Kenney lauds defeat of ban

Committee rejects Bill C-48

Premier Jason Kenney is calling for a full-court press to kill Ottawa’s proposed B.C. coast tanker ban now that it has been defeated in a Senate committee.

Kenney says he hopes the full Senate will follow the lead of its transportation and communications committee and reject Bill C-48.

He says that in the meantime he hopes to rally support for his cause by meeting with Alberta senators next week and having his energy minister head to Ottawa to make Alberta’s case to senators there.

The Alberta legislature will also be putting forward a motion next week calling for the Senate to reject the bill.

Bill C-48 would put into law a long-standing voluntary moratorium on coastal tanker traffic between the northern tip of Vancouver Island and the Alaska border, something Alberta says would frustrate efforts to grow its oil industry.

The House of Commons passed the bill a week ago.

Kenney says he will also keep pushing to have the Senate reject Bill C-69, proposed legislation opponents say would make it difficult to get future energy megaprojects approved.

“We will continue to work on behalf of Albertans in speaking truth to power,” Kenney said Thursday.

Dozens of amendments to Bill C-69 were also approved by a Senate committee on Thursday. Bill C-69 is supposed to improve the way the environmental impact of major energy and transportation projects are evaluated, making the assessments more stringent so that they are less likely to fail court challenges.

Kenney, who has labelled the bill the “No More Pipelines Act,” has warned of a national unity crisis if the legislation passes unchanged. In one of his first acts as a new premier he headed to Ottawa to fight it.

“I made it clear in both official languages that, if passed, that bill would jeopardize national unity and undermine our shared prosperity as Canadians by creating massive additional investor uncertainty, that would scare away job-creating investment and would make it impossible for companies to come forward with future potential pipelines,” he said in Calgary Thursday.

The amendments approved by the Senate’s energy, environment and natural resources committee would reduce cabinet discretion to intervene in the assessment process, make it harder for anyone to initiate court challenges to decisions on projects and change how climate-change impacts are considered. Some are wordfor-word what was proposed by energy lobby groups.

Kenney pronounced himself pleased with the changes but said he wants to see what happens with the final law. The Senate as a whole must now decide whether to accept or reject the amendments, which environmentalists say would gut the bill.

Any amendments to government bills approved by the Senate must go back to the House of Commons where the government decides whether to accept, reject or modify them and sends the bill back to the upper house.

So far, during Trudeau’s mandate, appointed senators have not insisted on any of their amendments after they’ve been rejected by the elected chamber.