It was Sunday morning. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had just met with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and British Columbia Premier John Horgan, laying down the line for Horgan that this pipeline will be built.
This pipeline, of course, is the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Expansion Project.
But after watching the live press conferences afterwards for Notley and Trudeau, I wonder if perhaps it would have been more useful sitting in church, praying for pipelines. I know my mom would think so.
While Trudeau talked tough, and talked about investing in the line itself, I came away from the experience thinking that precious little had changed, that Horgan is going to be just as obstinate, and that he did not receive the metaphorical beat down so many pro-pipeline people thought he deserved.
In the pipeline wars, the Trans Mountain campaign was not won on this battle. Indeed, it hardly counted as a skirmish.
I don’t think anyone truly believes the British Columbia government’s “use every tool in the toolbox” stance has changed one iota.
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe sure doesn’t. The next day he shared a National Post story on how the federal government promises $4.1 billion for B.C. infrastructure. Moe commented, “So the Trudeau government plans to withhold $62 million in green infrastructure funding from Saskatchewan because we are refusing to impose a job-killing carbon tax.
“But they just gave $4.1 billion for infrastructure funding to B.C., whose NDP government is blocking construction of the Trans-Mountain pipeline.
“Is the Prime Minister actually serious about getting the pipeline built?”
It likely would have been unrealistic to expect Horgan to have simply caved at the Sunday morning meeting with Trudeau and Notley. At the head of a government propped up by the Green Party, every day his job is on the line. If he loses their support, he’s done as premier.
You also don’t get to be premier or prime minister without being alpha male or female of their domain. So now we have to see if Prime Minister Trudeau is truly the Alpha of Canadian politics, or not.
His idea of taking some sort of financial position in the pipeline, along the lines of what Notley was talking about a week ago, is not necessarily a good idea. In fact, many people in the oilpatch, capitalists all, absolutely cringe at the concept. Warren Waldegger, CEO of Estevan-based Fire Sky Energy, tweeted, “Kinder Morgan doesn’t need public money, they need predictable governance. The Trans Mountain Pipeline has been approved... or has it?”
Government doesn’t need to run pipelines. We have very competent companies who have done so for many decades. What happened to government ownership of SaskOil and PetroCanada? Gone, a long time ago. And look at how they have done since? PetroCanada was bought by Suncor. The roots of Nexen are found in SaskOil. SaskOil, as a Crown, would have never become a Nexen. (The last I checked, Nexen no longer had a presence in Saskatchewan, either, having abandoned its roots.)
Pipelines used to be approved and built in a few short years, not the better part of a decade from proposal to scratching dirt, if ever. This is not rocket science, folks. There is nothing new here. It does not take more time to study a pipeline than to fight a world war, especially if that pipeline is following an existing right-of-way.
Trudeau is not the only one to blame here. The Stephen Harper Conservative government allowed this ridiculousness to get out of hand during its watch. There is absolutely no reason that Northern Gateway or Energy East were not proposed, built and completed before the end of their mandate. The Conservatives allowed pipeline approvals to get hijacked, bloated and effectively impossible. The Trudeau government has just followed on, allowing two projects to die because they didn’t suit the Liberals.
We need a reset, all right. We don’t need more pipeline regulation. We need it streamlined. And we need projects built. Tens of billions of dollars have fled the Canadian oilpatch as a result of this.
How do we fix this? The next federal government needs to run on the idea of a reset. Northern Gateway was approved and Energy East should have been. Invite the original proponents to start construction the month after the new government takes power. Approve several LNG projects and their associated pipelines, too. Get this country moving again.
Maybe then we can stop going broke with continual deficits.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net
