Western Standard - 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

00:00:22.120 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

00:00:39.360 couple of months ago and doing an excellent job. Chris, I see the numbers every day and you are

00:00:45.640 you're doing great. So you're also a pretty skilled writer in your own right and paying

00:00:52.320 attention to the things that matter. And you had an editorial in the Western Standard just,

00:00:59.300 I think it was yesterday, and it drew attention to a really oddball situation that has happened

00:01:09.340 And where we have the federal government having claimed responsibility for pipelines when it's to their advantage, now just sort of, you know, go and sort it out among yourselves.

00:01:23.440 The article I'm talking about is E.B. can't, that would be the B.C. premier, E.B. can't veto a nation-building pipeline.

00:01:33.600 What's going on, Chris?

00:01:35.680 Yeah, well, when Carney came in, he talked about this major projects office, which is now up and running.

00:01:42.020 They picked the first five projects, most of which were actually already well on the way to completion, but at least they're doing something.

00:01:50.200 And obviously, Danielle Smith, the Alberta Premier, has been asking for another pipeline. 0.97

00:01:56.320 She wants it obviously to be one of the major office projects that they have going on and has started the process of that.

00:02:05.480 The Alberta government is going to pay the first little bit of the work that needs to go in before a private investor would come in.

00:02:11.460 However, you see Premier David Eby calls it basically a dream and it's never going to happen.

00:02:17.940 And he also says it's not allowed to come into B.C., which he can't do because it's a federal project.

00:02:26.020 as soon as you go over a provincial line.

00:02:27.520 Well, you've seen this movie before, haven't we,

00:02:29.200 with the Trans Mountain expansion line?

00:02:31.860 Yes, and they went all the way to the Supreme Court,

00:02:34.700 and B.C. lost.

00:02:37.020 B.C. attempted to stop the Trans Mountain pipeline.

00:02:40.500 So even the Supreme Court is really doing on this.

00:02:42.360 It's really pumping, like that got finished,

00:02:45.440 and it's pumping oil, right?

00:02:47.140 That's correct, yeah.

00:02:48.140 Yeah, the last numbers I saw on the Trans Mountain pipeline

00:02:52.300 is that it is operational.

00:02:54.660 depending on who you listen to anywhere from 25 to 80 capacity uh they haven't really been

00:03:01.140 too forthright with the exact numbers going through but i've heard numbers anywhere from

00:03:05.700 25 to 80 percent of the max capacity of what the transmountain pipeline can pump through it

00:03:10.900 so in other words we do need another pipeline it it's not going to take much to to fill up the

00:03:17.200 transmountain pipeline and need a second one uh and especially if we want to get our uh oil

00:03:22.940 out of Canada and the U.S.

00:03:25.720 Because right now, 96% of what we pump out of the ground

00:03:30.100 goes to the U.S.

00:03:31.500 And we're not even getting the market price for it

00:03:35.120 because they know that we can't sell it to anybody else.

00:03:38.680 We need to be able to create competition

00:03:40.260 by being able to export to Asian nations.

00:03:43.860 And right now we can't.

00:03:46.060 I mean, what we have, we put on rail

00:03:47.480 and into the Trans Mountain, but it's not an out.

00:03:49.800 We definitely need a second pipeline. 1.00

00:03:51.220 especially for the economic development of the country particularly the west these are good

00:03:57.260 middle class paying jobs now it seems to me chris that we actually uh back 10 years ago

00:04:03.920 there was a pipeline a second pipeline approved it was called northern gateway

00:04:09.240 and it was going to go out to the west coast up around prince rupert okay uh and then the

00:04:19.300 new federal government under Justin Trudeau deep-sixed that. It was fully approved, fully

00:04:25.920 permitted, but they just arbitrarily canceled it. Then we had a number of other pipeline projects

00:04:38.500 fall off the table because, frankly, the federal government didn't want them to happen.

00:04:44.340 And then we had the No Pipelines Bill, the famous Bill C-69.

00:04:50.820 And we had another bill, which is still in force, that makes it illegal for tankers to show up off the West Coast.

