“This is a test of whether Canada works as a country,” warned Alberta Premier Danielle Smith after she finally announced a proposal for a bitumen pipeline to the B.C. coast sponsored by… the government of Alberta.

After months of futile door knocking and arm twisting in the oil patch, Smith obviously failed to find a private sector partner prepared to pony up their own money in support of her relentless hype about the strong business case for another pipeline. Instead, the Alberta government will apply to the federal government’s new Major Projects Office in hopes that a private partner and pipeline route through B.C. might present itself later.

Small wonder that no private companies came forward. Unlike the cushy political existence of regular public pay cheques, businesses need to base their decisions on dollars and sense. The global oil market is entering a period of structural decline due a massive deployment of cheap renewables led by China.

Crude prices are projected to plunge 25 percent next year and any sensible oil company would be looking at slashing costs rather than sinking billions into soon-to-be-stranded assets. Case in point is Imperial Oil’s utterly unsurprising decision to cut one fifth of their local workforce by as part of a larger personnel purge by parent company ExxonMobil. Other oil giants around the world including Chevron, BP and ConocoPhillips have likewise shed up to 25 percent of their workforce as the entire industry enters hard times.

Smith on the other hand can enjoy the luxury of performative rhetoric rather than producing actual results. She is apparently daring Prime Minister Mark Carney to override legitimate concerns from the elected government of British Columbia and virtually every First Nation on the B.C. north coast to push through her faux pipeline “proposal” with no private partners. And if Carney says no? Then according to Smith, “Canada … is not a country.”

Smith’s Company Town

Really? In this moment of ludicrous political theatre, perhaps it is more illuminating to ask: is Alberta an actual province, or just a company town? The oil patch has intruded so far into Albertan institutions it is difficult to discern where private interests end, and public government begins.

Some of Smith’s more bizarre policy actions — such as intentionally kneecapping her province’s previously booming renewable energy sector — make more sense when you imagine her government representing fossil fuel interests rather than ordinary Albertans.

Likewise, her government’s wildly unpopular decision to re-open the breathtaking eastern slope of the Rockies to coal mining and threatening the downstream water supply as far away as Saskatchewan.

Or further hobbling the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), which had already allowed unfunded oil patch liabilities to reach up to $260 billion based on documents leaked in 2018. Apparently that already lax oversight required more laxative.

Staff was slashed in 2020 at the direction of the Alberta government even though there was no financial benefit for the province since the AER is 100 percent funded by the industry it is allegedly regulating. Even David Yager, Smith’s special advisor and AER board member recently described the province’s abandoned well problem as a “giant stinking pile of shit.”

Why also would the Alberta government choose to freeze their industrial carbon tax even though that depletes public coffers while putting the province in potential legal jeopardy with Ottawa?

Or allow utilities to mix hydrogen with piped methane for heating and cooking fuel? This unwise and dangerous policy increases costs to consumers while raising the risk of childhood asthma and even household explosions. The only beneficiaries would seem to be the owners of natural gas infrastructure who can claim bogus progress on lowering emissions to forestall the transition to heat pumps.

What about the Alberta government allowing the Pathways Alliance to break up their massive carbon capture and storage (CCS) proposal into 126 separate applications to avoid triggering a provincial environmental assessment? Leaks of carbon dioxide from CCS projects in the U.S. have had potentially deadly consequences yet the province seems to be colluding with industry to preclude proper oversight.

Grievance Politics

This latest stunt of a pipeline with no proponent seems solely an effort to generate additional oil patch grievance rather than actually governing. A cultivated narrative of Upper Canada meddling is now precious political capital, which Alberta and oil companies profitably spend to extract concessions from Ottawa or the Canadian taxpayer — like a $34 billion pipeline through B.C.

The reason there was so little love from Alberta after the Canadian taxpayer forked over $1,200 per household for the TMX project is that grievance is the point — it has become an end unto itself. Expect the oil patch to employ similar cynical tactics in an effort to have beleaguered Canadians to massively subsidize their dubious Pathways CCS project.

Existing bitumen production will profitably persist for years to come. There is currently adequate pipeline capacity and planned upgrades to existing routes are more than enough to meet near-term needs according to the CEO’s of both Trans Mountain and Enbridge. Contrary to Smith’s hyperbole, the era of huge capital investments to increase oil sands production is long gone and not coming back.

The world is moving on from fossil fuels, and fast. Entrenched incumbents and their political minions will use whatever influence they have to slow down this transition, even at the expense of their countries or the citizens they were elected to represent. Smith’s charade of a straw man pipeline project dangerously undermines Canadian unity at time when it is needed most, while benefiting Big Oil and MAGA-aligned efforts to break up our country.  

No amount of fossil fuel giveaways or subsidies will satisfy oil companies or their surrogates so we should stop trying. There are big things we need to build including port upgrades, a national electricity grid, and an enormous wind development in Nova Scotia. Canada has a higher calling than wasting time and political capital indulging fossil fuel fever dreams.

PM Carney has done an admirable job of isolating ill-informed extremists and moving forward with his agenda. However, he, and all Canadians, need to recognize that if Canada is to be a real country and not just a company town, we need to finally stand up to powerful and cynical interests like the oil patch.