Canada proves again it can’t get things done

If a history is ever written on the saga of Canada’s efforts to build the Trans Mountain pipeline, there will have to be a chapter labelled “H for Hummingbirds.”

Construction of the pipeline has been ordered delayed for four months after members of the Community Nest Finding Network in Burnaby, B.C., spotted a worker cutting down a tree containing a nest belonging to a species known as Anna’s hummingbird. Federal wildlife officers were alerted, which led to Environment and Climate Change Canada ordering the halt on the basis that “cutting vegetation and trees or carrying out other disruptive activities such as bulldozing or using chainsaws and heavy machinery in the vicinity of active nests will likely result in disturbance or destruction of those nests.”

Under the Migratory Birds Act any situation in which migratory birds might be killed, captured or their nests threatened is an offence. Hence, the pipeline — already on track to challenge Canada’s first transcontinental railway 150 years ago for most delayed construction undertaking by a federal government — must down tools once again. Anna’s hummingbird can now join activists, environmentalists, Indigenous communities and People with Placards in successfully slowing down, and adding costs, to what might otherwise be a fairly straightforward effort to transport a product that is in high demand and essential to the economy.

The National Post is the last organization that would want to harm a hummingbird, but this latest delay can’t help but add to the impression Canada is a country where it is very hard to get things done. One reason the Trans Mountain pipeline is needed is that proposals to build pipelines in the other direction — across the country to the Atlantic coast, where crude is currently imported from emission-spewing foreign regimes at great expense and environmental risk — can’t win approval because Quebec is against it. And if Quebec is against something … well, we better not get into that.

The decisions on issues like this are frequently made by people who live far away in Ottawa, some 4,300 kilometres from the tree containing the nest in question. Most don’t live near their offices in downtown Ottawa, which largely resembles a ghost town once civil servants finish their shifts. Nor do they favour tiny condominiums within walking distance of work. Instead, many drive — often alone in cars that can seat four or more — on roadways to suburbs containing homes large enough for spare bedrooms, which, like their cars and offices, have to be heated with the fuels that will be harder to ship because of the regulatory regimes they enforce.

Ottawa is in Ontario, where there is currently a drive to prevent construction of a new roadway. Highway 413 would start west of Toronto and head northeast, allowing truck traffic to bypass the city and reduce the constant crush on Highway 401, North America’s busiest highway, and one of the widest at 18 lanes as it passes Pearson International Airport, Canada’s busiest when it isn’t shuttered by pandemics. Opponents to Highway 413 include activists, environmentalists, People with Placards, journalists who live elsewhere and people who already own homes in the region and don’t want a new highway nearby. One of their key complaints is that the roadway would attract housing, factories and workplaces, and reduce farmland.

Canada currently has a housing crunch so dire it is being compared to the COVID crisis in terms of emergency status. The Globe and Mail, popular with many in Ottawa who make decisions for communities they rarely visit, carried a column this week headlined: “The housing boom is ripping apart the financial fabric of Canadian life.” The Toronto Star, widely read by Liberals and predictably horrified by the idea of a highway, insists Ottawa must absolutely do something about housing.

The western entrance to Highway 413 would be at Milton, ranked in 2019 by Maclean’s as the second fastest-growing town in Canada. Anyone who heads south from the town will pass by one spanking new development after another, field after field having been gobbled up as developers race to feed the demand for housing in and around the Lake Ontario horseshoe. New homes demand new roads, new malls, new workplaces. Milton’s southern march will soon meet with a parallel building boom running north from the lake, and the ever-growing communities of Brampton-mississauga to the east, creating one vast suburban conurbation fated to pour traffic onto the already overloaded network of aging roadways.

All these developments gobble up land at a rate that has somehow failed to prompt the outpouring of angst that has greeted Highway 413. Opponents condemn it as “sprawl,” while neglecting to suggest how else housing can be provided without building homes. But we already know that the job of activists, environmentalists, People with Placards and regulators in Ottawa is not to suggest solutions, but to oppose projects like roads and pipelines that serve the demands of Canadians and help keep the country solvent.

Opposing is easy. Canadians are very good at opposing. We’re not so good at getting things done. Maybe if we were, we’d have done a better job of battling the pandemic. But when indecision, delay, uncertainty, risk-aversion and equivocation embed themselves in the national character, doing nothing becomes a pass time rather than an excuse.

CANADIANS ARE VERY GOOD AT OPPOSING. WE’RE NOT SO GOOD AT GETTING THINGS DONE.