Elect Trudeau? Say Goodbye To More Pipelines

One of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s star Liberal candidates — prominent Quebec environmental activist Steven Guilbeault — says it’s unlikely Canada will ever build another pipeline under legislation passed by Trudeau’s government.

In acknowledging this to the National Post’s Jesse Snyder, Guilbeault — recruited to run by senior Trudeau strategist and fellow environmental activist Gerald Butts — committed a classic political gaffe.

That is, Guilbeault, who has a history of engaging in civil disobedience at climate change protests, accidentally told the truth.

Trudeau’s official position is that his Bill C-69, which expands and complicates the already Byzantine process for reviewing and approving pipelines in Canada, won’t interfere with the construction of new pipelines.

At least beyond the one pipeline Trudeau bought — Trans Mountain — in a bid to get that long-delayed project, which is still stalled, moving again.

Guilbeault confirmed the concerns of Canada’s oil and gas industry, which dubbed Bill C-69 the “no more pipelines bill,” along with Bill C-48 banning oil tankers from docking in northern British Columbia.

Despite all of the polls at the beginning of the campaign showing Canadians were concerned about climate change as a major issue, we’re back to where we started before the election on the issues of climate change and energy policy.

If the polls are accurate, it doesn’t matter who wins Monday, unless Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer wins a majority government, which seems unlikely.

If Scheer wins a minority government, he’ll find no support for streamlining pipeline approval legislation from the Liberals, NDP, Bloc or Greens.

If Trudeau wins a majority government, he’ll keep pursuing his policies which have failed to deliver pipelines.

If Trudeau wins a minority government, he’ll need support from one or more of the NDP, Bloc and Green parties, all of whom are anti-oil and anti-pipeline.

This will leave Western Canada with insufficient pipeline capacity to get its oil to tidewater and from there to global markets, meaning it will have to keep selling it at hugely discounted prices, costing our economy billions of dollars annually.

Trudeau has always been ambivalent about this issue, saying Canada’s oil sands need to be phased out and then, claiming he misspoke, that no country would leave Canada’s oil reserves of 173 billion barrels in the ground.

Except that’s what’s going to happen.

This will damage national unity, particularly in Alberta, where many believe Ottawa doesn’t care about them while pandering to anti-pipeline provincial governments like Quebec’s.

Contrary to green propaganda, the age of fossil fuels is far from ending and Canada’s pipeline shortage means we are literally cutting our own economic throats.

Global demand for oil rose 1.3% last year, according to the International Energy Agency, while the demand for natural gas — another of Canada’s major resources — rose 4.6%, up from 3% in 2017, and three times the average annual growth rate of 1.5% over the past five years.

One of the major reasons is that natural gas is increasingly being used to replace coal-fired electricity, which also addresses climate change because natural gas burns at half the carbon intensity of coal.

A logical energy policy for Canada would be to use the increased profits from the international sale of our oil and gas resources that would come with building more pipeline capacity, to fund the expensive transition to a low carbon economy.

Trudeau himself has made that argument.

The problem is his climate change and energy policies are doing almost nothing to achieve it.

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