Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s insistence that Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is in the “national interest” raises a couple of interesting questions about the term, veteran climate campaigner Tzeporah Berman writes for National Observer: How is the national interest defined, and who gets to decide?
“History shows us that national interest seems to mean whatever the person using it wants it to mean,” Berman writes. “Also interesting is that it often gets invoked to overcome opposition of some kind.”
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Which leads into questions about whether the prime minister of the day gets to define the national interest, regardless of merit. That’s what Trudeau is doing with Trans Mountain, “despite his broken promise to give the project a new environmental assessment process,” Berman assert. “This is also despite his failure to answer questions raised by his own ministerial panel on the project. It is also despite the strong opposition of many First Nations across B.C. (along with an alliance of 150 Nations from Canada and the U.S.), and B.C. local governments.”
With Trudeau’s definition of the national interest, “Vancouver has been told it must accept a seven-fold increase in oil tankers through its waters. Young Canadians have been told to accept the associated increase in greenhouse gas emissions, even as we are in a climate crisis that requires deep and immediate reductions,” she adds. “Does Justin Trudeau get to decide that broken promises, flawed processes, violating Indigenous rights, and causing environmental damage is in the national interest, all as long as the oil flows?”
The other way of interpreting the national interest is that British Columbia, by studying the impacts of diluted bitumen in marine environments, is doing what the federal government should have. But “as the seriousness of the climate crisis became known, Canadian politicians have been like deer in headlights, refusing to admit that climate math shows that we will not be able to dig up and burn the majority of our fossil fuels,” Berman charges. “The math also says we should not be building any new fossil fuel infrastructure like pipelines if we want to keep global warming below 2.0°C.”
“Yes, all this is hard,” she acknowledges. “It means Canada’s fossil fuel industry can’t keep growing unchecked. It means a managed transition to a clean energy economy, with retraining for many workers and buyout packages for others. It means capturing more of the oil wealth currently flowing to offshore investors, and putting it instead into a clean energy future here at home.”
But “if anyone tells you that the national interest equates with Kinder Morgan (a Texan company born in the aftermath of Enron), then they have an incredibly blinkered perspective on where we are as a country at this point in history.”
