The Ottawa-Alberta deal, Carney charges the new Danegeld...
The deal offers many things for Alberta, but still holds the province ransom.
I was driving north of Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes area on Friday afternoon to spend a few days away at a cottage. No, it’s not mine, just a lovely place we found to rent for the weekend.
It’s calm, it’s serene, and now there is a guy across the narrow channel of the lake we are on who started using his chainsaw at 7am.
I’ll still take it.
So here I sit lakeside, coffee at the ready pondering what to make of this deal between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
Below I lay out the wins for Alberta, the risk Carney is taking by agreeing to this and why it is still not enough. I’ll share Eric Nuttall’s thoughts on what he is calling The Great Ransom and what I am calling the new Danegeld.
Premier Smith is certainly happy…
While I have several reservations about this deal and the slow timeline for it, Premier Smith is certainly saying publicly that she’s happy with the deal.
Here’s some of the posts she shared on social media bragging about the deal.
All of those are major wins for her and Alberta and none of them should be discounted.
On matters like this, I do put a lot of weight in what Premier Smith says. She’s a smart political leader, she thinks deeply about how to achieve her goals and she’s calling this good for Alberta.
So too are my Postmedia colleagues at the Calgary Herald such as Rick Bell, Don Braid and and Chris Varcoe. Take a look at what they are saying and consider their points of view.
As for individual questions, Premier Smith answered them all on Friday afternoon.
Carney’s side is facing pushback…
For all Mark Carney did in agreeing to many of Alberta’s demands, it still isn’t enough in my view - more on that in a moment.
Within Carney’s own caucus, there is pushback mainly from Quebec MPs and members of the party’s supposed green caucus. As I’ve said before, Carney has the political capital to spend within his own party and with the Canadian public.
He should be reminding all of these MPs that if it weren’t for him, they’d be out of a job and the Liberals would be out of power.
(Oh how I wish!)
On Friday, Carney faced criticism from groups like Environmental Defence, the Pembina Institute, Eco Justice and Sierra Club.
Telling these groups that have long supported Liberal policy that he is moving ahead, despite their objections, could cost Carney at some point.
This is not without political risk for him.
Carney was asked to respond to those groups during his scrum with the media.
All that said…
This still does not go far enough or fast enough.
A deadline to get to a decision on approving, or rejecting, a pipeline won’t come until September 2027.
Yesterday, the UAE announced they would double their pipeline capacity by fast tracking a project already under construction to open in 2027. They are doing this to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and any future disruptions.
By the time this pipeline is operating, we will have come to a decision on whether to build one, that if all goes well, will open sometime between 2033 and 2034.
“We will need to think big and act bigger. We will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.”
That was Mark Carney in his victory speech on election night, April 28, 2025.
This new announcement is not living up to that promise. A promise that he made time and again during the election and that he has repeated often since the election.
We are not thinking big enough, we are not acting big enough and we are moving at Ottawa speed.
Meaning barely moving.
I mentioned above that Carney is spending some political capital in facing off against the environmental groups and even members of his own caucus.
He’s not spending enough.
The Canadian voting public would back this man to the hilt if he came out and said he was actually fast tracking this project and others to boost the Canadian economy. His popularity in the polls would increase, including in Alberta - a place not normally friendly to Liberals but where his party is doing well currently.
The latest Leger poll for Postmedia has Carney’s Liberals at 41% in Alberta. They got 28% of the vote in the last election and won two seats, if they got 41% they’d win far more in Alberta.
If they actually moved quickly on these projects, he’d be winning enough seats in Alberta to offset losses in Quebec.
And Canada would be winning economically.
We are only harming ourselves…
Most of the world is moving on from the fantasies that they have been telling themselves on carbon taxes and the like.
Not Canada.
The whole world wants more energy, wants energy from reliable partners, and we are still making it difficult to get it to them.
Eric Nuttall is a major investor in the oil and gas sector and he’s still bullish on it, but he’s clearly frustrated by this deal calling it The Great Ransom.
He’s claiming a TM on that, but I think The Great Ransom the perfect way to describe what just happened.
For years, I heard green activists tell me that even oil and gas executives supported carbon taxes or carbon capture projects, which was proof that they worked. No, what really was happening was they were agreeing to the ransom in place at the time.
For years they were agree to pay the Danegeld.
On Friday, we just changed what Danegeld is and who it is being paid to, but Alberta is still paying.
I applaud Premier Smith for getting to any agreement but I’m sure she would agree with me that it would be better if we didn’t have to jump through hoops to move forward on the projects that will build and sustain our country.
there will NEVER be a pipeline west. Carney has set in place so many barriers it will never happen. He is so crooked and scheming and lies on every turn. build south AB into the US and IGNORE any Federal involvement.
The can has been kicked yet again with some grand pageantry, handshakes and signings of each other’s yearbooks. As an Albertan, I can appreciate what Danielle Smith is doing. Fighting for her province and its livelihood, as well as her political future. But as a pipeliner who has actually worked in the “trenches” for 30 years, we are no closer to a pipeline west or any direction than we were when the government of the coiffed prime minister cancelled the Northern Gateway and Energy East projects. The CER regulations, red tape and environmental impact nonsense will effectively stall this and any other major pipeline project, if it even gets past the indigenous consultation phase…which itself is not likely. I’ve seen projects grind to a halt because a dead frog was found on the right of way. The job was shut down and environmental investigators were brought out to determine if a frog nesting ground was disrupted. For all we knew, the frog could have died of natural causes! So a frog takes precedence over the economy of a nation, now we add in all the “green” regulations. It’s absolute insanity. As far as the Keystone XL revival that Trump is asking for yet again after he brought it back to life in 2020, only to have Biden cancel it 8 months later, that is another issue entirely. I worked on that project when it was cancelled. Approximately 150 km of pipe is in the ground in central Alberta between Monitor and the South Saskatchewan River. It sits buried, capped with a rust inhibitor and nitrogen purge inside to preserve the pipe integrity. The stockpiles of the remaining pipe have been sitting in storage yards since 2012, slowly rusting and the protective outer coating baked off by 12 years of prairie sunshine. The pipe is effectively scrap. TC energy washed their hands of the project in 2021 when it was buried. TC had fought to get the project revived after it was cancelled by the Obama administration in 2012, right after the two major river crossings were completed on the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan rivers. There will be no proponent who will take on this project either, the cost will be tremendous and the route has now been changed to completely cross southern Saskatchewan and into North Dakota, instead of straight south into Montana. Again more environmental hurdles. Two major projects that in my experience are nothing more than “sound bites” to keep the people hopeful. Canadas fate has been sealed by Mr Carney and his green scheme, he will let the regulators, environmentalists and Indigenous do his dirty work and prevent them from ever breaking ground on a single project. He can claim that he tried, but the people have decided that it’s not in the interests of the country.
Apologies for the long rant, sometimes it’s hard to sit back and listen to the social media experts that come out of the woodwork claiming that “shovels will be in the ground soon”,or “the Keystone is already built”. I’ve witnessed the horror of the “dead frog” shutting down a multi million dollar operation and sending workers home. The “horror” of the virtuous.