Western Standard - HANNAFORD： Pipelines and the Constitution： Ottawa’s vanishing act

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show

00:00:22.140 of the Western Standard. It is Thursday, October the 16th. With me today is my friend and colleague

00:00:31.160 Chris Oldcorn, who has been actually attending to the opinion pages since I sort of retired a

00:00:39.380 couple of months ago and doing an excellent job. Chris, I see the numbers every day and you are

00:00:45.660 doing great. So, you're also a pretty skilled writer in your own right and paying attention

00:00:52.760 to the things that matter. And you had an editorial in the Western Standard just, I think it was

00:01:00.300 yesterday, and it drew attention to a really oddball situation that has happened where we

00:01:10.880 have the federal government having claimed responsibility for pipelines when it's to

00:01:18.120 their advantage now just sort of, you know, go and sort it out among yourselves. The article I'm

00:01:25.020 talking about is E.B. Kant, that would be the B.C. Premier, E.B. Kant Veto a Nation Building Pipeline.

00:01:33.620 What's going on, Chris? Yeah, well, when Carney came in, he talked about this major project's

00:01:40.000 office, which is now up and running. They picked their first five projects, most of which were

00:01:45.160 actually already well on the way to completion, but at least they're doing something. And obviously,

00:01:51.940 Danielle Smith, the Alberta Premier, has been asking for another pipeline. She wants it, obviously, 1.00

00:01:57.580 to be one of the major project office projects that they have going on and has started the process

00:02:04.040 of that. The Alberta government's going to pay the first little bit of the work that needs to go in

00:02:09.440 before a private investor would come in. However, E.C. Premier David Eby calls it basically a dream and

00:02:16.080 it's never going to happen. And he also says it's not allowed to come into B.C., which he can't do

00:02:23.540 because it's a federal project as soon as you go over a provincial line. You've seen this movie

00:02:28.220 before, haven't we, with the Trans Mountain expansion line? Yes. And they went all the way to

00:02:33.880 the Supreme Court and B.C. lost. B.C. attempted to stop the Trans Mountain pipeline.

00:02:40.520 And the Trans Mountain is really pumping, like that got finished and it's pumping oil, right?

00:02:47.140 That's correct, yeah. Yeah, the last numbers I saw on the Trans Mountain pipeline is that it is

00:02:53.740 operational, depending on who you listen to, anywhere from 25 to 80 percent capacity.

00:02:58.580 They haven't really been too forthright with the exact numbers going through, but I've heard numbers

00:03:05.220 anywhere from 25 to 80 percent of the max capacity of what the Trans Mountain pipeline can pump through

00:03:10.720 it. So in other words, we do need another pipeline. It's not going to take much to fill up the Trans

00:03:17.460 Mountain pipeline and need a second one. And especially if we want to get our oil out of Canada 0.88

00:03:24.760 and the U.S. because right now, 96 percent of what we pump out of the ground goes to the U.S.

00:03:31.560 and we're not even getting the market price for it because they know that we can't sell it to anybody

00:03:38.120 else. We need to be able to create competition by being able to export to Asian nations. And right now 0.89

00:03:44.860 we can't. I mean, what we have, we put on rail and into the Trans Mountain, but it's not enough.

00:03:49.840 We definitely need a second pipeline. Especially for the economic development of the country,

00:03:54.420 particularly the West. These are good middle-class paying jobs.

00:03:59.340 Now, it seems to me, Chris, that we actually, back 10 years ago, there was a pipeline, a second

00:04:06.860 pipeline approved. It was called Northern Gateway. And it was going to go out to the West Coast,

00:04:14.640 up around Prince Rupert.

00:04:16.020 And then the new federal government under Justin Trudeau deep-sixed that. It was fully approved,

00:04:25.620 fully permitted, but they just arbitrarily canceled it.

