{"id":187036,"date":"2025-10-03T08:39:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T08:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/187036\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T08:39:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T08:39:10","slug":"alberta-gets-oil-pipeline-politics-bouncing-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/187036\/","title":{"rendered":"Alberta gets oil pipeline politics bouncing again"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announces plans to submit an application for a new oil pipeline to northwestern B.C. on Wednesday. Ms. Smith wants the project on the next list of federally backed major projects.Todd Korol\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

Now the pipeline game is afoot. The temporarily calmed politics around a new oil pipeline are once again a bouncing ball between Ottawa and Alberta, with unpredictable bobbles in British Columbia and across the country.<\/p>\n

Alberta\u2019s Danielle Smith changed the game by announcing her province will carry a pipeline proposal forward<\/a> \u2013 even if she said that in the end, a private investor would have to step in to build it.<\/p>\n

She wants the pipeline on the next list of federally backed major projects that Prime Minister Mark Carney is to announce in November.<\/p>\n

Until now, it had been relatively easy for Mr. Carney to push the building of a pipeline into the tomorrow-world of things that aren\u2019t even on the drawing board yet. <\/p>\n

B.C. Premier David Eby has been able to steer away questions about a pipeline through his province by noting that there was no actual project.<\/p>\n

Now all that gets a little harder. The politics are already messier.<\/p>\n

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Mr. Eby called Ms. Smith\u2019s announcement taxpayer-funded wedge politics. \u201cWe need a major projects office at the federal level,\u201d he said. \u201cNot a major distractions office.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Smith said the provincial government will lead a group<\/a> that will define the project and steer an application to be put to Ottawa\u2019s Major Projects Office and then hopes to turn the project over to private investors who would build it.<\/p>\n

The pipeline is still not even on the drawing board. But political questions will be raised anew. For a while, it seemed like the politics around building an oil pipeline had cooled. Ms. Smith\u2019s announcement will heat them up.<\/p>\n

Three weeks ago, when Mr. Carney\u2019s Liberals announced a first list of five major projects<\/a> to be fast-tracked that did not include an oil pipeline, Ms. Smith had been atypically positive, saying the list made her think, \u201cFinally, they get it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Smith had previously expressed optimism about the prospects for a \u201cgrand bargain\u201d that would see a new oil pipeline built if it was bundled with the huge Pathways Alliance carbon capture and storage project.<\/p>\n

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Behind the scenes, Ms. Smith\u2019s government and Mr. Carney\u2019s kept talking about the give-and-take required. Now Alberta\u2019s Premier is forcing more of that give-and-take into public view. <\/p>\n

That can only complicate Mr. Carney\u2019s balancing act. For a Liberal prime minister, the grand bargain still requires some kind of climate action.<\/p>\n

He is expected to release a climate competitiveness strategy in a matter of weeks, which will presumably outline how he plans to fit climate action with a new industrial strategy and a series of major infrastructure and resource projects.<\/p>\n

If Mr. Carney removes some of the environmental restrictions that Ms. Smith wants to see lifted, such as the proposed cap on greenhouse-gas emissions, he\u2019ll face political pressure to balance it with some emissions constraints, such as a tighter industrial carbon-tax regime. <\/p>\n

In the grand bargain that Ms. Smith has been taking about, the environmental quid pro quo for an oil pipeline is supposed to be the Pathways Alliance carbon-capture project. But there\u2019s no agreement on who would pay the cost. Ms. Smith is asking Mr. Carney to put a pipeline on the list of national projects to be fast-tracked before the other side of the bargain has been worked out.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, federal Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said a pipeline \u201cmust move forward in conjunction with the Pathways projects.\u201d<\/p>\n

All those issues were going to come up anyway. Ms. Smith is accelerating them.<\/p>\n

The months of relative calm in Confederation. when premiers acknowledged the need to work together in the face of damaging U.S. tariffs, now seem unlikely to last.<\/p>\n

Mr. Eby argued lifting a tanker ban off the northern B.C. coast to make a pipeline viable would derail Indigenous consent for other projects. Bloc Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois Leader Yves-Fran\u00e7ois Blanchet \u2013 who doesn\u2019t speak for a province but is still the Liberals\u2019 main political competitor in Quebec \u2013 suggested a new pipeline would make Quebeckers a party to Alberta\u2019s environmental destruction.<\/p>\n

For Ms. Smith, it\u2019s obviously good politics. Making her government the proponent forces Ottawa to say something sooner. If it leads to the approval of a pipeline, she can run for re-election on her success. If it doesn\u2019t, she can run for re-election against Ottawa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announces plans to submit an application for a new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,15147,48,15148,295,714,66],"class_list":["post-187036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-campbell-clark","tag-canada","tag-canadian-politics","tag-environment","tag-politics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}