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Day: June 19, 2019

 

You can't blame former Prime Minister Stephen Harper for regularly skipping Council of the Federation meetings.  If you had to spend an entire weekend with all of your 13 deadbeat children, who rarely agree on anything except that everything is your fault and you should give them more money, you'd look for a way out of it every time.

This year, the deadbeats are more unified against Ottawa than usual, particularly on energy and environmental matters.  According to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Saskatchewan's Scott Moe, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government are threatening "national unity" with measures such as imposing a federal carbon tax and Bill C-69, which would overhaul the environmental review process for major construction projects.  In turn, Trudeau dismissed the notion that national unity is under fire then attacked the premiers for "dragging their feet" on naming the infrastructure projects in which the feds should invest, preferring to "have their citizens suffer" through the delays.

This isn't the first time Trudeau and the premiers have sparred on these terms.  Just a month ago, six premiers Kenney, Moe, Ontario's Doug Ford, Manitoba's Brian Pallister, New Brunswick's Blaine Higgs, and Bob McLeod of the Northwest Territories sent Trudeau a letter urging him to accept 200 amendments to Bill C-69 recommended by the Senate.  The letter ends thusly:

We would urge the government to stop pressing for the passage of this bill which will have detrimental effects on national unity and for the Canadian economy as a whole. . . . 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.

In response, Trudeau had this to say during a media scrum:

I think it's absolutely irresponsible for conservative premiers to be threatening our national unity if they don't get their way.  The fundamental job of any Canadian prime minister is to hold this country together, to gather us together and move forward in the right way.  And anybody who wants to be Prime Minister, like [Conservative Leader] Andrew Scheer, needs to condemn those attacks on national unity.

If there's one thing everyone involved can agree on most of the time, anyway it's that someone is threatening national unity.  Unfortunately, they're all wrong.  National unity cannot be threatened because, as they imagine it, it does not exist.

In the First Ministers' dreamland, Canada carries out its business with the greatest of ease.  The federal government is in consensus with each province, and each province is in consensus with each other province.  Everyone's goals and interests are perfectly balanced.  The premiers get every dollar they require and spend it to the satisfaction of the prime minister.  The prime minister sets wonderfully fair and reasonable rules that do not burden the premiers in the slightest.  All is sunshine and cupcakes.

Yet the prime minister is not mandated to make every premier happy, nor are they mandated to accept federal decrees without question.  All of these men were elected to achieve optimal outcomes for their respective jurisdictions theoretically, anyway.  In a country the size of Canada, with its wildly divergent political cultures, economies, and geographies, one optimal outcome will always be at odds with another.  This is not a bug created by any specific PM or premier, or even a group of unusually like-minded premiers.  This is a feature of Canadian politics.

Speaking of Scheer, don't expect him to frame it this way.  As he put it in one of his keynote speeches last month, "Every time there's a Trudeau in the Prime Minister's Office, our union begins to crack."  Mr. Scheer, have you met British Columbia's John Horgan and Quebec's François Legault?  I believe they may have some concerns about your coast-to-coast energy corridor.

As fellow columnist Wyatt James Schierman has noted, there have been a few true existential threats to Confederation in Canada's history.  Neither Bill C-69 nor the carbon tax counts as one of those.  Recent separatist sentiment in Alberta is too impractical to merit genuine worry.  In the context of the comparatively mundane intergovernmental dispute that this is, uttering the phrase "national unity" is a pure desperation maneuver, a slightly more eloquent way of saying "Please make my life easier."

When these disagreements inevitably happen, there is plenty of room for discussion and negotiation.  Expressing fear for national unity is not an argument.  It's empty political theatre for people who have never paid any attention to politics.

Photo Credit: Canada's Premiers

Written by Jess Morgan

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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The Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion is back on track.

Already there are pipes piled up at depots along the route waiting to be dug into the earth.  Happy times are back in Alberta again.

Well, no they aren't.  Slumping oil prices, aggravated by the long wait for yet more consultation and deliberation imposed by last August's TMX Supreme Court decision, have poisoned the well for oil patch workers.

Justin Trudeau driving a back hoe himself on the TMX route wouldn't convince the province's malcontents that there is no Liberal government-environmentalist conspiracy to shut Alberta's wealth in the ground for all time.

The Conservative narrative has been set by Andrew Scheer and Jason Kenney, both of whom say hold the celebration until the pipeline is actually finished.

Scheer's statement even before the pipeline approval was a pre-emptive sneer.

"Today's cabinet decision gets us no closer to having this vital, job-creating protect than we were when it was first approved two and a half years ago," said Scheer.

Kenney was more statesmanlike in his press conference after the prime minister's announcement.

"This second approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline isn't a victory to celebrate, it's just another step in a process that has frankly taken too long," he said.

The cynicism about whether the pipeline will ever be completed is understandable.  The federal approval triggered renewed threats of protests and court challenges.  Environmentalists and the First Nations in the Lower Mainland opposed to the project will not give up easily.

But realistically the end of the road is in sight on this particular project.  TMX will finally be built.  Construction jobs will temporarily ease economic woes in the blue-collar oil services sector.  But the fact that the country tore itself in two getting to this point over what is, after all, an expansion of a pipeline on an existing route, underscores the much bigger underlying struggle.

