Home » BLOG » Kevin Libin: B.C., Alberta pipeline bartering is nothing more than shoddy protectionism

Kevin Libin: B.C., Alberta pipeline bartering is nothing more than shoddy protectionism

Premiers, left to right, Quebec's Philippe Couillard, New Brunswick's Brian Gallant, British Columbia's Christy Clark and Saskatchewan's Brad Wall at the Council of the Federation in Vancouver.

This economy isn’t a lunchroom where provinces can swap like children their baloney for goodies

There was a time when Canada was referred to as a nation of traders. Perhaps we are still, somewhere. At home we might as well call ourselves a nation of garish wheeler-dealers, with provinces brashly bartering support for economic pet projects as if the whole federation was nothing more than a shabby bazaar – instead of, say, a significant G7 economy.

Alberta and B.C. are feverishly haggling out a pipelines-for-power arrangement, with Christy Clark’s government attempting to interest Alberta in buying B.C.’s excess hydro-electricity. Alberta says it’s possible, as long as B.C. would like to purchase into its West Coast oilsands pipelines. Meanwhile, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall is working his own pipeline angle, linking a federal bailout for Quebec’s sickly Bombardier to approval for the Energy East pipeline.

Marketplaces, from commodity exchanges to local flea markets, are wonderfully efficient things for clearing inventory and maximizing social benefit, of course. But markets only work well if they are free. There is nothing like this here. These are sellers offering fraudulent goods to largely captive buyers. There aren’t any possible substitutes available as there is whenever a buyer can at any rate turn to a Ford when she can’t find the right price on the Lexus, or perhaps a firm can buy iron ore from Brazil if it’s less expensive than Australia’s. British Columbia may be the only province that stands between Alberta and the Pacific Coast. Any route to the Atlantic must cross Quebec.

B.C. is sensible to peddle its hydro power to Alberta. Being lucky enough to get have vastly more tributaries than its eastern neighbour, it’s its eye on becoming a “clean energy superpower” – partly by “supplying hydroelectric power to Alberta” as B.C.’s lieutenant-governor Judith Guichon explained in her own throne speech recently. B.C. is really a motivated seller: the province is neck deep in the $8.8 billion Site C dam project and it has been desperately looking for buyers for that 5,100 gigawatt hours of annual energy it’ll produce by 2024, based on the province’s former NDP leader, Adrian Dix. “Suddenly, the idea of Alberta came up,” Dix said, calling the Site C dam “a caravan in search of an oasis.”

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