Backing Amarjeet Sohi, the Liberal candidate in Edmonton Mill Woods, would have been a smart move for voters.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Quebec knows how to vote strategically. Ever so cynically, its voters will endorse any party they think will keep the federal favour train rolling. Alberta? Not so much. By eradicating the Liberals from the provincial map on election day, Albertans stand to punish themselves as much as they punished Justin Trudeau and his merry band of oil sands skeptics.
A strategic vote might have involved a campaign within Alberta to reward one or two prominent Liberal candidates, not send them packing. The Conservative sweep in Alberta means the province will have no elected representative in Mr. Trudeau’s minority-government cabinet, no one at the table to prevent its energy industry from turning into a great punching bag.
In effect, Alberta has rendered itself defenceless in Ottawa. That’s too bad, because the province does have some environmentally friendly energy stories to tell. Now they will go unheard in the Prime Minister’s Office.
Backing Amarjeet Sohi, the Liberal candidate in Edmonton Mill Woods, would have been a smart move for voters. He was one of two Edmonton Liberals to win a seat in the 2015 election, and was minister of Infrastructure and Communities. He lost his seat on Monday to the Conservatives’ Tim Uppal by a hefty margin.
Mr. Sohi did a credible job consulting Indigenous groups on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project (TMX), which Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet reapproved in June. But the Liberals became toxic in Alberta, partly because Mr. Trudeau once said of the oil sands, “We need to phase them out,” and Mr. Sohi lost his seat – no more Alberta pipeline advocate in the government.
With Alberta devoid of a Liberal presence, it will have to come up with a new strategy to protect the oil industry.
The oil sands has never done a great job at selling itself outside of Alberta. The industry is a technological wonder, but you don’t much hear about that beyond the clubby world of reservoir engineers. It is slowly cleaning up its act, too. A 2018 report by IHS Markit noted that greenhouse gas intensity per barrel produced in the oil sands fell by 21 per cent between 2009 and 2017, and could drop as much as 23 per cent in the coming decade.
The global anti-fossil fuel movement has no idea that the oil sands’ CO2-output needle is moving in the right direction. They just see a planet-killing monster devoted to pumping enough cheap oil to keep U.S. sport utility vehicles on the road.
The oil sands needs an advocate, and it’s not going to be the next federal government. The Liberals will have to rely on the NDP for support, and that lefty party will not be inclined to make life easy for Alberta’s oil set. The NDP opposes the TMX project; NDP leader Jagmeet Singh didn’t even condescend to visit Alberta during the campaign. In a note issued just after the vote counts showed that the Liberals had won the most seats, RBC Capital Markets said: “We see the election result itself as likely sustaining the negative sentiment towards the pipeline and midstream [oil] sector.”
Having made no effort on the strategic-voting front, Alberta has little choice but to lobby hard for favourable treatment in Ottawa and prepare itself to take a few lashings. Tougher environmental regulations are likely to come – the price of support from the NDP. Carbon taxes might go up faster than had been expected, and pipelines may not get built any time soon, although the election results seem unlikely to ruin the prospects for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would extend into the U.S. Midwest and Texas from Alberta.
Taking some pain may not be the end of the world for the oil sands. In the age of Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and widespread anxiety about potentially catastrophic climate change, no big oil or coal project anywhere on the planet will be greeted with kisses. Accepting, even welcoming, tougher environmental regulations might buy the oil sands some time. Still, there is little doubt that the Liberals’ no-show in Alberta does not bode well for the oil industry. The province’s vote will come at a cost.
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