As I write this, the British Columbia legislature has not yet been recalled, and Christy Clark is still premier.
But in short order that is expected to change, and NDP Leader John Horgan, supported by Green Leader Andrew Weaver, will be the new premier.
The two lefties are staunch opponents of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) pipeline. While not in a political marriage of a coalition, their relationship could be more closely approximated to soon moving in together.
And as politics makes strange bedfellows, the key point of their attraction is killing the TMX pipeline, already approved by Ottawa. They seem to forget that the federal government, through the National Energy Board, has dominion over interprovincial pipelines.
Christy Clark cracked opened this Pandora’s box of provincial opposition with her five conditions – supposedly met by TMX. Now the NDP and Greens want to throw Pandora’s box wide open.
Don Braid, columnist for the Calgary Herald, stole some of my thunder in his suggestion that if B.C. truly doesn’t like pipelines, fine, shut down deliveries of oil to the Lower Mainland and interior of B.C. now. Like, right now, not at some time in the future. Let’s see how Vancouver likes walking.
I would suggest Alberta go one further. Not only should oil shipments to B.C. be shut down, but natural gas exports out of B.C. should be shut down, too.
This would mean shutting down, at the Alberta border, the Nova Gas Transmission Ltd. system. It would also mean cutting off all B.C. flow in the Alliance Pipeline, which starts near Fort St. John, B.C. and runs all the way to Chicago. (I spent the better part of 16 months building Alliance in 1999-2000, along with 1,600 other guys.)
Let’s see how B.C. likes having its fuel source shut off and its energy exports kyboshed in one fell swoop.
Kinda sounds like a blockade, doesn’t it? Blockades are often employed in times or war, or, are acts of war in and of themselves. I’m not talking trade wars. I’m talking shooting wars.
That’s effectively what British Columbia is proposing, a trade war focused on no pipelines. It wasn’t enough that Northern Gateway got quashed. Lotusland wants to be fueled by unicorn farts. So be it.
The problem with a blockade is escalation. Weigh stations at the border start turning back trucking. Wheat can’t make it to port. Things start getting ugly. Some rednecks decide to arm themselves. A trade war could lead to violence.
All of this is happening, by the way, as the country celebrates its 150th anniversary in a few weeks.
Curiously, Quebec chose this week to suggest it’s time to reopen the constitution. I think Alberta and Saskatchewan have a few issues that other provinces might not want to discuss. Pipeline projects taking the better part of a decade before construction even begins might be one. Cutting off equalization payments that are primarily paid by petroleum producing provinces to the rest would be another. That might get some attention.
Forever we’ve heard about provincial negotiations on removing barriers to interprovincial trade. Several years ago, I attended the press conference after the signing of the New West Partnership back in 2010.
For all the talk, seven years later we’ve got Alberta and B.C. going to war on pipelines. So much for removing barriers. So much for partnership.
The federal government must put its foot down. To his credit, Justin Trudeau has been speaking to that effect in recent days.
But it can’t be just talk. It has to be action. He has to use the existing constitutional prerogative to get TMX built. And he should be telling the B.C. NDP and Greens, in no uncertain terms, they cannot interfere with a federally approved project.
If you detect some frustration in my writing, it may be because my fuse is short after having endured the better part of a decade of pipeline politics bovine feces. It’s time for this to end.
B.C. had a change in government, which is the natural course of democracy. Mark Twain noted, “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”
But that doesn’t mean the new leadership has free reign to counter the needs of the nation. This pipeline, and others like it, are not just about B.C. They are necessary for Canada.
Just wait until we get to Energy East.
