When it comes to summing up the deeply disappointing Liberal prime minister, Michael Harris does it as well as anyone.
Canadians dumped the Conservatives for a young, attractive politician who believed in all the right things: democracy, the environment, transparency, electoral reform, inclusiveness, feminism, and LGBT rights. Trudeau was the not-Harper candidate, the personification of sincerity with a great smile.
But what voters are getting is very different: a manipulative, secretive and occasionally deceitful politician who, on a bad day, could give Stephen Harper a run for his money when it comes to disingenuousness.
If, like his father, Trudeau is reduced to a minority government when he seeks a second term, his political comeuppance will boil down to two words: Kinder Morgan. This is the project that has sucked the credibility out of the prime minister, though there are certainly other issues which took the shine off before his face plant on this file.
Trudeau’s justification for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is an intellectual sand castle. He claims Canadians can have it both ways: prudent stewardship of the environment and resource exploitation. That is exactly the thinking that wiped out the northern cod on Newfoundland’s Grand Banks.
...Up until now, and minus the bumph, Trudeau’s climate record makes the previous prime minister look like an ambassador for the Green Party, with approvals for Woodfibre LNG, Pacific NorthWest LNG, TransCanada’s NOVA gas Transmission Ltd. and its fracked gas, and two pipelines, Trans Mountain and Line 3, carrying tar sands oil.Trudeau, the Underhanded.
Remember all those optimistic carbon emission targets espoused by past Liberal federal governments that were never met? Remember the serial promises about a national daycare program that never got off the ground?
But broken promises are no longer the only thing on the table over Kinder Morgan. This week, theNational Observer published a disturbing story raising the stakes enormously for Trudeau.
With credible evidence, the piece alleges the approval of Kinder Morgan was “rigged” by a government that had made up its mind to approve the project while it was still involved in active consultations with First Nations. That is called bargaining in bad faith.
...After all, paying an American company to reap the lion’s share of the financial benefits from an unrefined Canadian resource, is dubious. Asking Canadians and British Columbians to shoulder all of the risk associated with a product as hazardous as diluted bitumen is plain foolish.
There is losing faceoffs in your own end. There is also scoring on your own net.
It seems to be working for him. A couple of recent polls show pipeline support in BC at over 50% and rising. Whether that translates into votes in a year and a half remains to be seen.
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.. at some point Jusin Trudeau will be called upon to tell Canadians exactly who will be buying all that additional dilbit". Pipelines function via long term contracts.. and the sludge has to go somewhere.. apparently via 300 to 400 supertankers thrashing in and out via the Salish Sea. Untold wealth we have been told.. an end to 'discounted Alberta oil'.. high paying jobs for everyone.. wondrous royalties for Alberta and the feds' caloo callay.. Growing The Economy, Energy Security For Canadians.. rumors fly the dilbit will be welcomed by booming Asian economies.. facts say it will stopover in Washington State then go to California and get pipelined to the Texas Gulf Coast for refining into its components.. We just keep being fed airy fairy unicorn shit. Its a Texas owned wealthy company.. and Canada and Alberta are going to buy the pipeline and gift it to the former Enron owners.. but wait, there's more! World class marine rescue & removal! Hell, did we see anything world class when a barge or two broke loose up near Kitimaat? No.. we saw First Nations trying to salvage their shellfish and fisheries.. and that was just diesel fuel..
ReplyDeleteWe need to know exactly how much we are subsidizing.. (paying)
foreign owned companies to ruin our inland waters and environment
extirpate species by trashing habitat
and risk the west coast fisheries and ecosystems & tourism..
We've seen the wreckage to the east coast..
That's real.. depressed that economy
So just trash the west now?
Trudeau subsidizing big oil and facilitating climate change - what's not to like, eh?
ReplyDeleteCap, what Trudeau knows - like every other Liberal in BC - is that the pro-pipeline vote comes from the north and the interior which are traditionally Conservative and NDP ridings. There's precious little for him there. The anti-pipeline group are coastal and urban and that's precisely where Trudeau picked up all those luscious seats in 2015.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, the Dauphin seems to have painted himself into a nasty little corner.
"just trash the West now?" That sums it up, Sal. We'll see how well Trudeau handles the fight with environmentalists and First Nations when it gets grippy.
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ReplyDeleteLorne, did you not get the memo? This is the path to Canada's green future. I read an analysis at a Calgary site yesterday that Notley's numbers are now so bad her only hope of saving the NDP's skin in the upcoming election is to renege on her carbon tax promise, the very compromise Trudeau claims justifies the pipeline. Given that Jason Kenney is going to tell Trudeau to put his carbon tax up his arse, that cannot be what he's really after in his fetish to get this pipeline built. This prime minister is not telling us what he's really after - which is entirely consistent with Michael Harris' assessment of the Dauphin.
Mound, I strongly suspect that Trudeau's main concern is the banks. In the last few years, foreign oil companies, including Statoil, Shell and Marathon, have sold off their tar sands operations worth billions.
ReplyDeleteThe buyers were largely Canadian companies financed by Canadian banks. Completing the pipeline is necessary to maintain the illusion that there are Asian buyers waiting for those operations to come on line.
Imperial Oil, ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil have already admitted that their tar sands holdings cannot be profitably developed and have taken billions of barrels of write-downs to their bitumen reserves. The Canadian banks are looking at a severe haircut if investors come to the same conclusion as the oil giants.
The last thing Trudeau wants before the next election is a recession driven by a collapsing bitumen bubble. So he's stalling, hoping to postpone the inevitable economic and political consequences. The world his own children will inhabit appears to take a back seat to his political future. This is truly the "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt observed at the Eichmann trial.
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ReplyDeleteA very interesting theory, Cap. A while back I compared the economic vitality of the US versus Canada by looking at their largest corporations. America has the world's largest companies and they're all on the West coast - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. backed up by a sea of high tech and aerospace companies. Canada's largest concerns are - banks. They're the engine of our economy? Banks?
So, yes, that would be consistent with your theory of Trudeau's motives. Thanks, appreciated it.
I've always been puzzled by what the Libs get out of supporting KM. Albertans are conditioned from birth to hate Libs, so it's not like they can trade off votes in BC for ones in AB. Plus, the party's base is in eastern and central Canada. It mainly serves the interests of the Laurentian elites, the most prominent of which are the bankers. I could be wildly off, but this is the only explanation that made sense to me.
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