Opinion: Remove Ottawa’s free pass for foreign oil via fpcomment
Once constructed, the pipeline would have allowed Eastern Canadians to purchase more Canadian and less foreign oil and it would have enabled Canada to export more oil beyond North America, instead of just to our primary purchaser, the United States.
The Quebec government opposed the project, but it’s doubtful the federal government even attempted to convince them it was in both the national interest and Quebec’s interest. Ottawa could have reminded Quebecers that projects like this help pay for social programs and that when the west does well economically, it pays significantly more to Ottawa than it receives back in funding — which means Quebec and other provinces receive more in equalization payments.
But this pipeline was not meant to be. Halfway through the National Energy Board’s expensive and exhaustive approval process, the federal government’s board changed the rules. In 2017, it famouslythat the pipeline would also have to go through an “upstream and downstream” emissions review. “Upstream” is the point in the supply chain that involves discovering, extracting and processing the resources while “downstream” presumably would have looked at emissions from end-users.
Proponents of the project could see the writing on the wall – who changes the rules of the game at halftime? The project was abandoned two months later. TC had to write down over $1 billion it had sunk into the project. Most of us would be disappointed if we lost a couple of hours working on a job application that didn’t result in an interview — never mind losing $1 billion.
At the time, while working for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, I filed Access to Information requests with several federal departments to investigate what kind of “upstream and downstream” emissions reviews Ottawa was conducting for
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