B.C./Alberta oil pipeline fight won’t end well

There’s a lurking sense that the B.C.Alberta pipeline fight will have more severe consequences than people might first expect. Inter-provincial trade arguments usually have an air of comedy about them. There has been an ongoing wrangle about buying booze in one province and drinking it in another. It raises issues of fairness, but in slapstick form, so it’s hard to take seriously. Alberta and Saskatchewan are just wrapping up another spat about whether workers with out-of-province licence plates are welcome at each other’s job sites. (Eye roll.)

And in the opening days of the pipeline fight, there have been moments of amusement. A Fort McMurray restaurant has taken B.C. wine off the menu to retaliate against B.C.’s move toward limiting increases in oil transport. (The Okanagan’s See Ya Later brand must have seen this coming.)

But the wine snub is likely about as funny as this is going to get.

Media are predisposed to inflame most arguments, so maybe it’s just conditioning that makes me expect the worst. But the stances B.C. and Alberta have taken are entrenched. The forces driving each government are extremely powerful. The political dynamics in each province push governments toward confrontation, not compromise. The amount of money at stake is vast and the value put on the coast is beyond measure.

It adds up to a disagreement so fundamental that it’s hard to picture a way past it that doesn’t have drastic repercussions.

The only thing that’s clear is that it’s up to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to solve it. His government is already deeply involved in the fight, since it approved the pipeline and holds most of the levers that will get it started. So whatever he does is going to be on the side of proceeding with the pipeline and getting much more Alberta bitumen in the pipeline flowing to many more tankers using the coast.

He stood pat at Nanaimo’s town hall meeting Friday, stressing that the Kinder Morgan line is part of a carbon-reduction strategy that caps oilsands emissions.

“It’s in the national interest to move ahead … we’ll be moving forward.”

Premier John Horgan said later B.C. didn’t come into Confederation “to be subservient to any other part of the country.”

He said the B.C. move is just to get an understanding of the “potential catastrophic impacts” of a spill, and wasn’t mean to be provocative. B.C. on the outs with Alberta on a major energy issue is bad. B.C. versus Alberta and Canada is much worse. There are two models for how this might play out, and neither ended well. One was the National Energy Program fight between Ottawa and Alberta in the 1980s. It was about oil as well, and became a protracted crisis that left scars still visible today. Trudeau might have memories of it, since his father started it.

The other was the War in the Woods in the 1990s, when hundreds of people protesting logging were charged and convicted in court.

The opening round of the renewed energy argument involved B.C. serving notice it will set limits on any increase in bitumen volume coming through B.C. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley responded by walking away from talks about enhancing the electricity connections between the provinces. That doesn’t amount to much. The talks are years away from producing anything, and the electricity trade isn’t a big-ticket item.

But there are more political moves to come from Alberta. And Ottawa has a much wider range of options.

B.C.’s strategy is to study and stall in hopes the company abandons the $7.3-billion project. If Horgan wavers in the slightest, the critical Green Party support could fade and his government could fall.

If Notley lets up, new Opposition Leader Jason Kenney will flatten her in the next election.

And Trudeau’s entire climate-change strategy is built around a compromise that allows the pipeline, one that is too far down the road to abandon.

It’s still just a spectator sport at this point, a political drama that people are watching with increasing interest.

But if the moves still to come start to hit at street level, and people start reacting personally, this argument will begin hitting home. Hundreds of thousands of people have life connections on both sides of the border. It would be a shame if the political stresses start to affect them.

Les Leyne covers the B.C. Legislature for the Victoria Times Colonist. This column appears weekly.