00:05:01.980 There isn't a comparable law banning tankers from the East Coast, but there is from the West Coast.

00:05:08.780 Now, that law is still in place.

00:05:12.440 The no new pipelines law is still in place.

00:05:16.740 So what is the game plan that Premier Smith is following here and demanding to reopen the old Northern Gateway route, essentially?

00:05:29.980 Well, I think it plays to her advantage politically since the energy sector is massive for Alberta and they export most of it. 0.98

00:05:39.380 so it's in their advantage to be able to get more out of the ground take it out faster i mean we're

00:05:45.140 not going to run out of oil in canada for you know 100 plus years if not longer um and we can

00:05:51.940 if we get more oil out of the ground it creates more jobs it creates more taxes that get collected

00:05:57.540 that then can be spent on things like health care and stuff but when we hear that chris but you know

00:06:02.420 at the moment you still can't back up a tanker to the dock and uh and take on a load so

00:06:07.940 So do we not have to clear those legislative obstacles first?

00:06:13.660 Possibly.

00:06:14.720 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.

00:06:24.360 So if she gets someone who's willing to come in here and build the pipeline

00:06:28.980 and pay for it all, and she can make an economic case for it, 0.94

00:06:33.420 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

00:06:48.440 about, you know, being carbon neutral and all this other stuff for pipelines too. So she's

00:06:53.560 even trying to appease the environmentalists who think that, you know, carbon is the worst thing

00:06:57.560 ever um and in this at the same time she can get her pipeline built which would provide plenty of 1.00

00:07:06.120 jobs not just in alberta but also in saskatchewan as well and so what is the what is the point that

00:07:12.600 mr eby seems to be stuck on that uh he says there there couldn't possibly be a case so don't even

00:07:20.280 try where where's he coming from on this that's a great question other than maybe it plays well

00:07:27.320 for him politically by trying to block

00:07:29.380 a pipeline, but it doesn't play

00:07:31.300 well for him economically, because

00:07:33.260 it would create jobs in B.C. as well.

00:07:36.500 And

00:07:36.600 for

00:07:39.060 EB to be

00:07:39.840 against it from the very beginning,

00:07:43.120 like not even willing to

00:07:44.820 hear

00:07:46.180 out the people who want to invest in this,

00:07:49.220 maybe behind private doors,

00:07:51.220 they're not going to come out publicly yet, but

00:07:52.960 he's not even,

00:07:55.140 he's basically saying don't even trust.

00:07:57.320 which the argument that you shouldn't try something

00:08:03.460 just because there's a premier against it

00:08:06.580 that doesn't fall under his purview 0.98

00:08:09.700 is completely ridiculous. 0.92

00:08:12.140 This is something that should be regulated 0.94

00:08:13.880 by the federal government.

00:08:15.020 It shouldn't be regulated by Alberta or BC.

00:08:17.640 This should be done through the Canada Energy Regulator.

00:08:20.420 That's what they do, cross-border energy.

00:08:24.420 And this is a pipeline that goes over a border.

00:08:27.320 But did not our new energy minister, Mr. Hodgkin, just say, go work it out among yourselves?

00:08:34.980 That's exactly what he's saying.

00:08:36.500 He's telling Daniel Smith to go convince David Eby to let this pipeline go through.

00:08:42.880 And if she can't get his support, then the federal government's not going to support.

00:08:46.460 So in one sense, this government oversteps into provincial jurisdiction where they shouldn't.

00:08:50.480 And then when they're supposed to oversee something in federal jurisdiction, they're abdicating it to the provinces.

00:08:56.540 It's not how our country is supposed to be running.

00:09:00.020 Well, we could speculate at length of what the hidden motives driving the federal government might be.

00:09:07.600 I'll take one stab at it.

00:09:09.740 I don't think they actually ever want to see any further oil development in Western Canada.

00:09:16.260 Wouldn't you say?

00:09:17.680 Absolutely.

00:09:18.680 I was saying this before Carney got elected.

00:09:21.140 But they can't come out and say it in so many words, because that would look bad.

