Some Albertans are unhappy that their guys lost the federal election, so they’re doing a MAGA. They are not accepting the result. They will take their ball and go home, i.e. they will separate from Canada to form their own country or to become an American state.
All of this stems from a feeling that the federal government, at least when it’s Liberal, is not sufficiently supportive of this province’s oil industry. And that tends to be expressed most often in the failure to build pipelines.
The feds did build Alberta a pipeline, of course, a twin to the Trans Mountain at a cost of $34 billion. That, however, and a great deal more aid the federal government has lavished on the industry, is not enough for the separatists. They want more pipelines and insist that once liberated from Ottawa they will have them. One group of optimists, Alberta Prosperity Project, suggests that oil and gas development would double within five years with multiple new pipelines.
They have short memories. One of Jason Kenney’s last acts as premier before his party dismissed him was to gamble 1.5 billion of our taxpayer dollars on the Keystone XL pipeline. The infamous Keystone was intended to carry tar sands crude to Nebraska where it would connect with an older line running to Gulf Coast refineries. We lost the gamble when the pipeline project was killed.
And who killed the Keystone? Well, it wasn’t Ottawa. Ottawa supported it. Prime Minister Trudeau supported it. Washington killed it. Some would say it was really American conservationists—a group the separatists should take very seriously—that killed it. Take your pick. The point is we couldn’t do a pipeline south of the border even with the help of Ottawa, and the separatists are going to do multiple pipelines?
They seem to believe that if Pierre Poilievre and his party had been elected, pipelines would be on their way. Really?
How many pipelines did the Conservatives get built when they had the chance under Prime Minister Harper? They had the same opportunity as Trudeau’s government—10 years in power. The answer is they built exactly one less than the Liberals. None. Zero. Not one pipeline south, north, east or west. And that’s how many they were likely to get built if they had been elected this time around.
Nobody has been building pipelines except the Canadian taxpayer. And it’s unlikely the industry will build any without governments guaranteeing returns. According to University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach, investors are preferring to stake their cash on investment cycles of only a few years rather than the decades required to get a return from a pipeline.
Speaking as a taxpayer, I have no desire to further subsidize the production of greenhouse gasses: $34 billion for the Trans Mountain was more than enough. I feel sufficiently guilty already for the global warming my tax dollars are causing.