{"id":42977,"date":"2018-04-10T03:00:02","date_gmt":"2018-04-10T07:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42977"},"modified":"2018-04-09T11:23:53","modified_gmt":"2018-04-09T15:23:53","slug":"theres-a-reason-most-people-dont-take-canada-seriously-on-energy-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/04\/10\/theres-a-reason-most-people-dont-take-canada-seriously-on-energy-issues\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s a reason most people don’t take Canada seriously on energy issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Wells<\/a> reports on the most recent twist in the pipeline debate:<\/p>\n

Jim Carr stood next to the Centennial Flame in front of Parliament\u2019s Peace Tower and addressed a chilled knot of reporters and news cameras. An hour earlier Kinder Morgan had announced it was halting all non-essential spending on its Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project. If the company can\u2019t find a way to proceed with the project, it will abandon it at the end of May.<\/p>\n

Crunch time. Carr is the natural resources minister, generally reckoned as a heavyweight in the Trudeau cabinet. This project is basically the sum and totality of his political credibility packed into one long, narrow and increasingly hypothetical tube. And now it hung by a thread. The tube, I mean. Or his credibility. Or my metaphor. Anyway, he seemed to be taking it well.<\/p>\n

\u201cThank you for coming to chat about pipelines,\u201d Carr said, just as cool as you please. \u201cWe seem to spend a fair bit of time on that subject.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ennui. It burns. Carr summarized the state of play, more or less as I just did, and then read from prepared notes in French: \u201cWe expect the government of British Columbia to cease immediately all attempts to delay this project.\u201d He did not repeat that sentence in English.<\/p>\n

Instead he delivered a kind of analysis. \u201cWhat we\u2019re witnessing is the consequence of uncertainty. And in this case it\u2019s uncertainty that\u2019s generated by the government of British Columbia by threatening court action. Even if it doesn\u2019t frame a question. Even if it doesn\u2019t choose a court in front of which a question would be reviewed. And there are consequences in the threat of delay. Investor confidence is very important. It\u2019s not only important for all of Canada, it\u2019s also important for the province of British Columbia. And for a province that is as rich and has the abundance of natural resources that British Columbia has, the people of B.C. should know that this kind of uncertainty has consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

This long succession of sentences could perhaps best be summarized as \u201cC\u2019mon, guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This precinct is full of historical parallels, whether you want them or not. About 80 feet from where Carr was standing, on an October morning in 1970, Pierre Elliott Trudeau had run into another CBC reporter, Tim Raife, who wanted to know what he would do about the kidnapping of Quebec\u2019s transport minister and the British trade commissioner. \u201cJust watch me,\u201d the prime minister said, and three days later he invoked the War Measures Act, which we all still argue about sometimes.<\/p>\n

But Pierre Trudeau\u2019s \u201cJust watch me\u201d established a precedent, not just for artful vagueness, but for follow-through. It\u2019s a precedent honoured most often in the breach: generations of politicians have used \u201cJust watch me\u201d or its assorted variants, including \u201cAll options are on the table,\u201d when what they really meant was \u201cI have no clue\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m crossing my fingers\u201d or \u201cBaby needs a new pair of shoes.\u201d<\/p>\n

So the temptation among other actors in a political drama, when a central figure pulls the just-watch-me, is to wait them out and not do their work for them by folding their cards prematurely. And sure enough, the rest of Sunday night played out according to a series of familiar scripts. Jason Kenney was apocalyptic. Rachel Notley was firm, including in her insistence that what she had seen so far from Ottawa wasn\u2019t nearly satisfactory. And John Horgan, B.C.\u2019s premier, was unapologetic. As some of my friends like to say, if nothing changes, nothing changes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Wells reports on the most recent twist in the pipeline debate: Jim Carr stood next to the Centennial Flame in front of Parliament\u2019s Peace Tower and addressed a chilled knot of reporters and news cameras. An hour earlier Kinder Morgan had announced it was halting all non-essential spending on its Trans Mountain pipeline expansion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,6,53],"tags":[542,491,887,511],"class_list":["post-42977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-alberta","tag-bc","tag-justintrudeau","tag-pierretrudeau"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bbb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42977"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42978,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42977\/revisions\/42978"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}