From the Editors: Trudeau’s political credit card is maxed out

In the moments after the announcement that the Kinder Morgan pipeline project had received governmental approval, leader of the opposition, Rona Ambrose, said that Trudeau and the Liberal Party had “run out of political capital.”

She’s right.

A friend of mine pointed out that, in some ways, Trudeau approving the pipeline is worse than Harper doing the same thing, because Harper’s approval would have been fully expected. Trudeau was supposed to be different.

The Liberals ran on promises that they would be better than the Conservatives at addressing climate change, and those of us in B.C. were happy to know that Trudeau had spent a lot of his time in Vancouver as a public school teacher and snowboarding instructor on Grouse Mountain. It would stand to reason that he, of all people, would respect the natural beauty of the province.

Now, plenty of environmental and indigenous activists have noted that the approval of this pipeline will be extremely dangerous to our dwindling population of Orcas. Only 80 are believed to remain. It’s not even the pipeline or the threat of an oil spill that would cause this, but the noise from increased tanker traffic which will ruin their ability to communicate with each other. This also means that the Strait of Georgia could be full of tankers ruining the view, causing damage to our tourism industry.

Let’s continue to assume that a leak will never happen, and that everything will work exactly the way it’s supposed to. Even if no tankers leak, tar sands oil is easily the worst type of oil to extract. While Canada does have one of the highest oil reserves in the world, unlike Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, we can’t just stick a straw into the ocean floor and suck. Tar sands need to be fracked, and to get it to market, it needs to be either put on a truck—which is horribly inefficient—or hurled down a pipeline. This particular oil is thick, so it needs to have chemicals added to the mix to flow through the pipe properly, only for them to be removed when it gets to the refinement phase.

What’s worse for Canada, the price of oil needs to be very, very high for this to be worth it, and world markets have proven that oil is no longer safe to bet on. With China embracing nuclear and solar power and phasing out coal, and with India building the largest solar power station in the world, Canada is beginning to make an ass of itself.

This is especially painful for indigenous communities. While Trudeau signalled that he would be better than Harper, the improvement seems marginal at best. In northern communities, food is so expensive that many stick to traditional fishing practices, but pipelines can screw that up. Tsleil-Waututh First Nation has already said that they will seek legal action over the pipeline approval, and they likely remember Trudeau’s statement that “governments grant permits, communities grant permission” from the UN.

What Ambrose means by “political capital” is that, if Trudeau had made good on several other promises, this pipeline approval wouldn’t have been seen as such a big deal. They’re also losing political capital to election reform. Even though the all-party electoral reform committee has recommended a referendum and a new proportional representation voting system, the five Liberal members have said that the recommendations are “too radical,” which is especially absurd given Trudeau’s promise that 2015 was going to be the last election under first-past-the-post.

The Liberals were elected on the backs of people who were tired of the Conservatives, and left-leaning NDP voters who realized that a split vote could have meant an additional session of Harper. They were also elected on the shoulders of indigenous voters who were happy to hear the leader of a major party acknowledging them and the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If they want to keep even a minority government in 2019, they have to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve made.