OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his ministers are ramping up their efforts to win support for critical pipeline projects going west, east and south, at the same time the exact content — and existence — of a reported letter to U.S. President Barack Obama on a climate plan and the Keystone XL remains a mystery.
The prime minister is dispatching a number of his ministers and senior bureaucrats to B.C. in the coming weeks to meet with First Nations chiefs, part of an ongoing effort to see progress on a couple of proposed pipeline projects that would send Alberta oilsands to the West Coast for shipment to lucrative markets in Asia and elsewhere.
Ottawa has also been ratcheting up its campaign to convince Washington to approve the Keystone XL oilsands pipeline.
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]But the Conservative government won’t confirm whether Harper has, indeed, written a letter to the U.S. president agreeing to harmonize Canada’s greenhouse gas regulations for the oil and gas sector with the United States in hopes of getting the Obama administration to approve Keystone.
Harper sent a letter in late August to Obama proposing “joint action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the oil and gas sector” if it will help win approval of the Keystone XL oilsands pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast, CBC News reported last week.
The final approval on the project rests with Obama, but it appears a decision won’t be announced until 2014.
However, the Prime Minister’s Office refuses to confirm or deny whether a letter was sent to Obama, or the specific contents of any possible correspondence.
“It’s as though the Canadian government is trying to find a face-saving way for the president to claim moral victory and just move on,” said Christopher Sands, a specialist in Canada-U.S. relations at the Hudson Institute, a think-tank in Washington D.C.
Obama has boxed himself into a corner on Keystone XL, so having the Canadian government agree to work with the U.S. on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector could be a way to approve the pipeline while still demonstrating some action on climate change, he said.
“It maybe lets Obama say ‘I got something for my strategy. I didn’t blow this one,’” Sands said. “He allowed this thing (Keystone) to become a bigger problem than it might have been.”
The $5.3-billion Keystone XL pipeline would transport 830,000 barrels of oil a day primarily from Alberta’s oilsands and the Bakken formation in North Dakota to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
The Harper government says the TransCanada Keystone XL project is an important component of trying to increase pipeline capacity and getting western Canadian crude to market.
But the project has become a magnet of criticism for concerned citizens and environmental groups who say the pipeline will increase the U.S.’s reliance on Canadian “dirty oil” and generate additional carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.
With Keystone still in limbo, a number of federal cabinet ministers and senior officials are expected to travel to B.C. over the next couple of weeks to meet with aboriginal leaders and further pitch the importance of increasing pipeline capacity to the West Coast, including the Enbridge Northern Gateway project.
First Nations leaders in British Columbia say federal officials have informed them that a number of ministers and bureaucrats will be in B.C. in the coming weeks to meet with them, including Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt, Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq, Transport Minister Lisa Raitt and possibly Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver.
“We have been meeting with our provincial counterparts and Canadians, including aboriginal peoples, right across the country on the need to responsibly develop our natural resources and diversify our energy exports. That work continues,” Oliver said Friday in a statement.
Earlier this year, the Conservatives appointed Douglas Eyford as Ottawa’s special federal representative on West Coast energy infrastructure, whose role is to engage aboriginal communities on pipelines and other oil and gas projects.
Eyford delivered a preliminary report to Harper in June, with a final report due by November.
The prime minister is in British Columbia this weekend for at least one public event.
The $6-billion Northern Gateway pipeline would ship oilsands crude from northern Alberta to the port of Kitimat, B.C., where it could be shipped by supertankers to Asia and other international markets.
The National Energy Board-Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency joint panel reviewing the project is slated to release its report by the end of the year.
A separate proposal from Kinder Morgan, which would see a $5.4-billion expansion to its 60-year-old Trans Mountain line, would nearly triple its pipeline capacity of oilsands crude shipped from Alberta to the West Coast.
The Harper government has also, in recent weeks, been trumpeting Enbridge’s proposed Line 9 pipeline reversal and TransCanada’s Energy East project to ship crude oil from Western Canada to refineries in Quebec and Atlantic Canada as examples of important initiatives that will help expand the country’s energy export markets.
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- Canada to work with U.S. on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions: Oliver (business.financialpost.com)
