And in this corner...
YOU CAN’T TELL THE PLAYERS IN THE TRANS MOUNTAIN SAGA WITHOUT A SCORECARD
Yes, it’s true: the hilarious merry-go-round of contradictions created by the fight over the Trans Mountain pipeline has completed a full revolution now. We have all, somehow, grown accustomed to the spectacle of a Prime Minister Trudeau who agitates aggressively on behalf of the Alberta oilpatch. We have seen a New Democratic governing caucus in Alberta, full of young MLAs whose arms are scarcely recovered from waving around handmade signs about DIRTY OIL, stay miraculously in formation behind an Alberta premier fighting to get a pipeline built from the tar sands to the briny blue.
The premier is doing this over the objections of a British Columbia NDP government, and no one seems to remember that most of her political career, before she came into her inheritance in Alberta, was spent working for a British Columbia NDP government. (There is definitely a parallel Earth on which the B.C. premier struggling to save local beaches from filthy Alberta dilbit is named Rachel Notley.)
And now comes the spectacle of the federal government nationalizing a pipeline — with the unanimous approval of Alberta conservatives, who, being conservatives, typically oppose dirigiste industrial policy on principle, and who, being Albertans, still haven’t finished grumbling about the form it took in the 1970s oilpatch, under Trudeau 1.0.
The contradictions are getting weirder, it almost seems, by the hour. Premier Notley getting the stinkeye from the other New Democrats throughout Confederation has become familiar, but when the federal purchase of the Trans Mountain pipe was announced, an equally curious gap opened up between Alberta United Conservative leader Jason Kenney and the conservative-branded politicians elsewhere.
Kenney was in no position to denounce the federal government’s action: “We are glad that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion was not permanently cancelled today,” he said, and he even added that the United Conservatives “are prepared in principle to support the Alberta government’s commitment of up to $2 billion in fund to indemnify the Trans Mountain operator from delays caused by political or legal uncertainty.” His only concern is that the Trans Mountain expansion may not now be built: the fundamental arrangement of political forces, in his view, has not changed just because Canada will now own the pipe.
Which might be right! (Provincial governments, all other things being equal, prefer to have Ottawa as an enemy: that’s a gift that has now been presented to B.C.’s Horgan, for him to make of it what he can.) But Kenney definitely will not be endorsing the view of federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who complained that “Canadians will pay $4.5 billion for a 60-year-old pipeline” — apparently taking the naive view that most of the economic value of a pipeline comes from the metal it’s made of — or the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, whose Aaron Wudrick highlighted the “cost and risk” of government involvement in the Trans Mountain expansion just as former CTF employee J. Kenney, Esq., was supporting that in principle.
The CTF’s critique was oddly harmonious with the response to the nationalization news of B.C. Green leader Andrew Weaver. Weaver raged that the Liberals should not be “spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money to buy out a fossil fuel expansion project ... Investing in this pipeline is like investing in the horse-andbuggy industry at the advent of the car.” Spoken like a true conservative! Albeit with a few unfamiliar grace notes about killer whales and Paris targets.
(And, by the way, Weaver technically deserves another “He might be right!” here. It is hypothetically possible that the solar-powered minivan will materialize on your neighbourhood Hyundai lot so soon that the economic benefits of Trans Mountain pipeline tolls evaporate before TrudeauPipeCorp can capture them.)
The rhyming reactions of the Taxpayers Federation and the B.C. Greens are a clear hint that we are seeing political opportunism rather than genuine economic reasoning at work. Governments are bad at running businesses, but, as the actual economists largely seem to agree this week, the Trans Mountain pipeline is a business entity that lacks a lot of the dangers we associate with government ownership.
The revenue forecasting and the physical planning for the pipeline expansion are all complete, and since it is an expansion, the rightsof-way are not much of a problem, unless we are talking about moral rights-ofway. It was only regulatory risk that dissuaded a hydrocarbon giant from going ahead. (Then again, maybe Kinder Morgan really is battening down the hatches for Andrew Weaver’s freeenergy paradise.)
Once the new pipeline is built, the stream of toll revenue and the costs of upkeep should be fairly easy to evaluate and sell as a bundle on the market. Oil is a commodity: operating a pipeline is not like opening a ladies’ shoe factory. Or, for that matter, even a hospital or a school.