Credit where credit is due, U.S. President Donald Trump’s Venezuelan raid and kidnapping has accomplished one important thing: There was hardly a word in the media about the Epstein Files most of the day yesterday!
Now comes the important Canadian question, though: Can the fallout from the raid also get someone to build another pipeline for Alberta?
Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, Danielle Smith seems to have sent an email to a few reporters yesterday saying, as The Canadian Press quoted it, “recent events surrounding Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro emphasize the importance that we expedite the development of pipelines to diversify our oil export markets.”
Naturally, Alberta’s premier said this includes a pipeline to the coast of British Columbia, a region where a lot of people for a lot of reasons don’t want to see any such thing.
This was inevitable, of course, the usual suspects on social media had been saying the same thing in a variety of ways for several hours before Ms. Smith jumped on the bandwagon.
And as these things go, in addition to being predictable, it’s a relatively harmless bit of advocacy by Canada’s best-placed fossil fuel industry lobbyist.
After all, if the Venezuelan armed forces had, say, sunk an American aircraft carrier, or if Chinese paratroops had dropped in to rescue Mr. Maduro, or if Chevron had announced a new oilsands plant in the Orinoco Belt, Ms. Smith would presumably have said exactly the same thing.
In Ms. Smith’s world, every day is a good day to start a new pipeline somewhere, just as no day is a good day to raise the minimum wage. This is just the way things are in Alberta in the early 21st Century.
The most significant problem for Ms. Smith’s pipeline demands is that it’s going to be impossible to find a private-sector investor willing to pony up the dough to build one because pipelines are high-cost, long-term projects and the long-term market for Alberta bitumen is problematic, no matter what happens next in Venezuela.
It is always said in Conservative political circles that this is the fault of Liberal (and if necessary NDP) policies such as carbon taxes, consumer protection laws, environmental laws, and probably even woke books in school libraries. The real problem, of course, is the market.
The market for Alberta bitumen is problematic because the most of the world is transitioning to cleaner energy – and in some places even clean energy – because it’s getting to be easier and cheaper to build and install than fossil fuel energy. Some parts of the Americas may have decided they’re going to be technology backwaters to prop up the fossil fuel industry, but how successful that project will be also remains to be seen.
As predicted in this space, publicly traded Canadian oilsands corporations’ stocks immediately came “under pressure” yesterday as a result of the raid. “Cenovus Energy Inc. and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. were each down about five per cent and Suncor Energy Inc. dropped 1.4 per cent,” The Canadian Press reported. “Enbridge Inc., which operates a vast cross-border oil pipeline network that it plans to expand, and South Bow Corp., whose Keystone system ships crude to the U.S., each fell around three per cent.”
Environmental Defence said yesterday in a statement of its own that is hard to dispute, industry executives “know what is coming and are focused on profit-taking while they still can.”
As a result, as Premier Smith surely understands – because whatever she is, she isn’t a dope – the only way those pipelines she keeps demanding will ever get built is with money from taxes or hijacked pension funds.
Just watch: We will move quickly from arguing the U.S. raid on Venezuela shows the urgency of building a multi-million-pipeline to the West Coast, to blaming the lack of investment on the Liberals, to saying Ottawa is going to have to put up the money.
Throughout this entirely predictable strategy, the UCP will keep its thumb on the scale to encourage a frightening campaign for Alberta independence.
And if none of that works? Well, that’s what the Canada Pension Plan fund is for, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, last night the Epstein Files snuck back into the news, as the U.S. Department of Justice slow-walks the release of more documents.
Political pressure will build Stateside as a result, so another U.S. attack somewhere in the world is probably coming soon. It’ll have to be bigger than the last one, since Saturday’ has already been downgraded from an invasion, to an attack, to an incursion, to a raid. Next thing you know it’ll just be a visit from the cops.
After all, that dog won’t wag itself.