00:04:31.480 Then we had a number of other pipeline projects fall off the table because frankly, the federal

00:04:42.700 government didn't want them to happen. And then we had the no pipelines bill, the famous

00:04:48.720 bill C-69. And we had another bill, which is still in force, that makes it illegal for tankers

00:04:58.540 to show up off the West Coast. There isn't a comparable law banning tankers from the East

00:05:05.680 Coast, but there is from the West Coast. Now, that law is still in place. The no new pipelines

00:05:14.280 law is still in place. So what is the game plan that Premier Smith is following here and demanding

00:05:24.920 to reopen the old Northern Gateway route, essentially?

00:05:29.700 Well, I think it plays their advantage politically since the energy sector is massive for Alberta

00:05:36.820 and they export most of it. So it's in their advantage to be able to get more out of the ground,

00:05:43.800 take it out faster. I mean, we're not going to run out of oil in Canada for, you know, 100 plus

00:05:48.200 years, if not longer. And we can, if we get more oil out of the ground, it creates more jobs, it creates

00:05:55.320 more taxes that get collected that then can be spent on things like health care and stuff.

00:06:00.240 Well, I hear that, Chris, but, you know, at the moment, you still can't back up a tanker to the dock

00:06:05.280 and take on a load. So do we not have to clear those legislative obstacles first?

00:06:13.800 Possibly. I mean, Premier Smith could be playing the angle of if she creates enough momentum, 1.00

00:06:20.940 it would force the federal government to have to move. So if she gets someone who's willing to come

00:06:26.620 in here and build the pipeline and pay for it all, and she can make an economic case for it, 1.00

00:06:34.140 then she might be able to get enough pressure on both the BC government and the federal government

00:06:39.580 for them to back off some of their anti-oil policies. And Premier Smith has even talked about,

00:06:48.880 you know, being carbon neutral and all this other stuff for pipelines too. So she's even trying to

00:06:54.200 appease the environmentalists who think that, you know, carbon is the worst thing ever. And at the

00:07:01.640 same time, she can get her pipeline built, which would provide plenty of jobs, not just in Alberta,

00:07:07.380 but also in Saskatchewan as well. And so what is the point that Mr. Eby seems to be stuck on

00:07:14.600 that he says there couldn't possibly be a case of don't even try? Where's he coming from on this?

00:07:24.200 That's a great question. Other than maybe it plays well for him politically by trying to block a

00:07:29.540 pipeline, but it doesn't play well for him economically because it would create jobs in

00:07:34.320 BC as well. And for Eby to be against it from the very beginning, like not even willing to, to

00:07:45.060 hear, hear out the people who want to invest in this, maybe behind private doors, they're not going to

00:07:51.760 come out publicly yet, but he's not even, he's basically saying don't even try, which the argument

00:08:01.400 that you shouldn't try something just because there's a premier against it that doesn't fall

00:08:07.540 under his purview is completely ridiculous. He, this is something that should be regulated by the

00:08:14.200 federal government. It shouldn't be regulated by Alberta or BC. This should be done through the

00:08:18.660 Canada energy regulator. That's what they do, cross border energy. And this is a pipeline that goes

00:08:25.980 over a border. But did not our new energy minister, Mr. Hodgkins, just say, go, go work it out among

00:08:33.980 yourselves? That's exactly what he's saying. He's telling Danielle Smith to go convince David Eby to

00:08:41.300 let this pipeline go through. And if she can't get his support, then the federal government's not going to

00:08:45.940 export. So in one sense, this government oversteps into provincial jurisdiction where they shouldn't.

00:08:50.500 And then when they're supposed to over, oversee something in federal jurisdiction, they're

00:08:54.700 abdicating it to the provinces. That's not how our country is supposed to be running.

00:09:00.100 Well, we could speculate at length of what the hidden motives driving the federal government might be.

00:09:07.680 I'll take one stab at it. I don't think they actually ever want to see any further oil development

00:09:14.700 in Western Canada, wouldn't you say? Absolutely. I was saying this before Carney got elected.

00:09:21.500 I mean, they can't come out and say it in so many words because that would look bad.

