If we’re not sadly mistaken, the voice of Canada’s pipeline industry has just declared itself against the Keystone XL pipeline.
That may not have been the intent of the comment from Chris Bloomer, president and CEO of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, in a dispatch from Financial Post columnist and perpetual fossil booster Claudia Cattaneo.
But in his attempt to insulate Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion from a possible NDP win in tomorrow’s provincial election in British Columbia, Bloomer raised some insightful points about Keystone.
“As an industry, we wish to reinforce the importance of respecting due process and maintaining the integrity of the regulatory process in place for transmission pipelines,” he said in a statement.
“A change in government at any level should not change the outcome of processes and decisions that have already been determined…”
Cattaneo’s column focused on whether the B.C. New Democrats under John Horgan would try to block Trans Mountain after it’s received federal approval. But if we’re declaring broad, consistent principles for policy continuity when governments change, let’s recap the Keystone XL story.
TransCanada and its partner at the time, ConocoPhillips, proposed KXL in July 2008.
Community pushback began to coalesce in 2010.
The U.S. State Department instructed TransCanada to reroute the pipeline around environmentally sensitive territory in Nebraska in 2011.
After Congress tried to pressure the White House into a fast-track decision, President Barack Obama rejected the project in January 2012.
TransCanada submitted a new route later in 2012, a massive mobilization ensued, and Obama rejected the pipeline again, on November 6, 2015.
Trump took office in January 2017, invited TransCanada to re-apply, and approved the application by executive order.
After it had already been declined. Twice.
Keystone wasn’t rejected by Congressional resolution. But nor was Trans Mountain approved by Parliament.
Is anyone else thinking how much they’d like to be a fly on the wall the next time Alex Pourbaix, TransCanada’s President of Energy and Oil Pipelines, takes his seat at a CEPA board meeting?
