With pointed words sure to puncture sensitivities to the south, the Canadian government has declared its intention to inoculate the national economy against environmental paralysis funded by outside provocateurs. Bravo.
Joe Oliver, federal minister of natural resources, delivered the message on Jan. 9 before hearings on Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. The project would carry bitumen from the Alberta oil sands from Edmonton to a shipping terminal at Kitimat, BC. The route often is portrayed as that by which Albertan production will proceed to China if the US rejects expansion of TransCanada's Keystone system to the Texas Gulf Coast. Like the Keystone XL proposal, Northern Gateway has become a focus for environmental obstructionism, against which Oliver unloaded in an open letter.
Battering motives
"Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade," he wrote after noting that "virtually all" Canadian energy exports flow to the US. "Their goal is to stop any major project, no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydroelectric dams."
After battering motives, Oliver attacked abuse of regulatory processes and funding of the effort by interest groups outside Canada.
"These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda," he wrote. "They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects."
Before the Northern Gateway review, more than 4,000 petitioners had filed to make comments.
"They [the groups] use funding from foreign special-interest groups to undermine Canada's economic interest," Oliver went on. "They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources. Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: Sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further. They do this because they know it can work. It works because it helps them to achieve their ultimate objective: Delay a project to the point it becomes economically unviable."
These are not barbs aimed at the US; they're harpoons—and not just about American litigiousness. Delay by US President Barack Obama of a decision whether to approve the Keystone XL project appeased extremists but rebuffed Canadians and put a project vital to US interests in unwarranted jeopardy. And largely through reporting by Vancouver blogger Vivian Krause, Canadians have learned that much environmental opposition to oil sands development receives financial support from the US. Supporters of oil sands work, in fact, want to cull witnesses funded from outside Canada from the throng seeking to testify about Northern Gateway.
Oliver's letter serves two important purposes. It gives notice that the government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has no intention of letting extremists dictate environmental policy in the manner of the Obama administration. And it forces a showdown that had to occur.
The conflict isn't between environmental values and economic interests. Those values and interests are compatible. They can be arbitrated when they clash by responsible government. The real conflict positions the type of environmentalism that measures success in terms of projects blocked and work unperformed, the type so aptly described by Oliver, against every other national interest.
Not obstructionist?
Extremists insist they're not obstructionist. But their denials conflict with simple observation, painfully clear in but hardly beginning with the Keystone XL fiasco. From offshore drilling to important pipelines to completion methods crucial to development of oil and gas locked in shale, they block projects by manufacturing fear and fabricating delay. The pattern is well established. And Obama has made his administration part of the economy-crushing mechanism.
His counterpart in Canada wisely has chosen not to follow. And the counterpart's natural resources minister has usefully clarified positions in a controversy now gone from simmer to boil.
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