00:09:26.720 Correct. So they have to look like, oh, we're trying, but it just didn't happen.

00:09:31.660 And, I mean, Carney is essentially Justin Trudeau, just slightly older.

00:09:37.280 But the policies that he's been following are basically essentially the same.

00:09:42.840 And that includes the environmental policies of the former government, former prime minister.

00:09:48.380 and we're not seeing any real change at the top of the country when it comes to pipelines

00:09:54.940 and when it comes to the West in particular.

00:09:59.320 Carney played up the fact that he announced his campaign in Edmonton and all this stuff.

00:10:04.200 But at the end of the day, he has basically been out of the country for over a decade.

00:10:11.160 And prior to that, he was the Bank of Canada governor.

00:10:13.700 but he got parachuted into into canada for this election more or less to try and save the liberals

00:10:20.800 and get them back in again which he did um but he also campaigned on being pro-business you know

00:10:28.340 he tried to steal some of the stuff that the conservatives were saying uh and then he gets in

00:10:34.680 and his words are not matching what he was saying as a matter of fact almost every bill that's been

00:10:41.500 introduced since the Kearney came back in, officially was elected as prime minister,

00:10:48.480 none of them have really been any use to the West. And this is another example of something

00:10:55.160 that's completely not useful to the West when the energy minister won't even do his job and

00:11:00.560 sidesteps the federal responsibility of managing cross-provincial border energy, which is a

00:11:08.420 pipeline. And he needs to step in and actually do his job and figure out some way to get EB on board

00:11:15.000 that makes EB happy, makes Smith happy, and the federal government can manage the actual building

00:11:21.100 of that pipeline. Well, I don't know how much effort it would take to, or whether we should

00:11:27.760 take to make the premier of BC happy. There is a legal obligation to accept a pipeline if it is

00:11:35.220 approved by the CER. I don't know what's kind of a trade-off that there could possibly be that would

00:11:41.420 be ethical. I want to take you one step back here. There was a meeting of the premiers with the new

00:11:50.100 prime minister in your city, I do believe. I was up in Saskatoon, yeah. Yeah, I'm in Regina. He was

00:11:58.240 in saskatoon he was obviously okay your promise anyway yes yep hard to spell easy to draw saskatchewan

00:12:06.080 so um look what happened at that meeting that's relevant to this discussion we're having about

00:12:12.720 driving a pipeline through to the west coast well at that meeting they talked about nation building

00:12:21.360 and nation building projects they hadn't quite announced the major projects office yet but they had announced

00:12:28.240 at that meeting and a lot of their discussions were about breaking down

00:12:32.440 interprovincial trade, for example, and then also major projects to get our

00:12:39.080 exports to new countries other than the U.S., whether it was going to Europe or

00:12:45.540 Africa or going the other direction to Asia, Australia, New Zealand, but to get 0.63

00:12:50.720 our products to world markets, which was a word that got said a lot, get our

00:12:55.240 get our products to world markets in other words not the u.s and coming out of that meeting

00:13:02.720 particularly at the press conference at the end of the day uh doug ford in particular

00:13:08.060 made a comment about how easy it was to deal with carney compared to his predecessor and that he

00:13:17.660 was actually confident for once that the federal government was actually going to help provinces

00:13:22.620 get their products out of just going to the U.S. and to going to new markets because we have markets

00:13:30.280 that want our stuff. It's just we can't get it to them. And that is where the issue is, is how do we

00:13:37.620 get what we have to those world markets? And the only way to do it is off of our East Coast and

00:13:45.300 our West Coast. And if the West Coast isn't playing ball, but the East Coast is, guess what?

