William Watson: Justin Trudeau faces his Margaret Thatcher moment on pipelines … and cowers

The country’s first pipeline crisis, as schoolchildren once learned, was in 1956. Trans-Canada Pipelines (TCPL) wanted to build an east-to-west pipeline to get what was then higher-priced Alberta natural gas to Ontario and Quebec markets. C.D. Howe, the federal minister of trade and commerce, was more than fully on board. In fact, he had helped put the TCPL consortium together. 

In early May of 1956, in that generation’s starkest instance of Liberal arrogance, the government imposed closure in the House of Commons so as to get financing set and construction started that very summer. The opposition parties — the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and Progressive Conservatives — argued that closure, which was rarely used, was an affront to the rule of law, or at least the rule of Parliament. The voters seemed to agree, turfing the Liberals in 1957’s election, giving John Diefenbaker a minority government, and then sweeping him to a majority in 1958, the year the pipeline was completed, with the biggest seat count in Canadian history to that time. 

The contrasts with today’s pipeline crisis are manifest and many. The Liberals are still arrogant, of course, but they’re far from gung-ho for the pipeline. Quite the opposite: most Liberals probably wish the issue would just go away. The Conservatives (no longer Progressive) are fully behind the pipeline and want approvals streamlined so it could be built yesterday. This time round, delay, not decisive action, is the affront to the rule of law.

In 1957, the CCF wanted government ownership of the pipeline. In 2018, the Alberta New Democratic Party wants the pipeline, the B.C. NDP doesn’t, and the federal NDP favours solar power, wind, or anything but fossil fuels.

As for Alberta oil and gas, they’re no longer over-priced. They could be sold at a legitimate profit to actual foreigners, not just captive-market Quebecers and Ontarians, as was the case in the late 1950s. But without pipelines the resources are landlocked and sell at a discount, which is a major economic loss for Alberta and the country as a whole. 

In 1957, the debate wasn’t about whether the pipeline was a good thing or not. All parties agreed it was. Fossil fuel deposits were then seen as a blessing not a curse. Rather, the debate was about who should build it — Canadian capital alone or Canadian and American together —  and where it should go: through the U.S. or only in Canada. It was the same debate which was held for the Canadian Pacific Railway 70 years earlier. 

The first pipeline debate hit bottom Friday, June 1 — “Black Friday” — when the Liberal Speaker of the House of Commons reversed his ruling of the day before prolonging debate. Pandemonium broke out. MPs filled the centre aisle. The CCF leader rushed the Speaker’s chair, shaking his fist. Tensions were so high a B.C. MP suffered a heart attack and died. Even in the sedate 1950s, the debate strained the thin veneer of civilization. (By the way, has anyone ever seen a thick veneer?)

It’s always pleasing to point out hypocrisy and arrogance, and the federal government has shown no shortage of either in the current debate. But I suspect its apparent passivity in pushing Trans Mountain is mainly for fear of what might happen if the project goes forward. How does “civil society” react? By being uncivil, presumably, and engaging in mass sit-ins and lie-downs, at the very least. How do Indigenous communities not on board with the pipeline react? 

In movies, books, music videos, cartoon novels, you name it, our current culture reveres the rebel who takes a courageous, even illegal stand against authority. It also gives Indigenous protestors far greater weight in the political calculus than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Everyone agrees on the rule of law. But law has to be enforced. If several thousand determined dissidents, many of them Indigenous, disrupt the pipeline’s expansion, what size of police presence and what kinds of police action would be required to stop it? Do our governments, whether federal or provincial, really have the wherewithal and determination to resist? 

In 1981, even the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher backed down in the face of a strike by the National Union of Miners, knowing it could bring Britain to a halt. Over the next three years, however, she built up coal stocks to six months’ supply and in 1984 won a long strike that effectively broke the union’s back and freed the country from union control. But then, she was determined and courageous and, most important of all, believed in the justice of her cause. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems deficient on all three scores. 

He has shown a willingness, however, to spend money to solve political problems. What we certainly don’t need is for governments to bail out the pipeline, or even take it over on the grounds that their own equivocation has rendered it commercially unprofitable.