B.C. Premier David Eby, left, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in June, 2024.Crystal Schick/The Canadian Press
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says her push to have a new pipeline built to the West Coast of B.C. will test whether Canada works as a country.
This pronouncement will have come as a surprise to many who had concluded Ms. Smith had already determined that Canada did not work as a country, which is why she is pushing so hard for Alberta to have greater sovereignty over its affairs, including its own pension plan, police force and tax collection agency.
One might have also concluded that Ms. Smith had no time for Canada given the extraordinary amount of effort she has expended, as Premier, denouncing virtually everything Ottawa has done for the past decade. You’d never know that the same horrible federal government built her a pipeline using $30-billion of taxpayers’ money.
Still, there is little question that the pipeline she wants – effectively a Northern Gateway redux – has the potential to cause a national rupture. If it is flatly rejected by Prime Minister Mark Carney, it will certainly stoke the simmering separatist sentiment alive in Alberta at the moment.
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Not helping matters is B.C. Premier David Eby, who can’t quite decide whether he is completely against such a pipeline or whether he is willing to leave the door to one slightly ajar. Lately, however, he has sounded more like someone who is against it on the basis that there is no real advantage to having it, and that the obstacles it faces, including Indigenous opposition, are too great to overcome.
What he conveniently ignores, however, is the fact that no major oil company in the world would be willing to back such a project amid the current regulatory hurdles that exist in Canada, including a tanker ban along the Northern coast of B.C. Any CEO of such a firm would be nuts to consider writing any kind of cheque until virtually all the roadblocks currently in the way of such an endeavour had been cleared, including the federal emissions and production cap. Even then, it would take an incredible leap of faith to sign on to such an undertaking.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and B.C. Premier David Eby are trading barbs over Smith’s push for an oil pipeline to the West Coast. Eby says the plan is 'fictional' and would cost billions in public money, comments that Smith says are un-Canadian and unconstitutional.
The Canadian Press
Energy economist Peter Tertzakian recently did some rough calculations for The Hub of what the upstream costs of such a project might be – the price tag for building the production facilities that would be necessary to fill a pipeline with a capacity for 1.5 million barrels a day. He estimated it would take roughly 10 years of sustained additions at a cost of about $100-billion. Add on to that, say, the $30-billion cost of the new pipeline itself, and you’re suddenly talking real money.
Even in a landscape with no regulatory impediments, that is a big ask. It’s not impossible to think that a consortium of companies would step forward to take it on, I suppose, but with so much uncertainty surrounding the energy future of the world in the coming years, it would seem to be a risky bet.
That said, as a country we are facing extremely challenging times economically, thanks to the trade policies of U.S. President Donald Trump. The long-term horizon is anything but clear and we need to work hard to broaden our trade alliances, including who we sell our oil to. In principle, we should support any effort to market our energy to Asian customers, rather than continue to sell it at a discount to the U.S.
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Yes, there are legitimate concerns about what a new pipeline and the production necessary to fill it would do to our existing climate goals in Canada. And Alberta’s commitment to a carbon capture-and-storage project would certainly have to be guaranteed before Ottawa signed off on a new pipeline. But the B.C. government (and the federal Liberal caucus members from B.C.) may want to hold off on making any holier-than-thou proclamations about the impact such a pipeline would have on the environment.
The NDP in B.C. will barely meet half of its 2030 target to lower greenhouse gas emissions, with carbon pollution anticipated to fall by only 20 per cent below 2007 levels by 2030, instead of the 40 per cent committed to in the Climate Change Accountability Act. This is according to a report released earlier this year, which used 2022 data. Who knows what impact the government’s decision to kill the consumer carbon tax earlier this year will have on future emissions targets.
When it comes to the oil pipeline debate in Canada, the hypocrisy surrounding it knows no bounds. The partisan games at the root of much of this pretense are quite dangerous.
There is too much at stake to have an important discussion undermined and sullied by parochial legerdemain.