00:09:26.740 Correct. So they have to look like, oh, we're trying, but it just didn't happen. And

00:09:31.660 I mean, Carney is essentially Justin Trudeau, just slightly older. But the policies that he's been

00:09:39.240 following are basically essentially the same. And that includes the environmental policies of the

00:09:46.380 former government, former prime minister. And we're not seeing any real change at the top of the country

00:09:53.660 when it comes to pipelines and when it comes to the West in particular. Carney played up the fact that

00:10:00.640 he announced his campaign in Edmonton and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, he is basically

00:10:07.480 been out of the country for over a decade. And prior to that, he was the Bank of Canada governor.

00:10:14.920 But he got parachuted into Canada for this election, more or less, to try and save the liberals and get

00:10:21.240 them back in again, which he did. But he also campaigned on being pro-business. He tried to steal some

00:10:29.400 of the stuff that the conservatives were saying. And then he gets in and his words are not matching

00:10:37.160 what he was saying. As a matter of fact, almost every bill that's been introduced since the

00:10:44.120 Carney came back in, officially was elected as prime minister, none of them have really been

00:10:50.760 any use to the West. And this is another example of something that's completely not useful to the

00:10:56.680 West when the energy minister won't even do his job and sidesteps the federal responsibility of

00:11:03.000 managing cross provincial border energy, which is a pipeline. And he needs to step in and actually do

00:11:11.720 his job and figure out some way to get EB on board that makes EB happy, makes Smith happy,

00:11:18.440 and the federal government can manage the actual building of that pipeline.

00:11:22.840 Well, I don't know how much effort it would take to, or whether we should take to make the

00:11:28.920 premier of BC happy. There is a legal obligation to accept a pipeline if it is approved by the CER.

00:11:36.760 I don't know what's kind of a trade-off that there could possibly be that would be ethical.

00:11:43.320 I want to take you one step back here. There was a meeting of the premiers with the new prime minister

00:11:52.440 in your city, I do believe. I was up in Saskatoon, yeah. Yeah, I'm in Regina,

00:11:57.960 he was up in Saskatoon. He was up, okay. Your province, anyway. Hard to spell, easy to draw, Saskatchewan.

00:12:06.120 So, look, what happened at that meeting that's relevant to this discussion we're having about

00:12:12.760 driving a pipeline through to the west coast? Well, at that meeting they talked about

00:12:20.040 nation building and nation building projects. They hadn't quite announced the Major Projects Office

00:12:25.400 yet, but they had announced at that meeting, and a lot of their discussions were about

00:12:30.600 breaking down interprovincial trade, for example, and then also major projects to get our exports

00:12:40.280 to new countries other than the U.S., whether it was going to Europe or Africa or going the other

00:12:46.760 direction to Asia, Australia, New Zealand, but to get our products to world markets, which was a word that

00:12:53.640 got said a lot to get our mark and get our products to world markets. In other words, not the U.S., and

00:13:01.560 coming out of that meeting, particularly at the press conference at the end of the day,

00:13:06.760 Doug Ford in particular

00:13:08.040 made a comment about how easy it was to deal with Carney compared to his predecessor, and that he was

00:13:17.800 actually confident for once that the federal government was actually going to help provinces

00:13:22.760 get their products out of just going to the U.S. and to going to new markets. Because we have markets

00:13:30.200 that want our stuff, it's just we can't get it to them. And that is where the the issue is, is how do we

00:13:37.640 get what we have to those world markets? And the only way to do it is off of our east coast and our west

00:13:45.640 coast. And if the west coast isn't playing ball but the east coast is, guess what? That actually is a

00:13:52.360 disadvantage to Alberta and Saskatchewan in particular because it takes a lot to get oil from Alberta all

00:13:58.680 the way to the east coast, which is basically next to impossible because there is no pipeline to go

00:14:03.960 through Quebec either. So the only way to actually get our stuff to large markets like Asia, we're talking

00:14:10.120 billions of people here, is to get it off the west coast. But if you got a tanker ban and a

00:14:15.400 no pipeline bill, that's going to be next to impossible. And we are literally saddling future

00:14:21.320 generations with debt that they shouldn't have to be saddled with because we would be have more money

00:14:26.440 flowing through the system which would create less deficits because we'd have more money to pay for

00:14:30.680 stuff. And this government seems intent on running massive federal deficits and not doing the things

00:14:38.600 that would make Canada wealthy. So Chris, at the end of that meeting,

00:14:45.400 Premier Smith came out and talked about a grand bargain. What was the bargain?