Trudeau laid it out pretty explicitly in his announcement.  The money that flows from this pipeline to the federal government will be redirected to clean energy spending.

This pipeline is a transition project, garnering cash to phase out the resource that fuels it.

Trudeau talked about solid middle class jobs today creating middle class jobs in the future.  But those jobs won't be in the conventional oil patch and they won't revolve around future pipelines.

Ottawa still has Bill C69, aptly dubbed the 'no more pipelines' bill by conservatives, and Bill C48, an oil tanker ban on the northern B.C. coast.  Those bills push Canada further down that transitional road from unfettered resource development to a reconsideration of the whole nonrenewable resource sector.

The institutional oilpatch, usually content to wield its might behind the scenes, has been forthcoming on its fears about Bill C69, openly proposing a raft of amendments to gut the legislation.  The suggestions were rejected by the government.

Kenney said he has no problem with the feds using TMX's profits for clean energy.  But he couldn't have missed the symbolism of that policy.

The Alberta premier's election is predicated on defending the oil patch.  He has pumped $30 million into a war room designed to battle "misinformation" about the industry.

The current conservative narrative holds that the environmental opposition to pipelines and the oil sands is a foreign funded plot.  That feels like a desperate attempt to turn back the clock to a happy time when climate change and carbon emissions weren't on the national and global agenda.

But Trudeau is signalling that ignoring the coming energy course change won't wash in 2019.  He said at the TMX announcement that the politics of the last century don't work in this one.

While that was probably an allusion to the question of thorough consultation, particularly with First Nations, before embarking on big projects, it applies as well to the energy sector.

Albertans who are skeptical about whether the Trans Mountain expansion will ever be built are likely wrong.  But the underlying concern about whether the energy industry can continue on its present course is well founded.

TMX will be a near-term fix for the Alberta economy.  But it isn't emblematic of where the Albertan, or Canadian, economy needs to go in the future.

Photo Credit: CBC News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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CSIS decision is an affront to historical study, denying us deeper understanding of both the former prime minister and the RCMP

There's a new Trudeau story in the news.  It doesn't have anything to do with the current prime minister for a change, but rather his late father.

The Canadian Press's Jim Bronskill wrote on June 15 that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service destroyed a Cold War dossier related to the late former prime minister Pierre Trudeau in 1989.

It should have been turned to Ottawa's Library and Archives Canada at some point for further study and observation.

CSIS apparently made this decision because Trudeau's secret file "fell short of the legal threshold for retention by either the service or the archives."

John English, a former Liberal MP who wrote an exceptional two-volume set about Trudeau several years ago, was far from impressed.  "It's just outrageous, there's no other word to describe it," he told Bronskill.  "It's a tragedy that this has happened and I think the explanation is weak."

University of Toronto historian Robert Bothwell, an expert on Canada and the Cold War, chimed in along these lines.  "When it concerns a prime minister, it has historical value.  That's a pretty clear standard."

Who can blame them for their reactions?

I've been involved in politics and the media for almost 35 years and this is one of the most abhorrent decisions I've ever heard of.

According to Bronskill's piece, Trudeau's secret file "was among hundreds of thousands CSIS inherited in the 1980s after the RCMP Security Service was dissolved following a series of scandals.  In a bid to uncover subversives out to disrupt the established order, RCMP spies had eyed a staggering variety of groups and individuals, from academics and unions to environmentalists, peace groups and even politicians."

Then-Conservative solicitor general James Kelleher apparently directed CSIS to clean up "the resulting heap of files."  He held this position under Brian Mulroney's premiership; that caused a predictable, short-lived reaction on social media.  (It also led to ridiculous conspiracy theories about the former PM's kind words about the current PM over the years, which aren't even worth addressing for a nanosecond.)

Some dossiers were sent to the national archives, including those on former Quebec premier René Lévesque, and former NDP leaders David Lewis and Tommy Douglas.  Others were destroyed, including those related to former prime ministers John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson.  Any files that were "judged to have current value at the time" were left with CSIS.

Bronskill and CP tried to gain access to Trudeau's Cold War dossier.  They were told by the national archives it wasn't there and CSIS said "its records indicate the file was destroyed on Jan. 30, 1989."

It's no big secret that I disagreed with many of Pierre Trudeau's policies as well as Justin Trudeau's.  But ideological differences have nothing to do with the preservation of historical information.  If that dossier had been about a Tory prime minister like Stephen Harper, Joe Clark or Mulroney, I would have said the same thing: It shouldn't have been destroyed.

It also doesn't matter whether Trudeau's secret dossier met CSIS's "legal threshold," whatever that specifically entails.  Historians, and students of history, should have been granted access to its contents and allowed to make a decision with respect to its validity.

We have no idea what was in that old RCMP dossier.  If the information was pertinent, it could have enhanced our understanding of the late PM's ideas, philosophies, meetings and/or private thoughts.  (Much like the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's dossier about Trudeau, which was collected over three decades and released in a redacted form shortly after his death in 2000.)

If the contents were nothing more than complete rubbish, it still could have shed some light on the RCMP's monitoring techniques with respect to Canada's 15th prime minister.

Alas, we'll never know the answer.  That's not something we should be proud of.

Photo Credit: CTV News

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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