“Plus ça change, plus c'est la męme chose,” or in the English idiom, “it was ever thus.”
In Canada, pipelines are 90 per cent politics and the rest is engineering and finance.
In 1942 the first major interprovincial oil pipeline was built from Norman Wells in the Mackenzie Valley via a tinpot refinery in the Yukon to wartime Pacific naval fleets. The Pentagon paid for it and the US Army provided the labour – mostly African Americans.
In the winter of 1949-1950, Interprovincial Pipeline (IPL) was built from Edmonton east across the Canadian Prairies to Superior in Wisconsin.
Imperial Oil, discoverer of the iconic Leduc oil field was the majority owner of Interprovincial and was in turn owned by the Rockefeller multinational Standard Oil.
In the day, Imperial was one of the biggest financial donors to the “naturally-governing” Liberal Party of Canada that had been in power in Canada since 1935.
Ottawa and Washington both wanted oil exports on the IPL line and the strongest interlocutor for that policy was the well-financed Standard Oil-Imperial lobby.
In 1953, the Trans Mountain Pipeline was built west from Edmonton across B.C. to refineries in the Lower Mainland to supply Korean War-era Pacific naval fleets with North American fuel that didn't have to be shipped from US Gulf Coast refineries through the Panama Canal.
The political granddaddy of Canadian pipeline debates came in 1956 and concerned the TransCanada natural gas line from Alberta to Ontario and Quebec.
Lending TransCanada the capital cost of using a northern Ontario route through the Canadian Shield instead of more cheaply south of the Great Lakes, set off a firestorm in Parliament that cost Liberal Prime Minister Louis St Laurent his job to Conservative maverick John Diefenbaker.
St Laurent's powerful minister-of-everything, C.D. Howe, insisted on an all-Canadian route for the pipeline because he had stopped trusting the Americans. Now that was a political reason with a capital “P”.
Fast-forward to 2016 and the politics of pipelines for the Northern Gateway and the Trans Mountain and Enbridge Line 3 expansions.
The battle to choke off oilsands development has claimed a major casualty with the essentially-political decision by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau not to approve Northern Gateway based on a political myth that oil is an inevitable risk to the Pacific waters and shorelines of B.C.
Perhaps Trudeau employed the same medium that Mackenzie King used to receive guidance from his dead mother. In any event, if Enbridge sues for damages, we Canadian taxpayers will be liable for several hundred million dollars. Again, that's politics with a capital “P”.
The decisions to allow the expansion of Trans Mountain and Line 3, incidentally the same lines that St. Laurent green-lighted in 1949 and 1953, will test the prime minister's resolve when the anti-pipeline forces go to battle to stop construction.
Does Trudeau have the right stuff to enforce his decision in the inevitable showdown?
It doesn't escape notice that Premier Rachel Notley is gambling her future on pipeline politics that she doesn't control.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author of four books and editor of several more.
"It doesn't escape notice that Premier Rachel Notley is gambling her future on pipeline politics that she doesn't control."
