Getting Alberta Oil to Market

"Today I'm announcing that, with the TransMountain halted and the work on it halted, until the federal government gets its act together, Alberta is pulling out of the federal climate plan."
"And let's be clear, without Alberta, that plan isn't worth the paper it's written on."
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley

"This is a project that's in Canada's national interest, a project that means thousands of good, well-paying jobs for the middle class."
"This one will be a strong, commercial project once we de-risk it. That's what we're attempting to do, so we can be in the market in the long term."
"The court has asked us to respond promptly and in a meaningful way to today's decision and has given us some good directions in next steps."
"While we want to make sure the project proceeds, we also want to make sure it moves ahead in the right way."
Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau

"There is that overall sense that when central Canadian issues -- steel or autos or dairy -- are in play, they're a priority, and when western issues are in play they're either not taken seriously or they are of such a secondary nature that they're not thought through carefully enough and they are essentially botched."
"We're getting to the stage where TransMountain is just botched. Elements of western alienation, for lack of a better term, run deep and also just below the surface in Alberta political culture. There's room for a provincial premier to champion the west, his province's interests, but the west more generally."
"We're at about the middle of the third iteration of this cycle [of past energy feuds with the rest of the country]."
Faron Ellis, political scientist, Lethbridge College, Alberta

Steel pipe to be used in Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain expansion project sits on rail cars at a stockpile site in Kamloops, B.C. On Thursday, the Federal Court of Appeal quashed Ottawa's approvals to twin the existing 1,150 kilometre-long Trans Mountain pipeline . (Dennis Owen/Reuters)

If any province has issue and legitimate ones with the rest of confederation it is surely Alberta. The long-established federal-mandated transfer payments to lesser economically hale provinces are mostly fueled by Alberta taxes, and the recipient provinces of this largess just happen to be the biggest critics of Alberta oil production. Quebec gets its electrical energy from its giant James Bay project, and sniffs disparagingly at oil production, campaigning vigorously against oil pipelines while grasping at Alberta's generosity.

British Columbia's digging in of heels, refusing to allow pipelines to cross its territory claiming environmental issues, is hypocritically taking advantage of Alberta oil to service its provincial energy needs while denying Alberta the kind of access that would ensure the province finally receives full payment for its oil products, not the discounts currently disabling its economic future. The federal government's stringently restrictive policies have so hamstrung investment by large energy conglomerates that they've given up struggling to build facilities that are meant to enable Alberta oil to be shipped abroad.

Yet when Kinder Morgan called it quits from sheer exasperation that all the patience mustered and the investments and the consultations, regulations simply kept increasing, leading the Trudeau government to the desperate measure of using taxpayers' funding to buy it all, lock stock and barrel. Shareholders approved the sale by a 99 .9 percent vote at the very time when the Federal Court of Appeal slammed the government for not adequately consulting First Nations. Work was proceeding on the pipeline and suddenly work is halted; thousands out of work, money thrown to the winds.

The National Energy Board's  report seen to be 'flawed', not considering tanker traffic, an issue outside their jurisdiction. That increased tanker traffic seen to be a threat to ocean wildlife. The increased rail traffic carrying oil across land also carries a greater risk of accidents and spillage, apart from the fact that the railroads are called upon to carry another natural resource -- Canadian wheat -- to outbound shipment abroad; oil interfering with the similarly critical issue of transporting grains, another trade imperative.
The steep discount Alberta oil sells for is a result of Canada not being able to ship Alberta oil economically and expeditiously if no pipeline is built to transfer it to tidewater. Oil by rail has accelerated to the point where Canadian trains have delivered twice as much oil to U.S. refineries int he period January to June of 2018 as was shipped for the entire of 2012. According to the National Energy Board "major crude oil export pipelines have been operating at, or near, capacity", and at discount.

"We can ship our energy products safely or we can ship them by rail, driving up emissions and costs", wrote Alberta Premier Rachel Notley  in an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun, in May, an explanation that did nothing to change public or government opinion in British Columbia. According to a 2017 report by the Manhattan Institute, to move a like amount of petroleum, trains cause close to four times greater numbers of accidents as do pipelines. Add to that the fact that when rails are stuffed with oil, a severe backlog of Canadian grain rail shipments result.