Prime Minister Mark Carney meets with British Columbia Premier David Eby at the Legislative Assembly in Victoria in April, 2025.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
David Eby doesn’t perform well when drawing lines in the sand. It’s not in his emotional range. But the Premier of British Columbia wanted everyone to know he is miffed.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that the Prime Minister is a friend to British Columbia,” Mr. Eby said as he stood beside Prime Minister Mark Carney at a photo-op before a meeting in Vancouver. “An important part of friendship is telling each other the truth.”
The truth Mr. Eby felt he had to voice was that economic development in B.C. has to go “hand-in-hand” with environmental protection, including the north coast tanker ban, which would kibosh Alberta’s desired oil pipeline to northwestern B.C.
Last week, Mr. Eby was complaining that Alberta is getting rewarded for bad behaviour – making veiled threats of separation – with federal backing for its pipeline project. He’s peeved. B.C. has been a good boy. What does it get?
Mr. Carney walked into all that and smiled, countering all those resentments with positivity.
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He’s positive about the deal with Alberta. He’s positive that it can be done in a way that meets the country’s obligations to Indigenous peoples – notwithstanding Mr. Eby’s insistence that lifting the tanker ban would set relations with B.C. First Nations on fire. He’s upbeat that federal backing will spark B.C. development.
The Prime Minister talked about negotiating a new deal for B.C.’s development priorities. Mr. Carney seemed to echo some of Mr. Eby’s concerns about environmental sustainability and Indigenous rights – but he really wanted to talk about all the B.C. projects that could be built. He suggested, at one point, that if B.C. doesn’t want projects, the feds will spend their efforts elsewhere. But then he also held out that new deal for B.C., suggesting there’s a lot in it for Mr. Eby.
In an armchair chat after a speech to the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, he even asserted positivity as an overall approach to building projects. “We don’t want to hear what people are against,” he said. “We want to hear what they’re for.”
The optimism that big things can be built is certainly working for Mr. Carney. It’s now central to both his governing agenda and his political persona. It is a big part of his appeal.
But there are risks to saying yes to everyone, even if the risks are pushed into the future.
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Mr. Eby’s criticism that Mr. Carney is giving into Alberta’s knife-at-the-throat threats of separatism by making concessions in a carbon-pricing and pipeline agreement doesn’t seem quite apt because Mr. Carney himself is now so keen on it.
The “implementation agreement” with Alberta announced last week substantially weakened carbon-pricing regulation to ease the path for a potential oil pipeline and Mr. Carney sold it as a step toward diversifying Canada’s energy trade.
The existing industrial carbon-pricing regime had certainly become contentious, ignored by Saskatchewan and reviled by Alberta, so there is something to be said for federal Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin’s assertion that it is better to make climate policy through co-operation than litigation. At least it might be more durable.
But the real political outcome of last week’s agreement was a ramping up of the Carney government’s implicit promise that a new oil pipeline can happen.
There is a national unity value in making those compromises. The risk is in turning that kind of deal-making into a pipeline-or-bust test for Canadian federalism.
There is still no private company lining up to finance a new pipeline and no route chosen. It is still unclear how Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who has made it her business to make a referendum on separation possible, will react if the proposal stalls. It would be nice to know whether her commitment to Canada will last past the summer, and that the deal won’t sour into a grievance by referendum day.
In the meantime, the deal-making with Alberta is clashing with Mr. Eby’s politics. He’s politically vulnerable and every new agreement with Alberta raises questions about whether the tanker ban off his province’s northern coast will be lifted. It’s still possible that there is a different route that dodges that problem, but in the meantime, Mr. Eby doesn’t want to face the questions.
Mr. Carney doesn’t want to address those questions, either – not in public. He wants to talk about what will be built, not what might get in the way. But the risks are still there, somewhere in the future.