Party of One by Michael Harris

Author:Michael Harris [Harris, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)
Published: 2014-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

twelve

FORKED TONGUE

On July 5, 2013, a report marked “Secret” landed on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s desk. The document was written by his special envoy on West Coast energy infrastructure, Douglas R. Eyford, a Vancouver-based litigation lawyer. Eyford had been sent to find out how the stakeholders, in particular First Nations peoples, viewed Ottawa’s push for oil and gas development on their lands. Entitled “Interim Report to the Prime Minister,” the document is full of general statements about how Ottawa needed to proceed rapidly on its most urgent initiative—energy and pipeline development in the West. The looming energy bonanza is incomprehensibly huge and the matter had suddenly become urgent.

Canada’s energy exports totalled about $110 billion in 2012, roughly 25 percent of the country’s total exports. While most Canadian petroleum goes to the United States, the industry is changing rapidly as the US develops its own domestic supplies. The Harper government wants to diversify markets—which makes economic sense. The industry has been developing refinery capacity in Quebec and upgrading existing capacity in New Brunswick at the Irving Oil Refinery.

Both Alberta and BC see energy infrastructure projects as key economic drivers. Canada is the world’s fifth-largest producer of crude oil and natural gas, and Alberta has the third-largest crude oil reserves in the world. With approximately 101 tar sands projects in Alberta, the industry generates one in fourteen jobs in the province and provided about $4.5 billion in royalties in 2011– 2012. BC had shifted its natural resources focus to natural gas,1 and the government estimated in 2013 that the liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry could create $1 trillion in economic activity over the next thirty years. BC’s goal is to have the first LNG facility in Canada up and running by 2015, with three more in operation by 2020.

With more than six hundred resource projects on the drawing board over the next ten years, time is of the essence. Several projects are in the planning and development stage—two interprovincial oil pipelines; five LNG export facilities; four intraprovincial gas pipelines; and an oil refinery near Kitimat, BC—so the stakes are enormous. The oil pipelines alone would require a direct capital investment of $11 billion, and would result in an estimated $94 billion of additional investment in the oil sands over the next twenty-five years.

The existing Trans Mountain Pipeline has been shipping Alberta oil to the west coast for export for about sixty years, and Kinder Morgan wants to triple capacity with a new, twinned pipeline. The five LNG facilities proposed for the west coast will require a capital investment of $278 billion by 2020. But as Douglas Eyford told the prime minister, because of an abundance of energy from new technologies such as fracking, the clock was ticking: “This opportunity is time-limited due to intensive global competition and changing market dynamics.”

Eyford was preaching to the converted on the importance of the developments. Stephen Harper is, first and foremost, a son of the oil patch. He had already done everything in his power to

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