It's weird living in Québec and not being the centre of some Canadian unity crisis.  Here we are in 2019 and a Trudeau is standing in the House of Commons lambasting a bunch of premiers for threatening national unity, and none of them are Quebecers.

Strange times we live in.  Anyway, what is the crisis?  Pipelines, of course.  The Senate has cleared Bill C-69 with a series of amendments that weaken many of its provisions.  Conservative provincial premiers — and the non-partisan premier of the Northwest Territories — sent the prime minister a letter saying his government must accept those changes, lest he threaten national unity.  The bill, they say, would put an end to pipeline construction.

They also insist Bill C-48, which would ban tanker traffic along the northern B.C. coast must not be passed on similar unity ground.

"As it stands, the federal government appears indifferent to the economic hardships faced by provinces and territories.  Immediate action to refine or eliminate these bills is needed to avoid further alienating provinces and territories and their citizens and focus on uniting the country in support of Canada's economic prosperity," the premiers say in the closing of their letter.

That is some pretty incendiary language, coming from a group of people demanding unity.  Accusing the prime minister of, essentially, wishing their citizens would rot in the poor house is really something.

Perhaps this is all my haughty indifference sitting here in Lower Canada.  There has been some polling that does seem to show westerners are feeling a sense of alienation.

But, who exactly has been stoking that?  It seems we may have forgotten the campaign now-Alberta Premier Jason Kenney ran.  Large parts of his pitch were based on a series of fantasies about the raw deal Alberta gets from equalization and how he will get the formula changed through, I guess, force of will.

It was a campaign built on resentment, toward the former NDP government, toward the rest of Canada, and toward Trudeau.

If Kenney were as serious about unity as the letter he signed implies, he might have conducted himself differently on his quest to gain power.

Instead, these demands for unity ring more as a bargaining strategy, meant to strong-arm the feds into doing the bidding of the west.

But that's essentially what Kenney has made his party: the political face of the oil industry.  The promise of creating an energy war room, where the province would become the lead mouthpiece for oil companies, is an interesting one.

One of the reasons Alberta has been hit so hard by a global downturn in oil prices is because it's a province built largely around the oil sector.  It's made worse by the difficultly in extracting .  The construction of new oil projects requires huge capital investments and large lead times, something that puts its at further disadvantage.  Further entwining the province with the industry isn't going to help the province when the next crisis hits.

(A quick digression: It's bizarre how the idea of a war room is being used as some sort of reasonable use of government resources.  A war room is where hacks sit around spinning the news.  I guess in an era when everything is politics, everyone's a hack.)

Anyway, what many of the amendments proposed by the Senate, and pushed by the premiers, do is weaken Bill C-69, lessening the amount of public input, and shielding decisions from legal challenges.  This is something the oil lobby is wholeheartedly behind, because they say it creates needed stability to the consultation process.

But the reason those court challenges have succeeded is because of the negligent way consultation has been done in the past.  Constant complaints on the length approvals take, belie the fact industry and government have not taken their duty to consult Indigenous people seriously.  By treating the process like a checklist to fill out, rather than a genuine effort to understand the grievances of Indigenous peoples, courts have again and again struck down natural resource projects.  Governments and companies thought they could force through the projects, constitution be damned, and were forced to begin again.

Codifying the limitation on consultation and court challenges flies in the face of that.  It's a shameful sop to industry, and just one more dereliction of the promise of reconciliation.  Not exactly unifying stuff, that.

Which brings us to another part of this premiers' letter.  The people of BC don't seem quite so bothered tanker traffic may be banned off a part of their coast, and their premier didn't sign the letter.

And this is the other side of that unity coin.  What exactly is the unifying principle of forcing pipelines on provinces and First Nations opposed to them?  Where's the outcry against one province's industry forcing itself on other parts of the country.

What many of the premiers have done is put the pain being felt by one segment of their population — and, yes, the oil companies — ahead of another long neglected segment.

These premiers dismiss the crisis of unity environmental degradation causes, the crisis of unity forcing pipelines through unwilling jurisdictions causes, the crisis of unity that cutting the public's voice from resource projects.

Makes it tough to figure out just who it is that's causing the unity crisis.

Photo Credit: Alberta Politics