There’s no need to make the explanation of the carbon pricing, carbon capture and bitumen pipeline deal announced Friday in Calgary by the federal and Alberta governments too complicated. It’s actually pretty simple.
After all, notwithstanding their political differences, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith have more objectives in common right now than they don’t, so it couldn’t have been that hard for them to reach an agreement.
Mr. Carney has served many years as an expert in and senior representative of international finance capital, of which the oil industry remains a key component in Canada. While neither an expert nor a deep thinker, Ms. Smith has been a lobbyist for the oil industry and an effective public proponent of its preferred policies throughout her career as a journalist and politician.
Of course they weren’t going to have all that much trouble finding ways to grant the Canadian oilpatch its wish for a pipeline to the West Coast, preferably completely paid for by taxpayers, plus slow-walked carbon taxes and big subsidies for the carbon-capture boondoggle to build social license for the pipeline.
They may have their differences, but they are flying in formation when it comes to the oil industry.
They have immediate parallel political needs as well. Ms. Smith must thread the needle between appearing to be an Alberta separatist and appearing to be a patriotic Canadian unifier to hold her fraying but still united voting coalition together – and, not incidentally, to hang onto her job as premier since separatists now clearly dominate her party.
Friday’s deal lets her do that – for the moment, anyway. And the moment is all Ms. Smith ever thinks about. To give her her due, it seems to work.
Mr. Carney needs to keep his coalition together as well. Instead of MAGA separatists on the right who would really rather be part of the United States so they could own machineguns and call people hateful names, he needs to appease moderate green voters in British Columbia and Quebec and somehow hold the country together.
Since the contradictions of using bitumen as the glue to keep their political coalitions together will become more obvious over time, they’re in a hurry to get the deal done and some pipe laid so the doubters on both sides of the political spectrum can be told there is no alternative. For this reason, we should take seriously their promise that work on the pipeline, whatever route it takes, will start next year.
The simplicity of this political equation seems to have confused the Canadian political and business commentariat, grown used to sustained attacks on Ottawa by conservative Alberta governments. Commentators’ theories and explanations, as a result, were all over the map Friday and yesterday – sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results.
According to Carson Jerema in The National Post, it’s all a dirty trick by Mr. Carney to “ensnare Danielle Smith in pipeline blackmail.” Ottawa’s gift of “free rein to polluters” (as Environmental Defence put it in a news release) “will give anti-energy B.C. Premier David Eby an effective veto,” according to the Post.
Meanwhile, over at the environmentally inclined National Observer, Max Fawcett agreed … sort of. Mr. Carney isn’t taking a wrecking ball to Canada’s climate policies, he’s saving the country by defusing Ms. Smith’s constant carping about Canada, Mr. Fawcett asserted. “He understands the value of appearing to say yes to certain forms of economic development while creating or accelerating the conditions that will make it a non-starter.”
Postmedia’s Rick Bell – who often acts as a sort of de facto minister of propaganda for Ms. Smith’s United Conservative Party Government – was enthusiastic, with mild reservations. “Carney is the prime minister and Smith says there was no choice but to meet him in the middle,” he wrote, leaving his usual breathless hyperbole to his colleague Don Braid. “She figures this deal did just that and it is a win for Alberta and a far cry from those days of ‘anger, frustration and despair’ under Trudeau.”
Well, the last time Ms.Smith said something like that, about the memorandum of understanding with Ottawa that set the stage for Friday’s deal, she was jeered at her own party convention.
And then there was Mr. Braid – Postmedia’s other high-profile Alberta political columnist – who went right over the top with a panegyric to Ms. Smith that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the pages of Pravda or the People’s Daily in the 1950s.
“She has won every single battle with Ottawa over the past year,” said Mr. Braid, sending his hosannas heavenward. “In scope and importance, her victories against Ottawa outweigh former PC premier Peter Lougheed’s limited victory in the oil pricing crisis after 1980. … Smith may have set up this province for decades of economic gains.”
Well, if Mr. Carney is sneakily giving Mr. Eby a veto, British Columbia’s premier doesn’t seem to happy about it. And if Ms. Smith is saving Confederation, you have to wonder why she’s pushing ahead with her separatist referendum agenda. It seems to me that coastal British Columbians are as unhappy with this state of affairs as are Alberta separatists. And if anyone’s thinking about the constitutional requirement for consultation with First Nations, no one seems to be talking about it.
You have to wonder if, despite Ms. Smith’s best efforts to keep the UCP united, something’s going to give as the separatists that now control the party push for it to officially declare itself to be a separatist party. Can political entropy in Alberta be far behind?
And how comfortable will some members of Mr. Carney’s narrow majority in Parliament be in a government that appears to have completely tossed the environmental policies of the Trudeau era, unlamented though they may be here in Alberta. Steven Guilbeault, the former federal environment minister? B.C. MPs Will Greaves and Stephanie McLean?
Is it possible that the biggest winner in this deal of the century could turn out to be … Avi Lewis?
