The B.C.-Alberta battle is bigger than a pipeline,
On Sunday morning, Jason Kenney — who would certainly be at the top of the board if there were betting on the next premier of Alberta — tweeted a link about the Trans Mountain pipeline crisis with the comment: “Canada is broken.” This seemingly flippant remark made a lot of people angry, and most everybody who got angry dutifully retweeted it, thus creating the phenomenon sound engineers call “reverb.”
For the record, it’s remotely possible that Kenney, the recently elected leader of Alberta’s opposition, knows nothing about how to win an election in Alberta, although the evidence against that looks awfully strong (including his skilful use of social media). He was chastised for being unpatriotic, but this is perhaps a case of semantic confusion. If you are outside Alberta it may have sounded like the United Conservative Party leader was criticizing a spiritual idea or an object of psychological identification we call “Canada”: the kind of thing that a flag and an anthem and a Stompin’ Tom Connors LP stand for. If you are inside Alberta, it is easier to see that Kenney was complaining about something else: a clump of political arrangements that also go by the name of “Canada.”
What Kenney alleges is broken is the arrangement between one province — this province — and the rest of the place. And he has some reason to expect Albertans will not only agree, but will admire him for saying so.
Canada as a political scheme still has much to be said for it — even within Alberta, even now. The truth is that the conflict over the Trans Mountain pipeline is, at root, a matter of what is often called NIMBYism: the determination of a local group of people to resist a project being imposed upon them in the name of wider social or economic benefits. And we ought to admit that there is an illiberal aspect to any great public work like a pipeline. There are countries that find it relatively easy to build them. This is, for example, a much-admired feature of the People’s Republic of China. (Just ask Justin Trudeau!)
A pipeline crisis — or an argument about a dam or a nuclear plant — could happen anywhere, probably even in China. The thing that makes this one painful is not so much the distinctiveness of Canada, but the weirdness of Alberta. The Albertan attitude toward Confederation, as distinguished from the transcendent spiritual entity called Canada, is a little like Quebec’s: to Alberta (during peacetime, at least) Confederation is an object of negotiation, more often than it is something demanding unconditional loyalty. And these days even that marriage of convenience fails to deliver the necessary convenience.
Political Canada is a club that extracts a high economic rent from Alberta, and which in return is supposed to offer certain practical benefits, such as unimpeded access to export markets, including access to coastlines. This is not primarily a matter of sentiment. It is more like expecting your cable and your internet to work when you want to use them. And when they don’t, kind words from Ottawa do not much help, any more than a chirpy customer-support recording saying “Your call is important to us” does. (“Your oil money is important to us. Please hold for the next available representative.”)
In taking the side of a NIMBY minority that enjoys circumstantial political leverage, the B.C. government has picked an awkward time to make trouble for a neighbour. Employment rates (particularly male ones), welfare rolls and the provincial budget all show that Alberta’s recovery from an oil-driven recession remains sluggish and incomplete. At a time like this, Alberta is somewhat awash in idle or underused human capital, and that is a special recipe for rage. Economic migrants from other parts of Canada, skilled labourers and engineers with university degrees are all waiting around for the chance to recoup personal investments. This is a factor in the Alberta neurosis that one might miss if one is monitoring only the fast-improving top-line unemployment figures.
Alberta is a place in which tradesmen and oilpatch workers enjoy unusual political power, as well as strong bargaining power in the labour market during good times. In a strange way, publicly owned oil and gas have made it a workers’ paradise worthy of Marx: the roads are literally smoothed for those who wear overalls to work; economic life and domestic politics are organized for their benefit.
The federal government is taking Alberta’s side on the Trans Mountain dispute because it knows there is no easy replacement for Alberta oil, either in Ottawa or in Grande Prairie. When the prime minister supports Alberta in the pipeline struggle, but then tells foreign audiences he would like to see the Alberta oilsands shut down, he is not double-dealing. He is defining a difficulty — a contradiction, if you like — that really exists.
Environmentalists like to tell us that everyone in Canada is implicated in the great carbon crime. But Albertans can easily see that B.C.’s NIMBYs insist on a contrived distinction between diluted bitumen — an allegedly Satanic new invention with terrifying and unpredictable chemical qualities — and the avgas, which not only lets Vancouver have an airport, but which is also safe and inert and presumably tastes of strawberries. The hypocrisy of this is what Alberta’s social-democratic government hopes to make clear to the public of the Lower Mainland by passing bills that threaten to interfere with the delivery of Alberta’s supply of hydrocarbons for B.C.’s local use. (Oil companies hate anything that savours of nationalization or government interference, and would prefer if these threats worked without having to be applied.)
In the long run the Trans Mountain crisis, however resolved, is probably destined to dwindle in perceived significance and become a mere incident. This always tends to be true of resource transport and export issues that take over the news. For the most part only historians could give you as much as 30 seconds of detail, ex tempore, on Canada’s Pipeline Debate of 1956. Even Albertans mostly remember the savage economic results of the National Energy Program much more clearly than they could describe the actual content of the program.
The Trans Mountain expansion was supposed to be the end-product of a political negotiation to which the people on B.C.’s coast were not really parties, and which they cannot be expected to honour for its own sake — which is why the government of Alberta is in the slightly preposterous position of having to pressure the government of B.C. politically.
It’s a bit like Allied strategic bombing in the Second World War. Before the Allies could land troops in continental Europe, bombing was the only choice on the menu. Hamburg got the worst punishment because of its geography, not because of its level of Nazism. (Alberta’s recent war against B.C. wine, since abandoned but revivable on a moment’s notice, was in practice the same sort of unfair but strategic air raid on the Okanagan Valley.)
What we remember about the National Energy Program is that it was part of a wider struggle between West and East. That division in Canadian life has been sorted out, pretty much, successfully defused by Albertans’ capture and renovation of the historic Conservative party.
But the Trans Mountain fight is a sign of two subtly different, hard-to-specify solitudes reasserting themselves: not metropolis versus hinterland, not even resource-digging Canada versus theme-park Canada, and not quite a class struggle between industrial workers and sedentary bourgeoisie, but with heavy elements of all three. This bigger story isn’t going away, and isn’t about one piece of pipe, however precious.
KIND WORDS FROM OTTAWA DO NOT MUCH HELP.