On Sunday night, Alberta premier Rachel Notley mandated an 8.7 percent cut in her province's oil production as a temporary measure to help close the price differential between the price of oil in Texas and what Alberta can sell it for in the US.  Markets reacted positively, and the price shot up on Monday (which coincided with other OPEC news), but along the way, everyone lined up to take their shots at Justin Trudeau, laying the blame for the situation solely on him something which ignores the decades of market realities that led to the confluence of events that created this price differential.

The blame game for what is essentially a freakishly-timed supply and demand issue is one that's easy to play just find the disparate facts that fit your narrative, and have at it.  The Liberals, for example, point to the lack of pipelines to tidewater that were achieved under the Harper government.  This ignores the fact that for decades, there was no need to get oil to tidewater, and that there were assurances that the Americans would take our oil in perpetuity.  The shale revolution changed that, but it's hard for any one government to turn around an industry that has decades of inertia going for it.  Add to that, the 2015 oil price crash was due to global oversupply, so even if we got our product to tidewater, it likely wouldn't have made much difference because of the Saudi decision to open the taps and flood the market in order to drive prices down.  That price crash hurt both Trudeau (blowing a $70 billion hole in the budget projections that he inherited), and Notley alike, but each were blamed for global events.

For Andrew Scheer, Jason Kenney, and their respective caucuses to blame Trudeau likewise ignores these decades of inertia, and the fact that the Harper-led government's attempts to reform the assessment system didn't bear the fruit that they hoped it would.  Instead, the gutted system resulted in a myriad of legal challenges, and their inability to properly consult Indigenous communities led to approvals of projects like Northern Gateway to be overturned in the courts.  While it's true that Trudeau decided not to pursue Northern Gateway after the Federal Court of Appeal ruling that struck down its approval, it was a project that was much more fraught from the perspective of Indigenous consultation, and for a prime minister trying to reset the relationship with the Indigenous communities, it was a price to be paid.  I remain supremely curious about how a re-elected Harper-led government would have managed to deal with the increasing Indigenous protests around that project.  There was no magic wand that would make that project go ahead.

The blame game around Energy East's withdrawal is a lot more of the narrative-building exercise that remains resistant to facts, which are the economic realities of the project.  While it was viable so long as there were no other pipeline routes, the approval of the Trans Mountain expansion chipped away at that reality, and the restart of the Keystone XL pipeline was the stake driven into the heart of Energy East.  The shared proponent, TransCanada, didn't have enough service contracts to fill both pipelines, and with Keystone XL being the more economical route, it won out.  Sure, they blamed the National Energy Board for deciding to include downstream emissions in their evaluation of the project, but Cabinet also made it clear that it wasn't going to be a factor they considered in their evaluation.  A magic wand won't change the economic realities of that project.

That same wand also can't speed the process for the Trans Mountain expansion approval either.  Retroactive legislation around the tanker traffic portion of the assessment wouldn't do anything about the Section 35 obligations around the duty to consult Indigenous people along the route, and appealing the Federal Court of Appeal decision to the Supreme Court of Canada would take at least a year, without any clear error in law being expressed.  Some Conservatives also claim that the SCC could grant a stay of the FCA decision that would allow construction to continue, but that is also false a stay would only be granted if it could be demonstrated that irreparable harm would result in the FCA decision standing, which is not the case here.  Trudeau making the decision to follow the FCA's recommendations is the fastest way to get the pipeline built (and not giving a firm start date also ensures that Indigenous communities don't feel like they're being railroaded, which would not go well toward fulfilling the Section 35 obligations).

Notley and her energy minister, Marg McCuaig-Boyd, have taken to the airwaves in recent days to decry that the federal government hasn't done enough for the oil sector, but can't point to any short-term solutions that would help alleviate the situation.  Trudeau not only bought them the Trans Mountain pipeline to de-risk the expansion and is fulfilling the FCA's recommendations for approval, and Bill Morneau filled the fiscal update with competitive tax measures that the oil sector had been asking for.  They haven't said no to helping fund Notley's plan to buy more trains to ship oil, but it's not a short-term solution it's medium-term at best, and by the time the trains would be online, the Enbridge Line 3 replacement pipeline would be in place and moving more oil than rail could, meaning that it could just be the federal government throwing money at a rail solution for the sake of appearances.

And appearance is a lot of what this now boils down to.  Notley may get a ratings boost when she kicks Trudeau, and Scheer and Kenney are more interested in perpetuating a narrative than they are in the facts of the situation.  Trudeau, however, hasn't done much to defend himself.  True to this government's form, unable to communicate their way out of a wet paper bag, Trudeau's attempt to straddle both support for the oil sector and for the environment, hasn't managed to communicate that a pipeline like TMX will actually do more to fight climate change than blocking it will and there is data to back this up that he refuses to use, relying on trite phrases instead.  He's left himself vulnerable to being the punching bag, and Canadians are worse off as false narratives swirl around them unchallenged.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post Canada