Roundup: Upping the Trans Mountain drama

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Late afternoon yesterday, Kinder Morgan put out a surprise press release saying that they were suspending “non-essential activities” and spending related to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, citing the political fights still underway on the project. It’s a transparent move to try and force a political solution to some of the drama underway, and it certainly got everyone’s attention. Within the hour, Jim Carr was standing before reporters to assure them that all options were on the table, but by that point, Rachel Notley was demanding “concrete action” from the federal government, while Jason Kenney started his performative caterwauling about how terrible the federal government has been on this, and the federal conservatives promptly followed suit, ignoring their own record on pipelines in the meantime. Andrew Leach, however, has kept receipts, and immediately called them out on it. (John Horgan, incidentally, denies that he’s been harassing the project).

When Leach called out the fact that the previous government didn’t hold a press conference about the approval of Northern Gateway, and didn’t travel to BC to promote it, Raitt didn’t get his point and responded with a news article from the day which pointed out directly that the minister’s office sent out a release and refused all questions, after which Harper noted in the Commons that jurisdiction was deferred to the NEB. So the question is, if that was good enough for the Conservatives then, why is it so terrible that the Liberals are doing more and being more vocal about Trans Mountain now?

Paul Wells, meanwhile, takes a survey of the landscape in the wake of these developments, and continues to express some doubts as to what is going on. I personally have to wonder what more the federal government can do in the face of the provincial tit-for-tat from Alberta and BC, seeing as they already have jurisdiction over this pipeline, and they realistically can’t bigfoot the actions of the NEB, which is a quasi-judicial body. After all, there is the rule of law to contend with. To date, BC really hasn’t made any concrete actions that the government can take to court, for example, and certainly nothing that would merit reviving the powers of disallowance from constitutional dormancy. Kenney et al.’s demand to declare Section 92(10)(c) of the Constitution is legally illiterate, so what else, pray tell, should the federal government do? I’ll be curious to see what verifiable solutions present themselves in the coming days.

To round it off, Kevin Milligan also offered some observations on the situation on the ground.

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/983120057608781824

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/983121108852289536

https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan/status/983123756355694592

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau went to Humboldt, Saskatchewan, for the vigil for the victims of the bus crash there.
  • Progress on NAFTA talks is likely because of the looming US-China trade war.
  • The justice minister won’t say why she suddenly felt that preliminary inquiries are slowing down the justice system, as there seems to be little evidence to show it.
  • Maclean’s has a great look at how the government is struggling to land its economic message, torn between good news and trying to help those still struggling.
  • Bill Blair says the government is not going to allow celebrity endorsements of recreational cannabis, as companies scramble to find loopholes.
  • Oh noes! An MP deviated from the government line on the Russian diplomat expulsions! Surely this is a crisis! (This is why we can’t have nice things).
  • Tens of thousands of high-capacity rifle clips declared prohibited by the RCMP in 2016 remain at large.
  • The head of the customs and border union wants more resources to deal with irregular migrants, while the minister wants more messages to dissuade arrivals.
  • The program to provide compensation to the parents of missing and murdered children continues to be undersubscribed and difficult to access.

Odds and ends:

David Akin returns to his notebook to give more detail about that background briefing on the Atwal Affair™ as it happened, and lo, there is a trove of context that should have been reported at the time but wasn’t, for which I think needs to also be called out. If the reporting had been halfway responsible around this, we would have had this information weeks ago.

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3 thoughts on “Roundup: Upping the Trans Mountain drama”

  1. “Later afternoon yesterday…” Should probably be “Late afernoon yesterday…”

    Reading Kinder Morgan’s press release (here), and coverage of this morning’s teleconference (covered here), it seems that the company has been forced to a decision point that seems more than political posturing. Kinder Morgan “has set a much higher bar in order to proceed: certainty that British Columbia will not be able to block or delay construction, and assurances that its shareholders will not be hurt financially if there is further disruption.”

    So Kinder Morgan will be looking for a major surety from the Canadian government that the project will proceed. Kind of like a Western Bombardier setup.

    The government is really looking impotent and out of its depth on the Trans Mountain file.

  2. I think the political science literature around “issue ownership” is helpful here. The Harper government didn’t need to bigfoot the NEB (or do anything else to produce a record of success on pipelines) because they already “owned” the pipeline issue in voters’ minds. Trudeau will have to go much further to prove himself if he hopes to win those voters over.

  3. Darrell Bricker of Ipsos is correct in observing (in the Maclean’s article referenced above) that the Trudeau government’s current messaging about segments of the population being “left out” is stoking concerns that the economy is not performing as it should. But, looking more broadly, the choice the Trudeau Liberals made in 2015 to run on the (false) notion that the Middle Class was in trouble planted the seeds of the grief the government is reaping now. Any political party that consistently tells a self-identifying group such as the Middle Class that it is doing poorly and continues that message of victimization day after day – well into its time in government – can hardly expect to be rewarded for the malaise it has created.

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