00:14:58.680 They didn't say specifically what the grand bargain was, but it did look like whatever happened behind

00:15:04.760 closed doors. There was something that was going to happen. It looked like, and I'm speculating here,

00:15:13.560 but it looked like they were going to have a pipeline to the west coast. She seemed somewhat confident in

00:15:20.840 that. And then also ways to get our stuff out through the Arctic through Churchill, Nanitoba.

00:15:27.320 They did indeed talk about that, but they also talked about something else, decarbonized oil.

00:15:33.720 Yes. And now, you know, down the road from where you are, you've got Weyburn, which has demonstrated

00:15:41.000 over more than 20 years. In fact, I think it's almost 25 years that you can take carbon dioxide,

00:15:48.280 compress it, push it down a hole, effectively bury it under very high pressure.

00:15:53.480 The purpose of that experiment was actually to retrieve the last oil, enhanced oil recovery,

00:16:02.280 is what they were calling it. But in recovering something like another 100 million barrels,

00:16:09.000 they actually demonstrated that you could capture and sequester carbon.

00:16:13.800 Yes. We even have a coal plant in Saskatchewan that's carbon capture.

00:16:18.600 Okay. So now I thought that the grand bargain was that you could have new pipelines if they carried

00:16:27.800 decarbonized oil.

00:16:32.280 Smith has talked about it.

00:16:35.400 Obviously, it's the carbon in the oil that gives it any value as a fuel. So, you know, we are

00:16:41.560 talking about dehydrated water in a way. But I think the principle is that whatever carbon you burn to

00:16:51.240 extract the oil, you put an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide down the hole and seal it. And there

00:16:59.560 is, in fact, a group in Alberta, the Pathways Alliance, that has been working on this project for some years.

00:17:05.160 Now, my understanding is that the grand bargain would involve taking that technology, applying it on a

00:17:13.560 very large scale. And we know it works from the Weyburn example, but to ramp it up, and that's where

00:17:21.320 things get sticky. What is it going to cost to actually take that much carbon out of the process,

00:17:31.880 pump it underground? We're talking a couple of million barrels a day. Is this viable, in your

00:17:41.000 opinion? Who is going to want to invest, they're talking about $16 billion, in order to sell $20

00:17:50.760 billion worth of oil? There's a lot of crazy talk around this, and I'm not sure that this so-called

00:17:58.280 grand bargain has got legs. But how do you see it? Danielle Smith has, to the best of her ability, 0.71

00:18:08.040 tried to appease environmentalists with regards to the pipeline. And whether or not it's economically

00:18:16.760 viable, that will come from a private investor on whether or not they think it is economically viable.

00:18:22.200 Danielle can pitch it and see what happens. But at the end of the day, if the dollars don't add 1.00

00:18:32.600 up, you won't get an investor. And we have policies in this country that, let's say they got rid of the

00:18:41.240 tanker ban and they got rid of the no pipelines bill. Let's just say Kearney woke up one day and

00:18:45.800 decided to actually do something nice for the West. Let's say those two disappear. But let's say we

00:18:51.560 start building a pipeline. You're going to go through at least one, if not two, elections before

00:18:57.080 that pipeline is finished. Meaning the government could change and come back in and literally campaign

00:19:03.800 on a no pipeline bill and a tanker ban again. And you could have your pipeline only half built. And then

00:19:09.240 you've wasted all that money. It's the economic uncertainty that is the greatest hindrance in

00:19:16.680 this country when it comes to energy projects. And the fact that we have a government that's hell bent

00:19:22.440 on net zero, even though one, net zero is not possible ever. You can't go to zero. So the entire

00:19:32.680 movement is a joke because it's not even possible to get to net zero. But we have a government that has

00:19:39.240 for lack of a better term, conned people in particularly Eastern Canada that somehow were

00:19:45.000 the greatest polluters on the planet. Even though we are probably the least polluters on the planet.

