Carney’s Pipeline Play Tests the Coalition That Put Him in Power

Steven Guilbeault was on Tout le monde en parle on November 30, downing a shot at the end for comic relief after catching his throat as he struggled to explain what it feels like to quit a cabinet job over Prime Minister Mark Carney’s energy deal with Alberta. I think he gave a good account of himself. Not for the first time, I wish this country had an English-language talk show that was as central to the national conversation.

Inevitably, the country has moved past a turbulent and surprising week toward familiar and comforting routines: booing compromise in Edmonton, counting favours in Montreal. “Carney has delivered for Alberta. What about Quebec?” reads the headline over Yasmine Abdelfadel’s column in this past Monday’s Journal de Montréal.

“Because, remember, it’s not Alberta that put Mark Carney in power,” writes Abdelfadel, a former provincial Liberal staffer turned public relations consultant. “It’s Quebec. It’s here that the Liberals saved the furniture. And yet, since he showed up, we don’t feel any recognition or consideration for the nation that gave him his mandate.”

I suspect that if Abdelfadel picked up the phone and dialed 1(403) and then any seven random digits, whoever answered would be full of ideas about what Carney’s party has done for Quebec lately. Here are two examples I’d name. Guilbeault was either the fifth or the seventh consecutive minister of Canadian heritage from Quebec, depending how you count ministers who got shuffled out and then shuffled back. Marc Miller is the sixth or eighth. This raises questions about what the governing party thinks Canadian heritage is. And Carney has referred two Quebec projects to the same Major Projects Office that has not yet received an actual Alberta pipeline project, including one that would expand capacity at the Port of Montreal’s Contrecoeur Terminal by 60 percent.

Some readers will say there can be no comparison between boats travelling eastward and the stuff that boats travelling westward might eventually carry. I have no rebuttal. American commentator Ben Shapiro wrote that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” but the reverse is at least as true: feelings aren’t interested in facts. If you view oil as the worst assault on Canada’s climate goals, and oil-sands oil as the worst form of oil, and if you believe, like former minister of environment and climate change Catherine McKenna, that any attempt to sequester carbon emissions to mitigate that score is “blatant greenwashing” that “plays Canadians for fools,” then I’m unlikely to change your mind.

Similarly, if you’re an Albertan who has believed since 2022 that Premier Danielle Smith is a better shield and sword against Central Canadian Liberalism than Jason Kenney ever was, you’re probably unlikely to read deep into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for evidence that she’s still on Alberta’s side against Ottawa. The sight of her glad-handing with Carney was probably all you needed to know, and it shouldn’t be surprising that some of Smith’s long-time supporters view her deal with Carney as a betrayal. In this view, Guilbeault’s departure from the Liberal cabinet (but not the Liberal caucus!) was an elaborate kabuki to make it seem like Alberta isn’t getting screwed again.

There are still facts and they still matter, but in a political culture that’s become deeply polarized and confrontational, it’s hard to imagine a more emotional question than whether Alberta oil-sands oil should be transported in much greater quantity to a British Columbian port. To the extent there’s a Justin Trudeau Liberalism that’s distinct from Carney Liberalism, expect the Trudeau crew to focus keenly on the Alberta MOU as evidence of the difference and of their superior virtue. I’ll be surprised if Trudeau can long resist the urge to comment publicly and critically.

Nor is this fertile ground only for Liberal infighting. The deep and long-standing animosity between much of Alberta and BC’s Lower Mainland, little noticed in the rest of the country, is coming to the fore again, as is Indigenous politics. Carney and minister of energy and natural resources Tim Hodgson may already have scotched their chances of success by consulting Alberta first and everyone else after, although BC’s premier, like Alberta’s, still seems surprisingly eager to find some sort of accommodation.

In his TV appearance Sunday, Guilbeault said it’s impossible “now” to imagine Canada reaching its 2030 emissions targets. That sentence was one adverb too long. This past Wednesday, while Guilbeault was still held to be a guarantor of Liberal climate virtue, the Parliamentary Budget Office published a report that said Canada is on track to emit 55 to 65 megatonnes more carbon than the government’s most lenient 2030 target—and that most of that gap, 45 megatonnes, was in place before Carney started changing government policies.

So, the difference between a Trudeau and a Carney is 10 to 15 megatonnes out of a projected global emissions gap of 20-ish gigatonnes. It would be highly characteristic for the Trudeau crew to decide this difference is crucial now that their guy is no longer able to deliver half-measures, just as it was entirely characteristic of them to enter a “clean energy dialogue” with a Joe Biden administration official, Amos Hochstein, who was that administration’s greatest champion of maximum oil and gas exports. It’s as if Hochstein had been playing poker against somebody who kept taping her cards to her forehead.

• Carney’s Pipeline Deal Lifts Up Alberta and Demotes BC to Second-Class Status
• Mr. Carney, about That Pipeline Deal—We Need to Talk
• The World Is Moving Away from Fossil Fuels. Canada Is Holding On for Dear Life

Lately, I’ve chatted with Ottawa friends who wonder what on earth Carney’s game could be—all these meetings with Smith, all this talk of oil. A tactical feint of some sort, surely. Three-dimensional chess.

I believe Carney would like to sell more oil. The reasons should not be mysterious. The US president is trying to reduce Canada–US trade. This will certainly inflict short-term cost in Canada and probably long-term cost too. I’ve written before that Canada is going through something very much like Brexit. What the Brits learned after Brexit is that you simply can’t find distant markets that will entirely substitute for the immense, once-congenial market next door. This is something Carney should know better than anyone, I’ve written a few times. What’s his answer?

His answer is that, in addition to revitalizing Canada’s internal market and maxing out those distant but imperfect overseas markets, he wants to sell more of whatever Canada has to sell. This is the “Canada has what the world needs” chapter of his catechism. That’s not only oil—a lot of different things would get shipped out of that 60 percent–larger Montreal port—but it could definitely include oil.

As one Canadian prime minister, a fellow by the name of Justin Trudeau, once said, “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” And it’s not even binary, sell it or don’t: Canada’s crude oil exports hit all-time highs in each of Guilbeault’s past four full calendar years in the federal cabinet, something he didn’t get asked about on TV the other night.

The particular project in the Alberta–Canada MOU, or rather the particular sort of project the document police-sketched in the absence of a proponent, may yet collapse or be blocked. The approach of Carney and Hodgson to consultation may have helped speed it to its doom. We’ll find out. In the meantime, Carney is making a big move with big risks and unpredictable outcome, which is hardly the sort of thing we see around Ottawa every day.

I caught myself saying to somebody today that Canadian politics hasn’t seen something like this since Brian Mulroney and the 1987 Meech Lake constitutional amendments. It’s a loose analogy, so loose it may not even be useful, but I mean it’s a case of a national leader putting his own voter coalition in play in return for a win that’s hardly guaranteed, rather than simply parking on the surest part of his vote and hoping for a half-point’s difference at this or that margin.

Meech Lake failed, incidentally, nearly paralyzing our politics for a decade after. That’s not an argument against trying to do big things. But it’s an argument against reckless brinksmanship. In a period of great uncertainty, a lot of people and governments will try a lot of things. Not all will succeed. None should be reduced to a binary pass/fail test of Canada’s worth as a country.

From “How carbon makes you feel” by Paul Wells (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.