Indigenous reconciliation requires resource development

National Post, 28 February 2020

If energy projects in remote areas require Indigenous consultation and participation, why not go the whole way and get Indigenous ownership?

While the turmoil of the anti-pipeline blockades is diminishing — though not over yet — three things have become clear in the past weeks that will shape Canadian politics and economics in the years ahead.

The first is that while protests at particular (remote) sites might be given the usual no-policing treatment, blockades of the rail network and other critical infrastructure will not be permitted. Western Canadian farmers alone have lost — are still losing — $63 million/week due to the blockade. The economic damage done to the country’s transport network from three weeks will take until the summertime to fully recover from. Governments will want to have more ways to prevent that.

Alberta’s government has already promised a bill to make disrupting “critical infrastructure” punishable with massive fines. Other provinces will follow suit and eventually the federal government as it contemplates a future blockade of an airport runway rather than a railway.

The second development is that the future of Canada’s oil and gas sector will involve more government ownership. There may be a lot of loose talk about “decarbonizing” the economy, but one might just as well as talk about shutting down Canada — as some have done this month. It’s not an option. Oil and gas is still Canada’s No. 1 export and there is nothing to replace it. The implications are national. The Alberta recession of 2014 and following has meant a $13-billion increase in the federal government deficit in 2019 alone.

Canadian governments are simply not going to embrace an option that makes Canada significantly poorer in order that American LNG exports will replace Canadian exports. Even the most radical climate activist does not argue that Canada makes any meaningful difference to the global climate when China is funding more coal capacity in Africa than exists in all of Europe. It’s a moral argument and Canadians are sympathetic, but will not make themselves significantly poorer for the cause.

Thus resource development — which has been the Canadian economy from the beginning — will continue. If regulatory complexity, political uncertainty and Indigenous involvement make that too onerous for private companies, then the government will step in. The Trudeau Liberals already bought the Trans Mountain pipeline and this past week the Alberta government, invoking the ghost of Peter Lougheed, said that it, too, would buy resource developments. Whether that is a pipeline (Keystone XL comes to mind) or projects — Teck’s Frontier mine is just one of many projects that have been shelved — Alberta is getting back into the oil business.

Continue reading at the National Post:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/raymond-de-souza-indigenous-reconciliation-requires-resource-development?video_autoplay=true