Continental Divide never looked bigger
Isuppose you have all read about the emerging “t rade war ” between British Columbia and Alberta over the proposed expansion of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain oil pipeline between Sherwood Park and Burnaby. This week B. C. premier John Horgan suggested that his province could delay construction of the new pipe, which parallels an existing route, while a “scientific panel” yet to be created studies the unique risks of a spill of diluted bitumen — the form in which hydrocarbons from the Alberta oilsands are shipped to refineries as a liquid.
The Trans Mountain expansion has already been reviewed by the federal government’s National Energy Board and approved. The NEB was fully aware of, and accounted for, the presence of “dilbit” in the product mix to be pushed through the pipeline. Trans Mountain is actually used for many different kinds of stuff: a load of semi- refined dilbit can be followed, down the same pipe, by highly refined aviation fuel that more or less goes directly from the western terminal to the Vancouver airport.
No one has any known concerns with the risk of a jet- fuel leak in the outer Vancouver suburbs. Those 14-hour flights to Hong Kong aren’t run on hamster-wheel power, you know. The B. C. government is happy to let ultra- volatile liquids pass over sacred soil if they are for locally convenient uses. For stuff that Alberta wants to sell to foreign markets for its own benefit, one ounce is one ounce too many.
The special concern with dilbit is a pseudo- scientific contrivance designed to allow Horgan to meet, or at least take a step toward, his l oud campaign promises to thwart Trans Mountain. Now, even if you don’t believe that, you can understand that Horgan is threatening to conjure an all- new improvised layer of environmental regulation here. Even if you are convinced that it was spilled dilbit that killed Tasha Yar in “Skin of Evil,” you can see the unfairness of Horgan imagineering an infinite regress of scientific panels — each one surely more scientific than the last! — to injure a neighbour’s economy for his own electoral welfare.
The truth, however, is that B.C.’s New Democratic premier knows the hand-wringing about dilbit is B. S. And so does Alberta’s New Democratic premier. And so does just about everybody in Alberta. Yes, we Albertans have been busy this week preparing for border war: there is so much to do, what with the need to make propaganda posters, train commandos for mountain- pass warfare, dig victory gardens, and relabel all the Nanaimo bars “Liberty squares.”
Sadly, it probably won’t come down to shooting war, but will remain in the crystal blue elysium of political manoeuvring. If it did come to a fight, Alberta would have a pretty big fifth column operating on its behalf across the legal border. I have a running joke with friends that I have occasionally referred to in print: it’s the idea that there exists a “Greater Alberta” that includes sizable parts of Saskatchewan and, in particular, B.C.
The so- called Peace River block that spans the border is one economic unit, and people at its western end, jealous of having ended up on the wrong side of a discontinuity in taxation, have actually agitated in the past for secession from British Columbia. And, as many have pointed out in the feverish climate of interprovincial hostility, the jagged southeast corner of B.C. has significant transmontane cultural and economic ties, too. It looks, on a flat map, like it ought to “belong” to Alberta. ( In real-world topography, on the other hand, the Continental Divide is definitely a thing that it is hard not to notice.)
In short, almost everybody is now making my “Greater Alberta” semi- sorta- kind-a-joke. But this is not really a Greater Alberta thing. At almost every point of the compass, that B.C. map is full of resource employees who are watching with distaste as their NDP government acts like an NDP government. This is surely a real moral advantage for Alberta in the grand struggle — but, remember, there are genuine practical gains for Horgan from his theatrical eco-rectitude: right now the motivating passion of his life, from dawn to dusk, is to persuade Green voters to turn orange.
Meanwhile, Alberta’s position is perhaps not without weaknesses. Albertans can be heard appealing this week to the Prime Minister, fella name of Trudeau, and to the federal government as the proper constitutional arbiter for large infrastructure projects that cross provincial borders. I can only add that it is kind of funny the friends you see folks try to make if you live long enough.
The Ottawa- defying playbook that Horgan is following was written in Alberta long ago. This battle is not really a “trade war” per se: the economic benefit that the pipeline expansion will provide directly to B. C. is a microscopic fraction of what better access to tidewater would do for the realized earnings from Alberta oil. Alberta is not, in essence, asking B.C. to participate in a mutually beneficial exchange: it is just asking it to behave as though we all live in a federation.
This means that for Alberta’s government to try devising economic sanctions against B.C. will just be an exercise in cutting off a nose to spite a face. Alberta, alas, has nothing to hold over B.C. that can compare to a coastline.