Pipeline to Nowhere

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s success in his first year has been to successfully convey an image of being the “smartest guy in the room.”

Even if you question some of his decisions, his steady-as-she-goes approach is reassuring. It has allowed him to accumulate a surprising degree of political capital – both at home and abroad.

But all that will evaporate if he keeps trying to dig up the zombie corpse of the Northern Gateway pipeline.

The push to revive Northern Gateway comes from Danielle Smith with the usual suspects backing her. Headlines in the American-owned National Post talk about Western “rage” over the lack of action on the pipeline. But other than Smith and the puppets at the Post, nobody in oil country is stepping up.

Back in 2014, Stephen Harper tried to push the northern pipeline through. It turned region against region, raised a massive Indigenous backlash and put environmental justice on the front burner.

There is no economic, political or environmental case for even considering the project. Northern Gateway 2.0 is the antithesis of “nation-building.” Carney could do a lot better than trying to imitate the worst of the Harper era.

Saying no to a second BC pipeline is a no-brainer. However, Carney is poised to sign a memorandum of understanding with Smith. And that will set the stage for a needless conflict between British Columbia and Alberta, where BC will be forced into a staged war with the MAGA Alberta premier.

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Prime Minister Carney might think this is good politics, but it is a disaster in the making.

Canadians are still paying for the $35 billion Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMX). The economics of TMX are so out of whack that the oil giants refuse to pay the toll rates, i.e., the fees used to recoup the costs of using the pipeline. Thus, the Canadian public is paying between 50 cents and 78 cents on the dollar to underwrite its use by massively profitable oil companies.

Getting straight answers on the cost of TMX was a big part of the work I did in the last parliament.

The publicly-funded TMX has given a massive boost to oil production. The expansion comes as Enbridge seeks to increase oil production by a further 250,000 barrels a day through the Mainline and Flanagan South lines. Oil is at peak production, which is why no proponent is willing to step up.

The first step will be to entice companies to increase production by another million barrels a day. Big Oil have already said they want concessions. And this will burn what little environmental progress we have made.

Former Prime Minister Trudeau gave billions for the oil industry in the hopes of bringing peace to the militantly-anti liberal politics coming out of western Canada. This meant dramatically increasing its oil production despite the commitments made at Paris while getting no concessions from Big Oil in return. And still the far right in Alberta/Saskatchewan raged on - making Trudeau a hated symbol. And despite the billions in public money from a Liberal government, the oil industry continued to present themselves as a persecuted minority.

The Trudeau government attempted to offset this massive investment in oil by advancing a number of environmental initiatives. But in it his first months in office, Prime Minister Carney killed off the key environmental planks - ditching the consumer carbon tax, halting the EV mandate and deep-sixing the plan to plant two billion trees.

To make the Northern Gateway proposal even possible, Carney will need to launch even more significant rollbacks of environmental regulations. It would mean eliminating the emissions cap. And don’t fall for the line that the oil industry will be forced to invest in carbon capture. They are using this process to dredge empty wells for enhanced oil recovery. It means more oil production, not less carbon.

But the biggest target is killing the tanker ban on the BC coast.

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To Smith and the MAGA right, the ban is a symbol of everything they hated about Trudeau, environmentalists and the “woke.” The tanker ban was political common sense and they’ve wanted it gone ever since it became law in 2019.

Harper’s militant promotion of the oil industry alienated people in British Columbia who were concerned about the fragile ecosystems on the Pacific coast. The pipeline was to come out near the Great Bear Rainforest – a massive ecosystem that is sacred to West Coast Indigenous nations. There was no way Indigenous people would ever allow this project to happen.

Perhaps Carney believes that by killing the tanker ban, he can bring Danielle Smith and Scott Moe onside. But Smith and Moe, with their efforts to align with Trump, have consistently undermined both the Liberal government and Canada.

Anyone who thinks that Smith would change course and play nice once she got her way is living in a world of make-believe. Appeasing the oil militants will come at a huge cost. Already, BC Liberal MPs are going offside with the government and saying such a move would spell death to the party in the province.

It also sets up a needless confrontation with Premier David Eby.

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Eby has been on the front lines of the Trump tariff damage to forestry, and he has proven to be a good ally on the national stage. Yet we’re learning that Carney has been negotiating with Smith and Moe about BC land while leaving Eby on the sidelines.

Is he willing to throw Eby under the bus just to push a pipeline? And does the PM believe he can ignore the serious title issues of Indigenous communities? This is the last thing Canada needs at a time when we should be rallying to bring people together.

The downsides to the project are obvious. But what rattles me most is what this says about Mark Carney. I don’t expect the likes of Danielle Smith or Suncor CEO Rich Kruger to show any interest in addressing the climate catastrophe. But Carney promised to be different.

In 2015, he drew a line in the sand for the capitalist world. While still governor of the Bank of England, he gave a keynote address where he denounced the climate catastrophe as the “tragedy on the horizon.” It was a rallying cry for business, bankers and politicians to address what Carney rightly called “the world’s greatest existential threat.”

In my work in parliament, I took hope in Carney’s leadership. The argument put forward was that we would reach an economic “tipping point” (the inverse of the environmental tipping point) at which the economics of choosing clean energy over fossil fuels would be so clear that the world would transition away from catastrophe.

It was the “trust in the market” solution.

And Carney stepped up at a crucial moment. The UN warned that the window for climate action was closing, yet the promise of a clean-tech future seemed so close. Carney had the business cred to help bring us over the line. But that never happened.

The efforts to transition to cleaner and cheaper alternatives were monkey-wrenched repeatedly by the oil giants, backroom lobbyists, disinformation campaigns and right-wing politicians.

Nowhere was this more noticeable than in Alberta, which, because of its immense energy expertise, was set to lead a clean-tech revolution in Canada. And then Danielle Smith intervened, killing $33 billion in new clean energy projects, chasing thousands of jobs out of the province and doubling down on oil and coal.

Smith is just one of many political leaders around the world who opted to burn the future to double down on the profits now. Ten years ago, when Carney issued his warning about the dangerous future, we still had summers. Now we have fire season.

The crisis is no longer on our horizon. It is here.

We have blown past the 1.5-degree danger line in global temperature increases, and scientists are hurtling toward a 2.5-degree future. The scientific scenarios are bleak. It means the total collapse of the ice shelves, the failure of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream (the refrigerator system for the planet), mass fires, floods, and famines.

Environmental scientist Gretta Pecl from the University of Tasmania was quoted in The Guardian saying,

“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years… [Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, and food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”

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Northern Gateway will never get built. The social conflict and economic headache are too great. However, Danielle Smith has already won. She wins if the pipeline moves ahead, and she wins if Carney backtracks. Smith will use the fight with BC and Indigenous nations to stoke Western alienation and to blame Carney for being weak.

If Carney goes any further down this path, Smith will score an even greater victory. And that would be to get the man who warned the world about the climate catastrophe to be seen working with the oil lobby to roll back the limited efforts we actually did make over the last decade.

Some people tell me the Prime Minister is playing 3-D chess, and I should be patient. But the planet is on fire, and patience is at least 10 years out of date. If they are indeed playing 3-D chess, Danielle Smith is owning the board.

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