Welcome to This Week in Canada, where climate change is not an existential crisis anymore, the United States gets squeezed for a change, and a steel town unravels. Let’s jump in!
The pipeline deal between Canada and Alberta that I wrote about last week would have triggered an identity crisis a decade ago. But public opinion about energy has taken a quiet but dramatic U-turn since then. Why did it happen? And what does it mean?
You might have forgotten about the Northern Gateway Project, which was supposed to include building 715-mile pipelines from Alberta to British Columbia. In 2014, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper got the project moving, but the company that wanted to actually build the pipelines could do so only if it met 209 conditions set by the National Energy Board, a regulatory agency. Those hurdles included oil spill plans, consultation with indigenous groups along the route, and on and on. Lawsuits piled up, a court ruled that the consultation was inadequate, and the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau killed the project in 2016.
Just 37 percent of Canadians supported Northern Gateway. In comparison, about 60 percent now say that they favor building new pipelines. That is not a subtle shift. It is a country that has changed its mind.
As a result, Mark Carney has far more political wiggle room to fast-track major energy and infrastructure projects than any prime minister in more than a decade. Since late November, three senior federal climate advisers to Carney have resigned, claiming that the new pipeline deal undermines Canada’s climate ambitions. It was “the last straw” for working with a Liberal leader who had championed “net-zero” emissions and been a United Nations climate envoy.
When did Canadians stop caring about climate change?
