Inside Carney’s Pipeline Deal with Alberta and BC

Prime Minister Mark Carney appeared Thursday night to have threaded the needle between Alberta and British Columbia, joining Premier Danielle Smith in Calgary to announce the Alberta government is OK with a southern pipeline route.

That avoids some of the big fights with First Nations and environmentalists that would have been inevitable if Smith’s favoured route to Prince Rupert had been followed.

“We’ve agreed that the best route for a new pipeline is one that already exists,” Carney said, although there was most certainly some painful arm twisting before that agreement was reached.

Earlier in the day Carney had a press conference with Premier David Eby to announce that British Columbia wouldn’t fight the heavy crude pipeline along the existing Trans Mountain pipeline route and the tanker ban off the province’s North Coast would remain in place. Plus, Carney announced a multibillion-dollar Canada-B.C. “co-operative prosperity agreement.”

Eby conceded he doesn’t have the constitutional ability to fight the pipeline, but said the B.C. deal “ensures that the northern tanker ban stays in place, and it ensures that if a pipeline goes ahead, that British Columbians are fairly compensated for the environmental risks we would take on any new pipeline project.”

Thanks to the Carney government, compensation for B.C. is a change from past pipeline battles during premiers Alison Redford’s and Rachel Notley’s governments in Alberta.

So nobody’s really happy, but everybody in power is happy enough with Carney’s joint messages of not necessarily a pipeline but a pipeline if necessary and ditto about a North Coast tanker ban. Nobody knows how this will actually pan out, of course, but it’s good enough for the moment for the parties with their hands on the levers of power.

As for Alberta separatists and West Coast environmentalists, they will be furious and praying to their different gods for the plan to fail.

Nevertheless, this is rather like the way prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King dodged the conscription bullet in 1942 when it threatened to split the country. If Carney is channeling Billy King at this fraught moment of Canadian history, well, he could probably do worse.

There is also plenty of bad news, of course, though not necessarily the same bad news depending on your perspective.

Alberta separatists and their many foreign-funded bots were in a frenzy Thursday attacking all parties, but especially Smith, for doing a deal with the PM that they insisted would never come to fruition.

On the other side of the ledger, the realization is yet to set in with the public that 90 per cent of the cost of this multibillion-dollar project — we don’t know how many multiples of billions yet — is going to be paid by Alberta and Canadian taxpayers, just as we were promised would never happen.

“It appears that Alberta — you and me and everyone else — will have to pay up if the southern route is to be financed,” said recently retired Mount Royal University political science professor Keith Brownsey. “There goes my pension!”

“It is now clear: there is no business case for a new West Coast pipeline in Canada,” said Pembina Institute executive director Chris Severson-Baker in a news release Thursday. “If this was a smart economic venture; if there was any kind of reasonable return on investment to be made, a private company or companies would have put up the cash.”

Obviously, the Alberta government can’t pretend Trans Mountain Corp., a federal Crown corporation, or the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission are private entities. And as for Pembina Pipeline Corp., described by Ottawa as a “strategic investor,” we can be confident that behind the scenes it’s been protected from any risk as a result of its role as a fig leaf in this political Kabuki theatre.

The Globe and Mail reported that Pembina Pipeline said its involvement was as a signatory to a non-binding memorandum of understanding with the federal and provincial governments and their two Crown entities.

Alberta’s proposal will now be referred to the federal government’s Major Projects Office for a decision on whether it will be named a project of national interest by Oct. 1. But, c’mon, Carney wouldn’t have flown all the way to Vancouver and Calgary to make announcements if this were not a done deal, or the next thing to it.

The deal supposedly also still hinges on the willingness of major oilsands companies to build the Pathways carbon capture project, which will require the input of even more public cash. Discussions will continue on that front, the politicians say. But, again, after many promises have been broken, what’s one more?

Brownsey assessed the political fallout as being to Eby’s benefit. “I think David Eby is the winner in all this. He will collect revenues from increased LNG, the North Coast tanker moratorium stays in place and if the southern route is built, B.C. will collect some sort of toll.”

Obviously, the significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions from increased production in the oilsands and liquified natural gas pumped from B.C. is going to have an impact on a rapidly heating world.

But clearly the prime minister concluded that if the two most urgent tasks at this moment in history are saving the country and saving the planet, his priority must be saving the country.

Someone else will have to save the planet, and if that turns out to be China, it does not bode well for the future of a pipeline full of diluted bitumen from Alberta.