Kevin Libin: Don’t dismiss Coderre’s Alberta bashing; all anti-pipeline politics are local

Everybody who’s nobody is rejecting Alberta’s pipelines these days. Nobody who has any official capacity to do so, anyway. But get enough of those nobodies together, plus they may have a powerful effect that can sure get somebody’s attention.

The latest is Montreal’s mayor Denis Coderre, former Liberal cabinet minister under Jean Chrtien, who together with mayors from Laval and Longueuil this week declared their opposition towards the Energy East pipeline running through their region. Coderre also threw in a shot at Albertans, permanently measure, accusing the opposition Wildrose Party, lately the most popular party in Alberta, of being a lot of ignorant rednecks for venturing to claim that there was no science behind Coderre’s fears. “Allow me a moment to laugh,” in the Wildrose, Coderre told Radio-Canada. “These are probably the same people who think the Flintstones is a documentary.”

A few days earlier, it was the reeves of Burnaby, B.C. who, through their lawyer at a regulatory hearing, known as the National Energy Board’s overview of the Trans Mountain pipeline a “sham” and demanded a stop to it. “It is becoming obvious this board is not able to representing the public interest,” their lawyer lectured the NEB. “It indeed appears that you are here sometimes to represent the interests of the American oil company.” Burnaby’s mayor Derek Corrigan has stated he’s willing to get arrested to prevent the pipeline. In other words, the renovation of the existing pipeline which has been sending Alberta crude to Burnaby in excess of 60 years, with no reports of widespread death and destruction. Burnaby’s lawyer insisted towards the NEB that Kinder Morgan’s expansion plan’s “rapacious.”

And a bit more than the usual week ago, it was Christy Clark, premier of B.C., saying her province couldn’t support Kinder Morgan’s proposal, either, because she was still being uneasy concerning the chance of a spill. That was Coderre’s opinion, too. “We are against it because it still represents significant environmental threats and too few economic benefits for greater Montreal,” he said. By “significant,” he presumably meant slightly higher than zero. Or, at least, dramatically less than the threats posed by oil trains passing through Quebec, once we so horrifically learned from Lac-Mgantic.

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Of course none of them of these people actually has any decision-making power with regards to approving either Trans Mountain or Energy East. That’s up to the NEB and, ultimately, the federal Liberal government. But it is hardly reason to laugh them off as grandstanding hysterics. In the end, grandstanding hysterics have proven to be the most effective means in history for scuppering oil projects.

The anti-oilsands lobby began their long march to victory against Keystone XL by shrewdly stirring up fear and opposition among Midwestern American farmers, warning them that a spill could poison the Ogallala Aquifer they use for irrigation. There is, really, no real threat, like a State Department investigation and many other pipelines already crossing the aquifer confirmed. Indeed, it appears as though the largest environmental threat was the farmers themselves, who’re draining the Ogallala faster of computer can replenish itself, drying up wells across the Great Plains.

Yet when TransCanada realized that the neighborhood concerns were getting too much national attention and decided it was better off just rerouting the road, the anti-pipeline forces had already managed to move on to organizing celebrities to get arrested in front of the White House. To date, Burnaby’s only took its mayor subscribed to the anti-TransMountain perp walk, but no one could seriously doubt that Naomi Klein would be available to repeating her handcuffed performance from Washington, D.C. And Daryl Hannah is unsurprisingly never too busy for any little civil disobedience. (Michael J. Fox is a native son of Burnaby, but no cop would be heartless enough to lock him up, and that he hasn’t shown much interest in anti-pipeline politics).

For all the insufficient energy that local and regional politicians have on paper, it sure looks like the playbook of the anti-oil movement continues to be stirring up local opposition, until it becomes too loud and angry for national leaders to wave off. Trudeau already decided to ban deepwater oil tankers off B.C.’s coast, a proxy for blocking Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline, following a years-long campaign by anti-oil groups to consolidate opposition among another group of subnational governments: First Nations.

When cities and regions get riled up in regards to a pipeline, we have an effect on the thinking of sympathetic politicians like Obama and Justin Trudeau who defer to ambiguous “social licence” for energy infrastructure. The anti-oil groups realize that denying social licence starts within the regions, which their technique to secure Alberta oil hinges on lower-level leaders like Coderre, Clark, Derek Corrigan and First Nations chiefs. It’s worked before, and there’s lots of reason to suspect it’ll again. Shrug off Coderre and his anti-pipeline, anti-Alberta mouthing if you dare. But when you are looking at stopping Alberta’s oil industry, all politics are local.