By J :
Anybody who questioned the importance of the ability to move energy within our own borders should take a long look in the mirror right now.
MichiganGov. Gretchen Whitmer’s bid to shut down Enbridge’s Line 5 to score points with environmentalists in her state has brought into sharp focus what that means for Canada.
The threat to Central and Eastern Canada is forcing virtue-signalling green politicians to fight for the 68-year-old pipeline. They’ve had to join forces with western premiers to take on this threat that could cut half of Ontario and Quebec’s oil and natural gas supply.
If this goes through, it will mean the immediate loss of tens of thousands of jobs across Canada with increasing losses in the oilpatch.
It will be a crippling blow to the economy.
It would decimate critical supplies, like jet fuel for Pearson International Airport, and cause fossil fuel prices to skyrocket, costing people more at the pumps or to heat their homes — if they can get the gas at all.
Malcolm Bird, an associate political science professor at the University of Winnipeg, said if the pipe is turned off, it will be Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s biggest crisis. At least, it will underscore a massive failing of Canada’s energy strategy that the West has been screaming about for a generation.
“It illustrates in a very tangible way what sovereignty really means,” he said. “If you have a pipeline going through a foreign country that you’re really, really dependent on, you don’t have full control over that pipeline.”
Trudeau has done everything he can since gaining power in 2015 to hammer the oil and gas sector, from cancelling pipelines, torquing legislation and implementing prohibitive taxes on industry and the public. Even the one pipeline still on life support to improve our access to tidewater has been fraught with continued legal battles, environmental red tape, failed consultations and has had to be revived several times.
What these sycophants have forgotten is we are nowhere near a position to actually cycle off oil and gas. Not even close from a technological standpoint, a replacement standpoint or an infrastructure standpoint.
Regardless of what Trudeau or his acolytes say, pipelines are still the safest, greenest and most efficient way to move oil and gas. We are also still entirely reliant on the product it moves.
Trudeau has continued in his failure to understand the need for energy independence within our own borders and not leave our future in the hands of foreign governments.
Former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, for all his many failings, actually had a reasonable solution in his last election: Create of an energy corridor tying the country together.
While this idea died with Scheer’s political career, it should be given more than a revisionist thought now.
“It certainly lays bare . . . the fact we don’t have that and there isn’t a Canadian-owned, Canadian-controlled set of infrastructure,” said Bird. “If we’re going to keep our country effective and active and a cohesive whole, we need infrastructure to do that.”
This goes beyond moving energy throughout the country. We are a fractured nation, regardless of insinuations of COVID bringing us together. In the 21st century, this could be critical to stitching us back together as previous national infrastructure projects, such as building the railroad to the west or constructing the Trans-Canada Highway, have done.
Trudeau needs to learn from this. The East needs to learn from this. I’m not holding my breath. It would take incredible political will and spine to do, something seriously lacking for years.
But we need a legitimate solution to selling off control of the energy we produce and rely on just so we can claim some imaginary moral high ground.
