Joe Oliver: Trans Mountain becomes another project sacrificed to Trudeau’s false green gods

Kinder Morgan finally succumbed to lawsuits, delays, escalating costs, threats of civil disobedience and one-sided regulatory policy. It has announced it is suspending all non-essential activities on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, Canada’s last chance to get our oil to tidewater. Anti-resource-development activists here and in the United States will be triumphant. The rest of us should be disconsolate that Canada’s ability to export oil to offshore markets may be blocked for a very long time, perhaps forever. The Alberta government’s offer of provincial funds for Kinder Morgan, fully backed by the opposition conservatives, might at least provide a last chance for life support.

Kinder Morgan is blaming the decision on the B.C. government’s ongoing attempts to frustrate the project. However, the debacle is ultimately the responsibility of the federal government. The Liberal government has mouthed support but its actions have been consistently harmful. Through their ideological obsession, regulatory meddling, partisan pandering and absence of leadership, the Liberals have effectively landlocked our vast oil reserves and condemned the country to a poorer, more divisive and less secure future.

In spite of promising to reconcile environmental protection with resource development, the prime minister managed to facilitate an economic, social and constitutional disaster that will go down as his shameful legacy. In so doing, Justin Trudeau squandered a historic opportunity for prosperity on the altar of a quartet of false gods: the belief that alternative energy will soon replace fossil fuels, which is demonstrably unrealistic; that Canada can help cool the climate, when in fact our carbon emissions are minuscule; that other countries are making similarly painful sacrifices to the climate cause, which they are not; and that energy investors would gladly sink billions of dollars into major project plans in Canada, despite the continuously moving goal posts and endless roadblocks Trudeau’s hostile policies created, which has been proven to be patent nonsense.

Investor confidence has drastically eroded due to a host of anti-development policies, including the new tanker moratorium off British Columbia’s northern coastline, emissions regulations, B.C.’s attempts to restrict Alberta oil, and the uncertain application of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which the Trudeau government has indicated it supports and raises yet more barriers to infrastructure projects.

Then came the full-on stake to the heart to the moribund patient: the federal government’s proposed Impact Assessment Act, Bill C-69, brainchild of Catherine McKenna, minister of environment and climate change, and Jim Carr, minister of natural resources. Among other poison pills, it mandates an evaluation of a proposed pipeline’s upstream and downstream emissions, including emissions from cars burning Canadian gasoline. Perversely, it exempts foreign fuel imported by tanker, thereby advantaging our foreign competitors. So damaging are these regulations to Canada’s energy sector, they could have been drafted by Saudi Arabia or Leonardo DiCaprio. Or even Gerald Butts.

Canada has 171 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the third largest in the world, 10 per cent of the global total. Technological innovation could increase that to 300 billion barrels. The idea that we should abandon such vast riches, to the detriment of Canadians and especially western workers, small businesses, First Nations and the poor, is unconscionable.

And who gains from our self-destructive behaviour? Primarily the big oil producers and petro-states that would compete with our resource exports, headed up by the likes of Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Four major pipelines or expansions were built between 2006 and 2015: Enbridge’s Alberta Clipper and its Line 9 reversal, Kinder Morgan’s Anchor Loop, and TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline (not to be confused with Keystone XL). That resulted in 1.73 million barrels per day of additional capacity for western Canadian oil.

Then the Liberals took office promising a better approach to energy policy. They subsequently rejected the previously approved $7.9-billion Northern Gateway pipeline. Petronas has since cancelled its $36-billion Pacific Northwest LNG project. Trans Canada called off its $12-billion Energy East pipeline proposal. And now the $7.4-billion Trans Mountain expansion is suspended. That’s a total of $63 billion in lost capital investment, tens of thousands of jobs, and hundreds of billions more in revenue Canada will now not see from producing and selling resources.

Unless it can be salvaged, this will be a national disgrace. The prime minister should accept his share of responsibility and hold his ministers to account. Carr naively believed that he could buy off anti-development militants with a debilitating carbon tax and stultifying regulations. McKenna’s focus on hammering oil and gas extraction deserves extra credit for its blind obsession. They should both be shuffled somewhere they can do less damage to the country.

Even if voters improbably forgive this colossal failure of leadership, historians will not. Our country’s well-being has been severely damaged and the injury was inflicted on us by a government that deliberately ignored the national interest in pursuit of a fantasy, fostered by a delusion and fuelled by dystopian radicals, privileged NIMBYs and conniving foreign enablers. What will puzzle future generations is why we let this government get away with it.

Joe Oliver is the former minister of finance and former minister of natural resources.