When the Conservatives tabled a motion asking the House of Commons to “take note” of the memorandum of understanding signed between the federal and Alberta governments and express its support for the construction of a pipeline, the Official Opposition presumably hoped, one way or another, to make trouble for the Liberal government.
According to the logic of these things, the Liberals only had two bad options.
If Mark Carney and his cabinet decided to vote in support of the motion, they no doubt risked highlighting dissent about a pipeline among Liberal backbenchers. At the very least, it is hard to imagine how Steven Guilbeault could have supported the Conservative motion.
But if Carney and the Liberals decided to vote against the motion, the Conservatives would surely hold that out as proof that the Carney government doesn’t actually want to see a pipeline built.
While dismissing the Conservative motion as a stunt, the Liberals chose the latter option. The Conservatives promptly declared their disappointment. Before the vote had even been taken, the Conservatives were touting a radio ad that will target Corey Hogan, the Liberal MP for Calgary Confederation, for his alleged “betrayal.”
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If the Conservatives retake Calgary Confederation at the next election — Hogan won it by just 1,248 votes this past spring — then perhaps Pierre Poilievre and his team will consider the motion a great success.
But for now it is unclear how much anyone’s interests were actually advanced by this week’s game of pipeline chicken.
For the Liberals, the questions surrounding their share of the MOU remain basically the same as they were before the Conservatives drafted their motion.
First, there is the pressure to shore up and defend the Carney government’s approach to climate policy. On the same day that motion came before the House, the Toronto Star and La Presse published an op-ed by Guilbeault, in which the former environment minister expanded on his misgivings about the MOU and set down some expectations about what must ultimately come out of the negotiations between Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
Second, there is the question of what Carney will do if talks with Alberta, British Columbia and First Nations leaders ultimately come to some kind of an impasse over a pipeline. But that answer might not be known for some time.
In the meantime, Poilievre’s Conservatives will continue to insist that Carney secretly has no intention of seeing a new pipeline built. Mind you, the Conservatives used to say the same thing about Justin Trudeau and the Trans Mountain expansion.
At the very least, it might be said that if Carney somehow actually intends to stand in the way of significantly expanding export capacity for Canadian oil, he will have chosen a very convoluted — and risky — way of going about that.
‘This game-playing is ridiculous’ says Alberta Liberal MP on Opposition pipeline motion
The Conservatives will now point to Tuesday’s vote as some kind of telling indicator. But the Liberals will presumably respond by pointing to the complete MOU — indeed, during question period on Tuesday, Carney suggested that perhaps the Conservative motion could be expanded to include the entire text.
Had the Conservatives gone that far, they probably would have succeeded in exposing any cracks in the Liberal caucus. But then the Conservatives themselves might have joined Guilbeault in voting against the MOU.
One imagines that might not have been appreciated by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
In narrowly drafting the motion, the Conservatives picked the part of the MOU that they like most — the pipeline. But in not mentioning so much else, they also gave the Liberals an out.
After the Liberals criticized the Conservative motion for excluding too many elements of the MOU, Poilievre stood in the House on Monday morning and proposed an amendment that would have added references to several things, including Indigenous ownership, negotiations with British Columbia and the approval of a large carbon capture and storage project (the Pathways initiative).
But as Hogan quickly noted, the Conservatives again stopped short of referencing everything in the MOU — in particular, the amendment made no mention of increasing the carbon price for industrial emissions.
Poilievre replied by restating his opposition to pricing industrial emissions.
“Madam Speaker, I think we just heard the Liberal member for Calgary Confederation say that he opposes a pipeline to the Pacific unless it includes a massive, crippling carbon tax on his own province,” Poilievre said. “Conservatives want a pipeline without a tax.”
Poilievre decided to oppose industrial carbon pricing this spring and he has repeatedly suggested the policy is somehow to blame for higher grocery prices — though independent analysis by economists has found that Canada’s industrial pricing systems have almost no impact on consumer prices. But while the Conservative leader may have thought that was a useful line of attack against the Carney government, it now has the federal Conservatives attacking part of an agreement signed by Alberta’s United Conservative government.
On a more practical level, it’s also not clear what doing away with carbon pricing in Alberta would mean for the Pathways project that the Conservative amendment included — a carbon price and market have been widely reported as an important element of moving forward with the carbon capture project.
“The viability of the proposed Pathways project is based on several factors including carbon pricing,” Kendall Dilling, president of that Pathways Alliance, said in a statement on Wednesday in response to a question about whether a strengthened carbon price was necessary to make the project viable.
“Implementing carbon capture and storage in oilsands operations requires close collaboration with both the federal and provincial governments, as well as an effective and nimble regulatory process. We remain committed to continue to work with governments to obtain sufficient levels of fiscal support to allow the project to move forward.”
According to the MOU, the Pathways project is also a prerequisite to moving ahead with a new pipeline.
All things considered it is unclear how much further ahead anyone or anything is after Tuesday’s vote. But with all due respect to the electors of Calgary Confederation, the actual debate here is about much more than any single riding.
Ultimately, the debate is not about whether or not the Liberals are willing to vote in favour of certain parts of the MOU in insolation, or what it does or doesn’t say that they aren’t. That might provide fodder for a few days of social media posts.
The actual matter at hand is how best, at a time when this country’s largest trading partner has become a threat, to reinforce the Canadian economy and how to do so in the most responsible way, both for the present and the future. And on another level, it is about how best to hold together a country — a challenge and a necessity at the best of times, but particularly important in this moment.
Whatever else it might’ve accomplished, Tuesday’s motion didn’t do much to meaningfully address any of that.
