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Speaking with reporters in Vancouver on Tuesday morning, Alberta premier Alison Redford flatly, and rightly, rejected calls by British Columbia premier Christy Clark to cut B.C. in for a share of the profits from the Northern Gateway pipeline.
As important as it is to develop the infrastructure necessary to carry Canadian energy products to market, from Alberta or elsewhere, such pipelines cannot be built at any price to satisfy opportunistic leaders looking for a quick buck or a bump in the polls. Ms. Redford did the right thing, for Alberta and Canada, by refusing to deal with Ms. Clark on the latter’s terms.
The Northern Gateway pipeline, which is still awaiting regulatory approval, would ship petroleum products from the Alberta oil fields across British Columbian soil to ports on the Pacific Coast. From there, tankers would haul Alberta’s oil to the growing, and energy starved, markets of Asia. There are risks to this plan. The pipeline itself could rupture and cause a spill — Enbridge Inc., the company that would build and operate Northern Gateway, has done itself no favours through its shoddy handling of similar spills involving pipelines it operates in the U.S.
And even if the pipeline itself functions perfectly, there is the potential for the tanker ships that would transport the oil to foreign ports to wreck and spill their cargoes. These are legitimate issues that should concern B.C. voters, and Ms. Clark was not wrong to speak out forcefully on her province’s behalf.And Ms. Redford, to her credit, has acknowledged that, agreeing on Tuesday that it’s “entirely appropriate” for the people of British Columbia to debate the merits of the proposed pipeline. And there are indeed benefits to offset the admitted environmental risk — while B.C. may only receive 8% of the royalties from the exporting of the oil, amounting to an estimated $6.7-billion over 30 years, it would reap the majority of the taxation and employment benefits from the construction and operation of the pipeline.
If, however, the government of B.C. remains concerned about the environmental risk the pipeline poses, the appropriate action to take is to seek to mitigate that risk. That can be accomplished through engineering and technical means, and by ensuring the pipeline and shipping firms are sufficiently insured to respond after any potential spill. Those are reasonable steps. Simply demanding a bigger piece of Alberta’s pie, irrespective of whether any incident ever occurs, is not only unreasonable, it is something that no export-driven province could ever agree to.
For the rest of this column, please go to the National Post website: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/08/14/matt-gurney-redford-shoots-down-clarks-attempted-cash-grab/