emissions.