HANNAFORD： Pipelines and the Constitution： Ottawa’s vanishing act
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
150.53064
Summary
Chris Oldcorn joins me on the show to talk about the need for a second oil pipeline from Alberta to B.C. and why it would be a good idea. We also talk about why Canada needs to get its oil out of the ground faster.
Transcript
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,
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
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
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,
00:04:16.020
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,
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,
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,
00:13:08.040
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
00:16:35.400
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,
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
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
00:22:11.960
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.
00:22:43.800
Unfortunately, it's usually the, um, the, the, the realists usually turn out to be pessimists,
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.