Rob Breakenridge: Mark Carney’s pipeline campaign against … Trudeau

CALGARY — It’s not a finish line, and it’s been a longer and more complicated process getting to this point than should have been the case, but Thursday’s pipeline announcement is a major milestone, nonetheless.

The declaration that the new west coast pipeline — now known as Pacific Link — is a project of national interest marks not only a big step forward for this vital project, but also a further and significant break from the Trudeau legacy.

Justin Trudeau’s name was absent from Thursday’s press conference, but his policies and his record were, for all intents and purposes, thrown under the bus numerous times — not just by Alberta’s premier, but also by Trudeau’s own successor.

But, frankly, if we are to meet the ambition of Mark Carney’s rhetoric and build at the “scale and speed” the prime minister now deems necessary, then the more we can shred that legacy, the better.

There’s a political shrewdness in Carney’s recognition of the need to dismantle Trudeau’s signature policies and to defuse the political weapon that those policies created for the Conservatives. In fact, Carney’s pointed words Thursday morning in Fort McMurray were as harsh as any Conservative critique of the last few years.

The prime minister lamented the fact that Canada has become “weighed down by well intentioned, but arduous, often duplicative, regulatory processes,” thus creating an urgency to “do things differently.”

Carney also pointed to the heavy cloud of uncertainty that has deterred major investments. Canada “stopped building,” he said, due to project proponents having to “spend years and potentially billions of dollars doing this work before even knowing where the federal government stood.”

The result, Carney says, was that “for many builders, the risk was not worth it.”

It would be difficult to disagree with that assessment. The extent to which this is no longer the case, however, remains to be seen.

It’s unfortunate that we needed a major projects office or the creation of a special lane for those projects deemed to be in the national interest. The excitement of Thursday’s announcement should certainly be tempered by that recognition.

The new Bill C-39 — the Building Canada Strong Act — aims to streamline project approvals more broadly and negate the need for these special designations. That’s a step in the right direction, but there’s still a long way to go.

In the meantime, though, the urgency remains in advancing this pipeline.

All the points made Thursday — the economic benefits of the project, the sovereignty and diversification boost of greater access to foreign markets, the importance of Indigenous ownership and involvement, and the national unity upside of showing that Canada can work — are all true right now. Yet, even the best-case scenario here is another year before final approval and five more years after that before actual construction.

The business case is clearly there, given current global oil demand and the fact that Canada has very quickly used up its added pipeline capacity. The Trans Mountain expansion has only been operational for about two-and-a-half years, but it’s already running at capacity.

Attracting more private investment, and thus reducing taxpayer exposure, will also be key. There is currently private sector involvement in the form of the Pembina pipeline company, in addition to the Trans Mountain Corporation (a crown corporation), but hopefully this will signal to other private interests that the federal and Alberta governments are serious about this project.

There are still all sorts of questions about the viability and cost of the Pathways carbon capture project, which Ottawa has linked to this pipeline project. There’s also the question of whether we can do the necessary work to ensure there’s port capacity for the increase in crude exports. Carney’s own warnings about the deterring effect of uncertainty still apply here, and so clarity and action are urgently needed.

There are still political obstacles for Carney himself. As much as public opinion is on the side of major energy projects and reducing our export reliance on the United States, there is and will be opposition from environmental groups and perhaps even from within his own party — those still loyal to the Justin Trudeau- Stephen Guilbeault worldview.

Saving the party from political oblivion has given Carney a considerable amount of benefit of the doubt from Liberal partisans, but that doesn’t necessarily extend to the more ideological opponents of energy development.

But as the prime minister noted in his remarks Thursday, the reality is that either Canada meets this demand, or someone else will. Carney pointed out that even with plausible net zero scenarios, the “world will still need tens of millions of barrels of crude a day. The question is: who will emerge as the world’s trusted suppliers? It should be us.”

Of course, many have been making that very point for many years now — often shouting into the wind at times, it seemed. To have that not only not fall on deaf ears, but actually be echoed and championed by the prime minister is indeed a significant and welcome change.

As the past eighteen months have shown us, though, the political landscape in Canada can change quickly. We’re headed in the right direction at the moment, but we can’t take anything for granted. If we don’t build on this progress, we could still yet squander this opportunity.

National Post

Rob Breakenridge is a Calgary-based podcaster and writer. He can be found at robbreakenridge.ca and reached at rob.breakenridge@gmail.com.