00:13:51.260 that actually is a disadvantage to Alberta and Saskatchewan in particular because it takes a lot

00:13:57.400 to get oil from Alberta all the way to the east coast which is basically next to impossible

00:14:02.080 because there is no pipeline to go through Quebec either so the only way to actually get our stuff

00:14:07.000 to large markets like Asia we're talking billions of people here is to get it off the west coast 0.96

00:14:13.800 but if you got a tanker ban and a no pipeline bill that's going to be next to impossible and

00:14:19.200 we are literally saddling future generations with debt that they shouldn't have to be saddled with

00:14:24.560 because we would have more money flowing through the system, which would create less deficits

00:14:29.140 because we'd have more money to pay for stuff. And this government seems intent on running

00:14:33.300 massive federal deficits and not doing the things that would make Canada wealthy.

00:14:41.480 So, Chris, at the end of that meeting, Premier Smith came out and talked about a grand bargain.

00:14:52.380 What was the bargain?

00:14:58.180 They didn't say specifically what the grand bargain was, but it did look like whatever happened behind closed doors, there was something that was going to happen.

00:15:09.600 It looked like, and I'm speculating here, but it looked like they were going to have a pipeline to the West Coast.

00:15:18.320 She seemed somewhat confident in that.

00:15:21.820 And then also ways to get our stuff out through the Arctic through Churchill, Nanitoba.

00:15:26.960 They did indeed talk about that, but they also talked about something else, decarbonized oil.

00:15:33.820 Yes.

00:15:34.020 and now you know down the road from where you are you've got wayburn which has demonstrated over

00:15:41.340 more than 20 years in fact i think it's almost 25 years that you can take carbon dioxide compress it

00:15:49.020 push it down a hole effectively bury it under very high pressure the purpose of that experiment was

00:15:56.320 actually to retrieve the last oil, enhanced oil recovery is what they were calling it.

00:16:04.080 But in recovering something like another 100 million barrels, they actually demonstrated

00:16:10.560 that you could capture and sequester carbon. Yes, we even have a coal plant in Saskatchewan

00:16:17.360 that's carbon capture. Okay, so now I thought that the grand bargain was that you could have

00:16:25.200 new pipelines if they carried decarbonized oil.

00:16:32.240 Smith has talked about it.

00:16:35.360 Obviously, it's the carbon in the oil that gives it any value as a fuel. We are talking about

00:16:43.440 dehydrated water in a way, but I think the principle is that whatever carbon you burn

00:16:51.040 to extract the oil you put an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide down the hole and and seal it

00:16:59.120 and there is in fact a group in alberta the pathways alliance that has been working on this

00:17:03.840 project for some years now my understanding is that the grand bargain would involve taking that

00:17:11.440 technology applying it on a very large scale and we know it works from from the wayburn example

00:17:17.120 but to ramp it up and that's where things get sticky what is it going to cost to actually

00:17:27.000 take that much carbon out of the process pump it underground i mean we're talking we're talking a

00:17:34.760 couple of million barrels a day yep is is this viable in your opinion who is going to want to

00:17:43.380 invest uh they're talking about 16 billion dollars in order to sell 20 billion dollars worth of oil

00:17:52.100 you know i mean there's a there's a lot of crazy talk around this and i'm not sure that this so

00:17:58.020 called grand bargain has got legs but how do you see it daniel smith has has to the best of her 0.86

00:18:07.620 ability tried to appease environmentalists with regards to the pipeline uh and whether or not it's

00:18:16.100 economically viable that will come from a private investor on whether or not they think it is

00:18:21.220 economically viable um danielle can pitch it uh and see what happens but at the end of the day

00:18:28.500 it's if if the if the dollars don't add up you won't get an investor and we have policies

00:18:36.820 in this country that let's say they got rid of the tanker ban and they got rid of the no pipelines

00:18:43.680 bill. Let's just say Carney woke up one day and decided to actually do something nice for the

00:18:47.500 West. Let's say those two disappear. But let's say we start building a pipeline. You're going to go

00:18:54.040 through at least one, if not two elections before that pipeline is finished. Meaning the government

00:19:00.780 could change and come back in and literally campaign on a no pipeline bill and a tanker ban

00:19:06.240 again and you could have your pipeline only half built and then you've wasted all that money it's

00:19:11.240 the economic uncertainty that is the greatest hindrance in this country when it comes to energy

