PM pivots to push pipelines. Carney’s see-saw affair with sustainability leans to oil, not climate

PATTISON'S POINT / OPINION By Ian Pattison IN the space of just a few years we’ve gone from ‘oil is awful’ to ‘oil is king’ – the saviour of the Canadian economy.

PATTISON'S POINT / OPINION

By Ian Pattison

IN the space of just a few years we’ve gone from ‘oil is awful’ to ‘oil is king’ – the saviour of the Canadian economy. This mirrors the trajectory of Mark Carney from environmental advocate to pipeline proponent, though he had always hedged his climate activism with a view to economic opportunity.

In 2019, as United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Change, Carney said that it is time to listen to scientists that have long been warning about the risks posed by climate change. Two years later, while still in the UN post, he said that in Canada there is a "huge economic opportunity" in the transition to a sustainable economy with reduced carbon emissions.

Two years after that, having initially supported Canada’s consumer carbon tax, he told a Senate hearing that the tax had "served a purpose up until now.

In 2025, after being chosen to lead the Liberal party, he appeared on Jon Stewart’s TV show and said that since much of Canada's emissions are tied to the oil industry that must become cleaner rather than ordinary Canadians changing their lifestyles.

Carney went on to win a majority government and, as his first official act he eliminated the consumer carbon tax. Soon after he suspended the federal fossil fuels emissions cap and ended the electric vehicle mandate.

Carney has called the green transition "the greatest commercial opportunity of our time." A world-wide transition to sustainable energy is underway to limit climate change. The aim is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by phasing down fossil fuels and switching to low-carbon electricity sources.

Carney has put much of that on hold and partnered with Alberta to plan a new pipeline to carry one million barrels of oil a day to an export terminal in British Columbia to serve the burgeoning Pacific region economy and help rescue Canada’s economy in the process. That part of the plan isn’t helped by his having changed from a promise that the private sector would build the thing to now saying a private company will have only a 10-per-cent stake in the project.

Saying he will work with the oil industry to lessen emissions he, and it, are counting largely on the questionable method of carbon capture and underground storage of oil field emissions.

CARNEY’S see-saw affair with sustainability does come at a time of world economic upheaval that is pulverizing the Canadian economy. But there is no need to so largely betray his earlier position as a climate activist.

Many European countries have successfully added, or mostly transitioned to, renewables like wind, solar, geothermal and tidal power to largely end dependence on dirty oil. Canada’s current priority is to spend an estimated $40 billion of public money – and we know how long initial cost estimates last – to build an oil pipeline that will take years to complete. By that time, much of the world’s dependence on oil will have dried up and only then will come the needed and long overdue large-scale conversion to green energy.

NOT to be outdone, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his Alberta counterpart, Danielle Smith, this week announced their own plans for a pipeline from the oil fields east through the Prairies and Northern and central Ontario to the refineries in Sarnia, roughly double the length of the proposed route from Alberta to the West Coast.

Here too there is every likelihood that taxpayers will foot the bill while the oil company users enjoy continued huge profits. That is because there is little likelihood that a private company will be willing to build the so-called Northern Shield Energy Corridor.

“The reality is that a pipeline is not going to make anybody any money,” said Stephen Legault, Environmental Defence Canada's expert on Alberta’s oil and gas economy. “If it was, then there would be private investors lining up, and there aren’t.”

As a reader put it in a letter to the editor of The Toronto Star, “This pipeline proposal isn’t even half-baked. It’s batter.”

Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, said the plan makes no sense economically or environmentally. "There is no private-sector proponent for these pipelines because there is no business case in a world where electric vehicles and heat pumps powered by wind and solar energy are cheaper, cleaner and faster to deploy than the fossil fuel megaprojects that are fuelling heat waves and wildfires."

Aside from the future reduction in global oil demand, Sarnia’s refineries would require costly upgrades before they have capacity for the volume of crude oil that this pipeline would deliver.

Neither premier could provide a timeline or estimated costs for the project, as its feasibility study won’t be completed by the end of 2026, reports Emmerson Jull in Canada’s National Observer. But Legault believes that spending on the Northern Energy Shield Corridor project could be more than double the Trans Mountain expansion — which saw $34.1 billion in federal investment — since the proposed Alberta to Ontario route would be twice its length.

THIS LEADS to another question. If we are going to build a pipeline-- and that’s a big if – why would we build it all the way to Sarnia. The refinery city on the St. Lawrence Seaway at the southern end of Lake Huron features an active deep-water port for both domestic freighters and ocean-going ships.

So does Thunder Bay which has just added a new ship facility using the old ore dock in addition to the dynamic Keefer Terminal where a dock rehabilitation project is currently planned and where additional capacity would be logical as it keeps breaking shipping records.

Pipeline construction costs through the flat soils of the Prairie provinces would be relatively small compared with that facing investors through the hard-granite Canadian Shield of Ontario.

Instead of blasting through the entirety of Northern Ontario, why not take a turn south before having to cross the Nipigon River (a contentious issue in the failed Energy East pipeline plan) and build the pipeline to new handling facilities at the Port of Thunder Bay where tankers could take on crude for the trip down to Sarnia? It would be much cheaper and make better use of the Seaway route that is too often overlooked as a cleaner alternative to trucks and a safer one than rail for moving oil.

ALL that said, a pipeline – any pipeline – in this day and age is a white elephant in the making. We are in the midst of a climate crisis with huge and unpredictable swings between scorching heat waves with dangerous wildfires and prolonged droughts, and drenching rainstorms causing massive flooding and widespread death. And yet here we are in Canada planning not one but two new oil pipelines that, by the time they come on line, will see a shrunken world market and catastrophic climate disasters far worse than today’s that make us wonder, ‘What were we thinking?’

Ian Pattison is retired as editorial page editor of The Chronicle-Journal, but still shares his thoughts on current affairs. You can email him at iPatPoint29@gmail.com.