Mark Carney, much like Justin Trudeau before him, is the master of the grand gesture, the grand announcement, often with little substance behind it. The difference is that, thus far at least, he seems to be managing to carry his public popularity along with him.
Yesterday was the occasion of another such grand announcement. Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith jointly announced, to great fanfare, a climate and energy agreement to follow up on their memorandum of understanding (MOU) last November. For all their talk of urgency, it has still taken six months to get to this next step.
The main item is the construction of a new one-million-barrel-a-day oil pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast. A firm proposal is to be submitted to the major projects office by July 1st, it is to be designated as a project of national interest by October 1st, and construction could start by "as early as" September 1st 2027, and in theory it could be up and running by 2033 or 2034. I suppose, in Canadian terms, that is expeditious, if not downright breakneck.
Of course, there is as yet no private sector proponent willing to stick its neck out and commit to building the thing. Neither is there a confirmed route that is not going to get bogged down in endless controversy and acrimony. Both parties say that they will respect Canada's duty to consult with Indigenous peoples, and the province of British Colombia remains implacably opposed to such a pipeline though its land abd coastal waters. BC accuses Carney of pushing through "nationally significant" energy deals without involving the entire country, and of "rewarding" Alberta's bad behaviour and separatist rumblings.
So, all things considered, we are probably no further forward than we were, despire the grand announcement.
The other part of the announcement was an agreement with Alberta on industrial carbon pricing and emissions reductions. Alberta is to impose on its oil producers a carbon price of $130 a tonne (that is what they would pay for carbon offsets), up from the current level of $95 a tonne, according to a gradually increasing schedule between now and 2040. Yes, 2040!
However, the "floor price" - the price actually enforced by government - will be only $110 a tonne, and it will only start to be regulated by 2030, starting at the ultra-low level of $60 a tonne. Compare that to the Trudeau-era federal climate plan, which set the price of carbon at $170 a tonne by 2030, and you can see just how much Carney has been swayed and equivocated. The lower carbon price is to apply across the country, pending consultations with other provinces.
Environmentalists are not happy, slamming the deal as betraying the country, undercutting national ambitions on industrial carbon pricing, snd sabotaging plans to combat climate change. It puts "Canada's target of net zero by 2050 well out of reach", they say, and its 2030 targets will be put back by at least a decade.
But the muck gets thicker. Carney also made clear that the pipeline deal is still dependent on the construction of a massive carbon capture project in the Alberta oil sands, the so-called Pathways project to be built built the Oil Sands Alliance. Carney was unequivocal: "No Pathways, no pipeline".
The Pathways initiative is a 400km long pipeline, funded largely by the region's oil industry, that will transport carbon trapped at oil sands facilities to a storage area located under Cold Lake, Alberta. At the moment, this is largely theoretical, and the oil company execs involved are increasingly getting cold feet as the costs and technical challenges become apparent. The coalition of potential builders also object the $130 price on carbon that has just been set. This is not going to happen by September 2027 (or even 2033). And, "no Pathways, no pipeline", right?
So, where does all this leave us? Well, nowhere really. For all the grand announcement, we are no closer to getting a new pipeline built than we ever were. Now, that's not a bad in thing, in my personal opinion. And I do wonder whether this is not some elaborate house of cards built by Mark Carney - once an environmentalist himself, remember - in full knowledge that it will almost certainly all come tumbling down eventually.
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