With the inauguration of Joe Biden south of the border and the subsequent cancellation of the Keystone XL permit, Canadian politicians and leaders still supporting pipeline projects are having to face a stark reality; Pipelines are looking pretty dead.
In the last few years, we’ve seen a number of oil and gas transportation projects bite the dust. Energy East was cancelled because it was deemed unprofitable by the private interests that sought to build the project and not, as Conservative party leaders past have argued, by updated environmental regulations. The Transmountain pipeline expansion is only going ahead because the federal government dumped billions of taxpayer dollars into building a pipeline to expand capacity to the west coast for export purposes. If the federal government did not step in to overpay for that pipeline it too would have fallen through the floorboards as being unprofitable and not worth it for private businesses to undertake. Now we’re seeing Keystone XL biting the dust as well thanks to the new president of the United States fulfilling a campaign promise. Yet, while one international leader fulfills their campaign promise, local leaders here in Canada are having their promises squashed.
Keystone runs, predominantly, through American states but the expansion project also runs through a fair portion of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Jason Kenney and Scott Moe, as well as Justin Trudeau, are obviously unhappy with the developments that have taken place on this front. Each of these leaders, to varying degrees, have potential electoral issues facing them due to the continued cancellation of these pipeline projects.
I would argue that Scott Moe probably has the least to lose from this project falling through the floorboards. Electorally the most he has to worry about is a minor threat on the horizon, one taking shape as another right-wing political party that has taken a harder stance on western issues relating to separatism, regionalism and by being more populist in nature. The Buffalo Party is not a looming threat by any means but for a party that ran for the first time in 2020 and fielded candidates in only 30% of the ridings they still managed to win more votes provincially than the Green party who ran candidates in all but one of the ridings and has been around since 1999. Regardless of this, Moe has the freshest mandate of any major Canadian leader and has the largest ongoing majority.
Trudeau has the second most to lose even though, from an ideological standpoint, you would think he’d have the least to lose. This is a Liberal government that has argued it is taking climate change seriously. A government that says that it has to do the hard actions needed to curb Canada’s impact on global warming. Yet, as one might expect, the federal government is taking the cancellation of Keystone relatively hard with Trudeau saying that he’s rather disappointed about the developments in a call with Biden.
Trudeau will continue to get hit by Conservative leaders and those in provinces such as Saskatchewan and Alberta as ‘Not Doing Enough To Protect Western Interests’. Electorally I see Trudeau getting hit in an area that he’s already rather weak and won’t likely pick up any new seats in a federal election anyways. Alberta and Saskatchewan, with the exception of maybe one or two seats in the urban centres between the two of them, are looking like they will stay solidly blue regardless of what happens on the pipeline front. However, it works out to being yet another problem for a Liberal government already struggling with the headache that is western alienation. This is a situation where national unity is pushed to the forefront for Trudeau and that is why he’s likely taking this issue as seriously as he is despite his environmental stances. However, even though Moe and Trudeau likely won’t get hit particularly hard electorally due to these developments the one leader who will is Alberta’s Jason Kenney.
To put it lightly Kenney is not having a good time in government. Alberta has continued to get hit hard in the energy sector which has translated to job losses, loss of revenue and a loss of faith among the electorate. The pandemic certainly has not helped either. What jobs aren’t in the energy industry that Alberta has been relying on to keep things afloat, such as those in the tourism and service industries, have been shuttered or close to shuttering because of COVID. There’s a reason why we’ve been seeing Alberta trying to keep service jobs open during the pandemic because, frankly, it’s the last thing their economy can reliably depend on outside of energy. Couple the downturn in the economic situation with rising government deficits, something Kenney campaigned on eliminating, and it’s not hard to see why Kenney is in some real hot water electorally.
Now, I have to caveat this next portion by pointing out that it’s the start of 2021 and the next Alberta election is in 2023 so there is plenty of time for polling to do a 180-flip, however, current polling has not been good for the UCP.
Out of the last four unique polls done in Alberta we’ve seen the UCP lead in only one, a poll that was done by Angus Reid on November 30th, 2020 that showed the UCP with a four-point lead. The other three polls from Research Co, Envrionics and Mainstreet showed NDP leads in Alberta of three, seven and seventeen, respectively, over the UCP with Mainstreet being the most recently conducted poll. The fact that the NDP have anything more than a five-point lead over the UCP in Alberta of all places is frankly amazing, especially outside of an election season. We have to remember that the UCP beat the NDP in the 2019 with a twenty-two-point lead and now we have polls showing them trailing the NDP. In a province where a two-party system has effectively taken place, seats only have one way to go if the government is losing support.
According to the most recent update of the LeanTossup Alberta model, the NDP would easily, with the numbers available to us, win back government if an election were held today. Our most recent run showed the NDP winning 48 seats while the UCP wins 39, a stark difference from the 62 and 24 the UCP and NDP won respectively in 2019.
Arguably, the NDP in Alberta doesn’t even need to play to the idea of building pipelines to win the next election (Although they almost certainly will given past support) instead needing to put the focus on either diversifying the energy industry into green and renewable version of energy or by expanding the service sector. The NDP could easily explain this away as following the economic trends wherein fossil fuel is increasingly being beat out by renewable sources of energy. Any way the Alberta NDP can feasibly argue they can make Alberta less vulnerable to major economic downturns, such as the one they are currently in and have been in for much of the 2010’s, makes them only more likely to wrest control of government back from the UCP.
Out of all the leaders that pipeline politics are most likely to impact, Kenney is the one most at risk of losing his job and government. The cancellation of Keystone is just another nail in the energy coffin for Alberta and another kick in the back of the knee for the Kenney government. Trudeau and Moe can at least weather the storm without being too greatly impacted.