Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a press conference in Montreal, Tuesday, January 26, 2016, following his meeting with Montreal mayor Denis CoderreTHE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham HughesGraham Hughes/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has finally taken a stand on the Energy East pipeline, and it's the right one. He says he wants to see it built but that there must be a robust assessment of the $15-billion project that takes into account a new and heightened appreciation of environmental and aboriginal issues. His stance is laudable and very 2016, but it can't hide one hard fact: If he fails to convince Canadians to build this pipeline, it will be a disaster for the country.
Pipelines are strange things. They are a ubiquitous part of life in Canada but are rarely seen or discussed – except when it comes time to build a new one. Which is weird. There is currently enough oil and gas pipeline in Canada to cross the country about 160 times. That's 825,000 kilometres in total, according to Natural Resources Canada. A little more than half of it is under the streets of Canadian towns and cities, bringing natural gas to your house and those of your neighbours. The rest of it crisscrosses various provinces, carrying crude oil and natural gas to market.
Spills and accidents occur but are relatively rare, given the 20 Earth circumferences worth of pipeline lying about in Canada and the huge amount of oil and gas that they gather, transport and distribute every day. Ottawa claims that 99.999 per cent of the 1.2 billion barrels of oil delivered by federally regulated pipeline every year arrives safely.
So what's the fuss? Well, one of the most pressing economic issues facing Canada is finding a way to get Alberta's landlocked oil to refineries and customers outside the province, including overseas. In 2014, the Harper government approved the Northern Gateway pipeline, which will carry Alberta crude oil to the Pacific coast – if it survives legal challenges from First Nations leaders and environmentalists. They insist the process for approving that pipeline was rigged by Ottawa, a position Mr. Trudeau agreed with. Ottawa, he said at the time, was a "cheerleader for this pipeline from the very beginning when Canadians needed a referee."
Mr. Trudeau is determined to have his government play referee, or "responsible mediator," as he said in Montreal on Tuesday. He wants the National Energy Board, which has already begun assessing the Energy East pipeline and gave Northern Gateway a green light in December 2014, to take new environmental factors into account – greenhouse gas emissions, above all – and be additionally sensitive to the concerns of First Nations communities.
He isn't asking the NEB to start over, but he is giving it a rather difficult assignment. Accurately measuring the impact of greenhouse gas emissions created by a pipeline that hasn't been built, and in the case of Energy East won't be completed for years, is probably impossible. What will the price of oil be in 2020 or 2021? What will the demand be? Will electric cars be more affordable by then? Will the companies extracting the oil in Alberta have continued to lower the GHG emissions created by the extraction process? All of this is hard to predict.
Mr. Trudeau is not wrong to ask the NEB to ask these questions. But he has to recognize that, at the end of the review process, there will be no way to please everyone. There is a growing public concern about climate change, and some people simply don't want Canada in the oil game, no matter the costs to the economy. There is a genuine malaise about the treatment of aboriginal people. And many local governments are happy to stand up and say "no" to pipelines, even though they don't have the legal power to stop them. These issues can't be swept aside by an openly pro-oil government any more. The Prime Minister is right to try to make the assessment process as credible as possible.
That said, it would be a huge mistake on his part to fail to sell the merits of Energy East.
The pipeline would deliver up to 1.1 million barrels a day of Western crude to Eastern Canadian refineries and the port in Saint John. If and when it is approved, it will provide a shot in the arm to the country's struggling oil sector by being an incentive to invest, at a time when the price of oil is low and people are losing their jobs and suffering as a consequence.
It will also be a solid demonstration of Mr. Trudeau's ambition of being a uniting influence. The Conservative Opposition has tried to make the issue an East vs. West one, and to some extent any debate about oil in Canada will always be haunted by Ottawa's misadventures with the national energy program of the 1980s. Mr. Trudeau needs to persuade Canadians of the fact that a healthy energy sector is a key part of a healthy economy, and of the consequence flowing from that: Oil must move. Where pipelines can transport oil safely, efficiently and in an environmentally respectful way that passes muster with a timely, arm's-length review process, they should be built.
The Prime Minister doesn't need to be a cheerleader. A plain old leader will do.