By Jim Warren
A minority Liberal victory in our upcoming federal election has the potential to take anti-Ottawa sentiment on the prairies to a whole new level. That’s because a Carney government can be expected to frustrate the legitimate aspirations of millions of Western Canadians. It’s what Liberals do.
Obviously, one of the most pressing economic concerns of the oil producing provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan is the collection of Liberal policies which are restricting growth in Canada’s non-renewable resource sector. Liberal anti-oil and anti-pipeline measures have hamstrung the capacity of the producing provinces to increase the revenue generating capacity of the oil and gas sector. They have restricted the ability of prairie people to benefit from the ingenuity, sweat and capital they have invested in their resources industries. The right to those benefits was supposedly guaranteed under the Canadian constitution.
It is far from clear that a Carney government would get behind developing increased export capacity for oil and gas. Previous statements Carney has made in support of new pipelines were clearly disingenuous. He supported a revival of Energy East when speaking in Kelowna. He went so far as to suggest the emergency powers of the government could be used to get it built. But during the French leadership debate he said Quebec would be given the power to veto any such project. Carney’s handlers should tell him it is impossible for both statements to be true at the same time.
Furthermore, Carney has expressed no intention of dismantling the labyrinthine approval processes and the legalized disruption of construction which makes export pipelines impossible to build (at least without incurring jaw dropping cost overruns). If those policy measures remain in place any pipeline given some sort of special approval, could still remain vulnerable to legal challenges and retroactive cancellation and shut down.
Let’s say special emergency approval for a pipeline is granted but the Impact Assessment Act (Bill C-69) and other onerous environmental regulations are allowed to remain in place. Couldn’t construction still be delayed or the line re-routed whenever a bird nest, arrowhead or rare plant is found on the right-of-way? Will protesters who block construction be treated with kid gloves or more like horn-honking truckers? Those are the sorts of issues that contributed to the $34 billion in cost overruns that plagued construction of the TMX.
There are, no doubt, measures a federal government could take to minimize these sorts of threats. Nevertheless, many of us expect a Carney government would not be prepared to provide truly bullet proof guarantees to new pipeline projects. The Liberals and their core supporters are too deeply invested in climate alarmist ideology to allow for the unfettered completion of pipelines or continued growth in oil and gas production.
The Liberals have already shown us who they are. They were very reluctant to enforce the law against environmental protesters during the period leading up to the cancellation of the Northern Gateway and the Keystone XL. In fact they awarded federal grants to activist organizations that helped organize protests and anti-pipeline court challenges.
Retroactive cancellation of previously approved oil production projects is a tactic recently embraced by environmental groups like Greenpeace in the UK. The Liberals’ allies in the environmental movement can be expected to apply a similar approach to new and pre-existing pipelines in Canada. The activists will no doubt be able to rely on grants from the Liberal government to fund their efforts.
There are approximately 75,000 people directly employed in extracting and transporting gas and oil on the prairies and about twice that number whose jobs rely indirectly on the sector. Several hundreds of thousands more understand how the ripple effects of the changing fortunes of the resource sector affect their province’s economies. For the past nine years those people’s interests and complaints have been ignored, frustrated and attacked by the Liberals and their allies in the environmental movement.
If the past is prologue, it is a safe bet the prairie West will be ignored and abused again should the Liberals pull off a minority election win. Their backers in the Bloc and NDP will insist on it. However, rejecting the reasonable aspirations of a large minority or majority of the citizens in the two major oil producing provinces is guaranteed to produce a precipitous decline in national harmony.
It is true there are large numbers of low information voters and woke supporters of environmental extremism in some of the big cities in the West. They are likely to elect a Liberal or two to the next parliament. But they do not represent the views of the people who create most of the wealth in the West—the people who risk their own capital and help build a more vibrant economy, as well as most of the people whose jobs involve sweating. Annoying these people, in order to garner support among the environmentally sanctimonious in Montreal and Toronto, will not make for a stronger, more united Canada.
Similarly, there are tens of thousands of farm operators who are vehemently opposed to Liberal backed measures that will limit their use of fertilizer and penalize them for owning cattle. Saskatchewan’s potash miners won’t take kindly to the imposition of export taxes on their products to save jobs in Ontario and Quebec. These are all capable people—and they don’t take being pushed around lightly.
Central Canadian fantasies about placing export taxes on Western oil shipped to the US, have already angered people in the producing provinces. Anti-Ottawa feelings on the prairies would surpass the boiling point if a Carney government actually attempted to do it.
An all too common response of federal Liberals and the talking heads in the mainstream media to spikes in Western alienation is to smugly claim, “They’ll get over it.” Don’t count on it.
Following a Liberal election win, expect court challenges over the abrogation provincial rights under the constitution and outright defiance of federal policies detrimental to Alberta and Saskatchewan. The federal government may face the prospect of having to arrest popular politicians for refusing to comply with unfair federal policies.
Cabinet Ministers in Saskatchewan have already said they would risk imprisonment for refusing to charge the carbon tax on natural gas used for home heating. The Saskatchewan government has also refused to comply with Liberal regulations requiring coal-fired power plants to be shut down by 2035. They have indicated the province can simply not afford to transition to renewables or nuclear within such a tight time frame.
Carney has had nothing to say about rescinding inane one-size-fits-all federal environmental regulations. Included in the class of mindless federal policies are plans to force people from the colder parts of the prairies to purchase electric cars and heat pumps even though they don’t function properly here in winter. We can expect many prairie people to resist the compulsory transition to EVs. And, as is the case with Liberal gun control laws, governments on the prairies are likely to ensure federal rules are lightly enforced.
More significantly, Carney would be confronted by a campaign to make significant changes to Canadian federalism that will provide greater autonomy to the prairies provinces. An additional bottom line demand will be the creation of constitutionally guaranteed energy corridors, allowing for the construction and protection of pipelines from the prairies to Canada’s coasts.
We are at a critical inflection point in our history that could influence the economic fortunes of Alberta and Saskatchewan for the rest of this century. There is a good chance that during the last half of this century renewable energy will be displacing non-renewable energy at a rate that reduces global demand for oil and gas. If this turns out to be the case, failing to get new pipelines built in the next decade will virtually guarantee a significant portion of Canada’s proven oil reserves will remain forever stranded. Hundreds of billions in potential revenues could been lost. That is, by the way, one of the goals shared by Mark Carney and the alarmist factions of the environmental movement.
Barring substantive reforms to federalism, including meaningful concessions to the producing provinces, the prospects for national harmony and less fractious federal-provincial relations are bleak. A Conservative majority victory in the upcoming federal election is clearly more likely to result in fair treatment for Alberta and Saskatchewan than a win for the Carney Liberals. Mark Carney doesn’t appear to realize heightened levels of alienation in the producing provinces have the potential to raise discontent to levels not seen since the days of the National Energy Program.
The next election could well be our last chance to ensure the producing provinces are permitted to maximize their constitutionally guaranteed capacity to generate non-renewable resource revenues.
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