00:19:50.680 I mean, I saw a study just the other day that showed that if Canada and the US went completely dark,

00:19:57.480 we would have almost zero change on the global environment. Like that's how little we already put

00:20:03.320 out because we're already, um, using environmental techniques, both in Canada and the US, uh, to

00:20:11.000 appease environmentalists on energy projects and so on. So this is a, this is a, once again, the federal

00:20:19.000 government needs to actually step in, do their job, build the pipeline and make sure that it's, there's

00:20:25.320 certainty for an investor to be able to come in and spend that type of money because you're not going to

00:20:30.200 get an investor if you're not going to be willing to be long-term open to whatever it is that they're

00:20:36.680 going to invest in. So rest of your knowledge, Chris, is the oil that's imported from offshore

00:20:42.760 into Eastern Canada required to be, uh, decarbonized in this, in this way? I'm not sure. I I've never

00:20:50.440 heard that it was, I've only ever heard the West talk about it. I strongly suspect that there is no

00:20:56.520 such requirement because when you're talking about places like Nigeria and Russia, they don't have the

00:21:03.320 technology to compress carbon dioxide and pump it underground, even if they did. So even if they

00:21:11.560 wanted to. So I, I, I have a feeling that we've got, again, one of these, um, problems of confederation

00:21:18.040 where the West is getting treated differently. Yes, you can have a new pipeline, but you have to decarbonize

00:21:24.280 the oil in the East. No, no such requirement exists. Eastern oil is cheaper. There's this big cost that

00:21:31.160 is, uh, imposed upon Western Canadian oil. And then of course you're supposed to go out and sell it on the

00:21:37.160 export market, which is of course where Eastern Canada is buying its oil from, you know, the whole

00:21:43.560 thing goes round and around. I strongly doubt that the economics are going to support this.

00:21:50.520 And then if it happens, it'll be supported by the taxpayer, not by private enterprise.

00:21:57.320 But I could just be a bit of a Jeremiah on this. Do you have any optimism to give us here as we talk

00:22:04.360 about the premier of BC and the prime minister of Canada and the premier of Alberta trying to make this

00:22:10.360 thing work?

00:22:11.960 I think there's only one of those three people trying to make this work. And I think the other

00:22:15.720 two are just simply passing the buck to each other. Uh, and there's, I don't think Kearney has any

00:22:23.720 intentions of ever building a pipeline. And I think he's going to use EB to make sure that that doesn't

00:22:28.440 happen. And then going the other direction into Manitoba, he'll use Wab Canoe to make sure that no

00:22:33.720 pipeline goes through Manitoba up to Churchill.

00:22:37.000 So you're a pessimist.

00:22:40.920 Ah, realist.

00:22:43.800 Unfortunately, it's usually the, um, the, the, the realists usually turn out to be pessimists,

00:22:48.840 don't they?

00:22:49.240 Oh gosh.

00:22:50.280 Unfortunately in this country, especially when it comes to energy.

00:22:52.760 We'll leave it to the, we'll leave it to the viewers to make the judgment. But, uh, Chris,

00:22:57.560 you're doing a great job back there in, uh, Saskatoon and, uh, sorry, in Regina. And thank you so much

00:23:03.560 for coming on the program today and explaining what Mr. Eby is up to and why he shouldn't be

00:23:11.560 allowed to get away with it. Thank you so much.

00:23:14.120 Thanks, Nigel. Thanks for having me.

00:23:15.720 All the best.

00:23:16.680 You too.

00:23:17.480 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

Western Standard - October 21, 2025

HANNAFORD： Pipelines and the Constitution： Ottawa’s vanishing act

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