Yesterday Danielle Smith and Mark Carney rolled out a bitumen pipeline from Bruderheim, Alberta down to the BC coast — a line that’ll run somewhere between $35 and $44 billion depending on which contingency number you believe. Right on cue, Pierre Poilievre showed up to do the one thing he still knows how to do: blame Carney and cheer for oil. “You got one guy standing in the way of it all, and that’s Mark Carney,” he said. “Provide the permit, let the private sector build it, get out of the way and get it done.” Stirring stuff. One problem.
The private sector isn’t building it. The company leading the job is Trans Mountain Corp, which is owned by the federal government, which is to say owned by you. The market already had a shot at a pipeline down this exact corridor and ran for the exits — which is how taxpayers ended up buying the last one for $4.5 billion and then watching the price tag blow past $30 billion. Nobody with private money wants a forty-billion-dollar bitumen line; they want the profits with the risk parked on your tab. So “get government out of the way” really means “keep government writing the cheque, and shut up about it.” That’s the trick. Poilievre’s whole pitch is a subsidy wearing a cowboy hat.
And the people actually standing in the way aren’t Carney. They’re the Coastal First Nations who’ve said no to this, again and again, on their own territory, plus a tanker ban that exists because a bitumen spill on that coastline is not a hypothetical. Poilievre calls the ban “ridiculous.” What’s ridiculous is a man who torched a 25-point polling lead by screaming the word “pipeline” deciding the fix is to scream it louder, while pretending the free market he worships would ever touch this thing without a public guarantee underneath it. He wants government gone from everything except the part where it pays. Get out of the way? Fine. He can go first.