Today is the day that the government will make their decision on the Trans Mountain Expansion, and it should not be a surprise to say that they are almost certainly going to approve it, having spent $4.5 billion on the existing pipeline to “de-risk” the project, and far more in political capital at the cost of some of their BC, Indigenous, and environmental base while trying to insist that this is necessary for the transition to a cleaner economy. Of course, if they could communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, it might help them to make that case, but they seem incapable of it. The real question is going to be what kinds of changes to the route will be made in order to accommodate Indigenous groups, or other conditions to be mandated as part of it.

There will be much talk about the “pipeline crunch” that the TMX will hope to address, which has to do with added oilsands production and not enough ways to get it to market, given ongoing delays on the American side of both Enbridge Line 3 and Keystone XL – projects which have been approved in Canada, and the Line 3 construction has been ongoing on the Canadian side. But as much as TMX will help, we also need to remember that the projected growth capacity is limited, which is another reason why Energy East doesn’t make economic sense. The concern that the sector needs all kinds of new pipelines isn’t actually borne out in the data (as Andrew Leach has pointed out repeatedly, including here).

On a related note, the government has rejected most of the Senate amendments to Bill C-48, on the tanker ban, but did agree to the five-year legislative review period, but as much as industry groups are demanding that this bill and Bill C-69 be killed, it’s not going to happen.

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau met with the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, who wants implementation of the MMIW Inquiry recommendations, as well as redress.
• David Lametti has signalled that he will accept the Senate amendments to the criminal justice bill to give tougher sentences when victims are Indigenous women.
• Bill Morneau says the new shared-equity mortgage programme will become available by September, as other parties also promise housing “affordability.”
• The House of Commons has voted to declare a “climate emergency.”
• There are problems with civilians who assisted the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan not being able to access treatment for PTSD.
• Here is a debunking of a viral meme that claims Trudeau gave $465 million to Afghanistan and that it “disappeared.” (It didn’t).
• The Senate’s national security committee has voted to extend their study into the Mark Norman case until August – but it depends if Senator Peter Harder plays ball.
• Some senators are calling for social media rules after they complain that staffers are “bullying” them on Twitter. No, seriously.
• Dominic LeBlanc says his cancer treatments are going well and he’ll run again in the upcoming election.
• Two more Liberal MPs, Geng Tan and Frank Baylis, had opted not to run again.
• Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column looks at what the government needs to get done before they can rise for the summer (and the election).
• Andrew Leach walks through why Jason Kenney is lying to Canada (and in particular New Brunswick) about Energy East.
• Andrew Coyne pointedly wonders if other provinces or the federal government are going to “tolerate” Quebec’s new “secularism” law.
• Colby Cosh takes note of the protests happening in Hong Kong, and what the movement may portend.
• My weekend column looked behind the scenes of the Senate’s amendments to Bill C-69, and how not all was as it seemed on the surface.

Odds and ends:

Here is the write-up of the conference I spoke at last week, featuring some quotes by me.

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