Mark Milke is a Calgary author.
In the lead-up to Confederation in 1867, one perennial concern was how the small-minded provincialism of local politicians made it difficult for merchants and travellers alike to criss-cross British North America.
Thus, in 1865, George Brown, founder of The Globe newspaper and a reform-minded politician in the Province of Canada's Legislative Assembly, compared travel to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as akin to visiting a foreign country, where a "customs officer meets you at the frontier, arrests your progress and levies his imposts on your effects."
That problem of artificial barriers (provincial tariffs on one's goods, for example) was one reason why Brown favoured the prospect of Confederation, and he was not alone. New Brunswick legislator John McMillan, also speaking in 1865, argued in favour of a "union of the provinces" because, among other benefits, it would "enable us to have free trade with our neighbours [and be] commercially the best step we could take."
Likewise, George-Étienne Cartier, co-premier with John A. Macdonald for a spell in the late 1850s and early 1860s in the Province of Canada, saw that it was precisely because a cacophony of local interests existed, and could unnecessarily interfere in greater coast-to-coast prosperity, that "the federation system ought to be resorted to and would be found to work well." His colleagues, listening to his speech in February, 1865, responded with "Hear, hear."
Brown, McMillan, Cartier and other early politicians envisioned a Canada with a dominion (federal) government that would promote, protect and ensure the national interest. That included a free flow of goods, services and national projects. It was necessary to counter the inevitable tendency of the occasional puffed-up provincial potentate to otherwise obstruct nation building, a grander Canadian identity and a wider and deeper prosperity.
In contrast to those mid-19th century statesmen, a recent example of local potentates just popped up in Montreal.
There, Mayor Denis Coderre and other area politicians have made clear they oppose the Energy East pipeline proposed by TransCanada. That's the one that would ship 1.1 million barrels of oil daily from the Western Canada sedimentary basin to refineries in Quebec and New Brunswick. Energy East could potentially replace $8-billion worth of imported oil from Saudi Arabia and other countries that now flow into Central and Eastern Canada.
Mr. Coderre and others oppose the possible Canadian/foreign oil "swap" due to a psychological need for perfection: "When it comes to transporting oil, we need a perfect score, and we cannot make mistakes," he opined in a recent column in The Calgary Herald.
Perfection is not a realistic demand, least of all for politicians or pipelines, or even for the Earth itself, considering how it groans, shudders, erupts and cracks tectonic plates, among other unpredictable activities. But for those who prefer to deal in reality, here's a useful fact: Pipelines are the safest way to transport oil, as Michel Kelly-Gagnon, president of the Montreal Economic Institute, has pointed out. But Mr. Coderre already knows that from Quebec's recent tragic encounter with another form of oil transportation: rail.
As part of his quest for absolutism against a tube that carries black liquid used by Quebeckers and everyone else, Mr. Coderre mentions his concern about carbon emissions. On such a matter, the mayor desires to reassure fellow politicians, such as those he recently met at the United Nations climate conference in Paris.
But Energy East is not just about finding a domestic market for Western oil production, it's also about displacing imports. And no honest person thinks the world will soon end its reliance on 96 million barrels of oil, daily. Thus Mr. Coderre's reality-ignoring position mimics the naysaying more often found among hard-line energy opponents who harbour romantic visions about a pre-energy Eden.
One would think Mr. Coderre and his colleagues would be more pragmatic. That includes recognizing it is oil and gas that help Quebeckers endure winter, and that such energy assists everyone else on the planet with much else. But the mayor's demand is born from a political marriage of theatrics and histrionics.
In blessed contrast to local Montreal politicians, Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume supports Energy East. As he told one reporter: "In a normal country, all organizations that want to build infrastructure for transporting energy should be able to do it."
Mr. Labeaume thus echoes the optimistic, entrepreneurial and national sentiments of statesmen at the time of Confederation such as Cartier, McMillan and others, or indeed of Brown, who in his 1865 speech, also advocated for a "scheme" – Confederation – to help Canadians develop our "great natural resources."