The man poised to become the next premier of Alberta called Sunday’s emergency summit on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline a “total failure.”
As Global News reports, Alberta’s United Conservative leader Jason Kenney wonders what was achieved when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and B.C. Premier John Horgan huddled for three hours to discuss the future of the pipeline project — one that Trudeau and Notley say they want and Horgan is adamantly opposed to.
“Today we have yet more proof of the total failure of the Liberal/NDP strategy to defend Canada’s energy industry,” Kenney told reporters in Edmonton on Sunday. “Even after this emergency meeting, British Columbia Premier John Horgan has doubled down on his opposition to Canada’s energy industry. We are no closer to getting this critical project built.”
The Kinder Morgan pipeline would potentially deliver Alberta’s oil sands petroleum to Canada’s west coast for export to overseas markets.
Although Trudeau promised Sunday to inject “significant” federal funding into the project and to introduced undefined legislation that would better clarify the federal government’s powers in approving trans-provincial projects, critics wonder how that will control the increasingly aggressive environmental protests that have virtually shut down construction at the moment.
British Columbia’s Horgan, who shares power in the province with the radical Green Pary, has sided with the environmental activists and says the pipeline could produce an oil spill.
But for Kenney, it is Trudeau who is exhibiting a “total lack of leadership” by his apparent refusal to recognized and utilize his existing “constitutional declaratory power” to move the pipeline forward regardless of B.C.’s apprehension and opposition.