If this pipeline is so great for the economy, wouldn’t having more pipelines be even better?
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After more than a decade of jurisdictional squabbling, political grandstanding, activist obstructionism, legal wrangling and bureaucratic delays, the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion gained final approval earlier this week and began shipping oil on Wednesday.
Despite coming in years behind schedule and nearly $27 billion over budget, the pipeline is being hailed by some Liberals as a triumph of Big Government, with the “golden” or “final” weld on April 11 drawing parallels to the Last Spike driven into John A. Macdonald’s Canadian Pacific Railway on Nov. 7, 1885.
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“There are those who claim that the only good thing government can do when it comes to economic growth is to get out of the way,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said in her budget speech in the House of Commons on April 16. The line was intended to bait the Conservatives, and it worked perfectly, drawing a boisterous applause from the Opposition benches.
“I would like to introduce those people, those people who just cheered,” Freeland continued, “to the talented trades people and the brilliant engineers who, last Thursday, made the final weld, it’s known as the ‘golden weld,’ on a great national project: the Trans Mountain Pipeline.”
As a stone-faced Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault looked on in horror, the finance minister proceeded to pat her government on the back, saying that, “It took an activist, determined Liberal government to get it built. And last week, the Bank of Canada estimated that this project alone will add one-quarter of a percentage point to Canada’s GDP.”
It was the most cringe-worthy part of a very cringey speech, and it speaks to the complete lack of self-doubt these Liberals have in their ability to solve any challenge by bringing the full weight of centralized government to bear on it.
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Yet Freeland’s boasts raise an obvious question: if this pipeline is so great for the economy, wouldn’t having more pipelines be even better?
It should be remembered that although the Trudeau government did swoop in and buy the fledgling pipeline project from Texas-based Kinder Morgan in 2018 for $4.5 billion, it came with a trade-off.
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave his blessing to the Trans Mountain expansion in 2016, he also put the final nail in the coffin of the Northern Gateway and Energy East pipelines — both of which would have been built by Canadian companies using private capital.
A year after buying the pipeline, the federal government passed bills that imposed an arduous approvals process on new infrastructure projects and banned tanker traffic off the coast of northern British Columbia, effectively ensuring that no more pipelines would get approved, and even if one did, much of the West Coast would be off limits.
From then on, Trudeau was on easy street, able to hold up Trans Mountain as a multi-billion dollar proof that his government cares about the economy, while ensuring that the numerous other pipeline projects that had been proposed over the years never got off the ground. The icing on the cake was that U.S. President Joe Biden did the dirty work of killing the Keystone XL pipeline for him.
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The Liberals have since imposed strict emissions limits on the oil and gas industry, making it less appealing to investors.
Nonetheless, some have been trying to spin this as a win for Alberta, and the Canadian economy as a whole. “Frankly, a bit of celebration would be in order,” wrote Kelly Cryderman, the Globe and Mail’s Calgary columnist. “Canada got a big, complicated project done.”
Which highlights the low bar we’ve set in this country. It took more than four years for the Trudeau Liberals to build a pipeline, once construction actually started, from Edmonton to Burnaby, B.C. — about the same amount of time it took the Macdonald Tories to build a transcontinental railway from Bonfield, Ont., to Port Moody, B.C. And with a price tag of $34 billion, Trans Mountain ended up being one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in Canadian history.
Yes, Trudeau ended up overseeing the construction of a pipeline to the West Coast — something his pro-oil predecessor, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, failed to do. But purchasing the pipeline is not what allowed it to get past the legal hurdles put up by the City of Burnaby and the Province of British Columbia. It simply gave the project more time to wait out the court processes, which Kinder Morgan had said it was unwilling to do.
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Trudeau could have used his bully pulpit and control over the federal purse strings to pressure B.C. politicians into accepting a project that has always clearly been in the national interest (it’s not like the prime minister has ever had any qualms about strong-arming other levels of government into accepting his dictates). And he could have fought to get the other major pipeline proposals approved, in the hopes that enough eggs in different baskets would hatch at least one chick.
Instead, he nationalized the chicken coop, put all his eggs in one basket and turned it into the boondoggle that every large government infrastructure projects ends up being. This perhaps wouldn’t be so bad if the Liberals didn’t now expect us to thank them for driving private investors out of the country, and then saving the day with money pilfered from hard-working Canadian taxpayers like you and I.
National Post
jkline@postmedia.com
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2024-05-02 10:05:31Z
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