00:19:18.980 projects and the fact that we have a government that's hell-bent on net zero even though one net

00:19:25.580 zero is not possible ever you can't go to zero so the entire movement is a joke because it's not

00:19:34.480 even possible to get the net zero. But we have a government that has, for lack of a better term,

00:19:40.760 conned people in particularly eastern Canada that somehow we're the greatest polluters on the planet,

00:19:47.120 even though we are probably the least polluters on the planet. I mean, I saw a study just the

00:19:52.080 other day that showed that if Canada and the U.S. went completely dark, we would have almost zero

00:19:59.160 change on the global environment. Like that's how little we already put out because we're already

00:20:05.020 using environmental techniques, both in Canada and the U.S. to appease environmentalists on

00:20:12.500 energy projects and so on. So this is a, once again, the federal government needs to actually

00:20:19.800 step in, do their job, build the pipeline, and make sure that there's certainty for an investor

00:20:26.540 to be able to come in and spend that type of money.

00:20:29.440 Because you're not going to get an investor

00:20:30.960 if you're not going to be willing to be long-term open

00:20:35.400 to whatever it is that they're going to invest in.

00:20:37.960 So the rest of your knowledge, Chris,

00:20:40.000 is the oil that's imported from offshore into eastern Canada

00:20:43.940 required to be decarbonized in this way?

00:20:48.620 I'm not sure.

00:20:49.740 I've never heard that it was.

00:20:51.880 I've only ever heard the West talk about it.

00:20:53.780 I strongly suspect that there is no such requirement because when you're talking about

00:20:59.300 places like Nigeria and Russia, they don't have the technology to compress carbon dioxide and

00:21:06.900 pump it underground even if they did, even if they wanted to. So I have a feeling that we've got,

00:21:14.420 again, one of these problems of confederation where the West is getting treated differently.

00:21:20.980 Yes, you can have a new pipeline, but you have to decarbonize the oil in the East.

00:21:25.940 No such requirement exists.

00:21:28.520 Eastern oil is cheaper.

00:21:29.780 There's this big cost that is imposed upon Western Canadian oil.

00:21:34.720 And then, of course, you're supposed to go out and sell it on the export market,

00:21:38.240 which is, of course, where Eastern Canada is buying its oil from.

00:21:43.120 You know, the whole thing goes around and around.

00:21:44.760 And I strongly doubt that the economics are going to support this.

00:21:51.400 And then if it happens, it'll be supported by the taxpayer, not by private enterprise.

00:21:57.060 But I could just be a bit of a Jeremiah on this.

00:22:01.140 Do you have any optimism to give us here as we talk about the premier of BC and the prime minister of Canada and the premier of Alberta trying to make this thing work?

00:22:11.780 I think there's only one of those three people trying to make this work.

00:22:15.100 And I think the other two are just simply passing the buck to each other.

00:22:21.180 And I don't think Kearney has any intentions of ever building a pipeline.

00:22:25.920 And I think he's going to use Evie to make sure that that doesn't happen.

00:22:29.700 And then going the other direction into Manitoba,

00:22:31.820 he'll use Wob Canoe to make sure that no pipeline goes through Manitoba up to Churchill.

00:22:38.460 So you're a pessimist.

00:22:40.940 ah realist unfortunately it's usually the um the the realists usually turn out to be pessimists

00:22:48.860 don't they unfortunately in this country especially when it comes to energy we'll leave it to the

00:22:54.380 we'll leave it to the viewers to make the judgment but uh chris you're doing a great job back there

00:22:59.740 in uh saskatoon and i'm sorry in regina and thank you so much for coming on the program today and

00:23:05.420 and explaining what Mr. Eby is up to

00:23:10.360 and why he shouldn't be allowed to get away with it.

00:23:13.200 Thank you so much.

00:23:14.680 Thanks, Nigel. Thanks for having me.

00:23:16.140 All the best.

00:23:17.460 You too.

00:23:18.120 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

00:23:35.420 Thank you.

Western Standard - October 17, 2025

Pipelines and the Constitution： Ottawa’s vanishing act

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