Revived Canadian pipeline dreams face daunting challenges in becoming reality: analysts

Politicians are looking at building more oil and gas pipelines for better market access to Alberta oil. CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson reports.

Capturing a moment all about change Sunday night, former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien told a Liberal crowd on hand in Ottawa for the selection of the federal party’s new leader to embrace Alberta energy, stumping for the development of a natural gas pipeline to Quebec.

Mark Carney, who won the Liberal Party of Canada vote to become the new leader and replace current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, made similar comments about the need for more energy infrastructure while campaigning in Calgary last week but stopped short of saying the word “pipeline.”

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Meanwhile, conservative politicians from Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the federal party that’s got the best odds to win this year’s national election, to Doug Ford, recently re-elected as Ontario’s premier – not to mention Alberta’s own Danielle Smith – have been lamenting the country’s limited access for its energy products to foreign markets outside North America.

Smith and Brian Jean, Alberta’s energy minister, are in Houston to discuss opportunities for the province’s oil as it enacts a change giving companies more flexibility to sell bitumen.

U.S. President Donald Trump introduced 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods last week but paused some of them until April 2.

Trump, who took office in late January, had been threatening the measures and has been promoting the idea of his country annexing Canada as the 51st state since winning the U.S. presidential election in early November.

Canadian leaders have vowed to push back against the tariff threats after Trump launched then partly paused the trade war last week. Several provinces have put trade sanctions on the U.S. in place.

And the shifting economic landscape has led to talk of how Canada can reduce barriers to trade both internally and internationally, one of them being the ability to export oil and gas to points across the country.

But while political talk over pipelines has ramped up in the wake of Trump’s threats, political and policy experts say private industry sees them as a risky investment.

Richard Masson, an executive fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy and chair of the World Petroleum Council Canada, said Monday – using the federal Impact Assessment Act (Bill C-69) as an example – that several untested requirements under the act “make it daunting for a company to try and set out and to ask for regulatory approval.”

“To ask for regulatory approval, you probably need to do a minimum of $1 billion of work (such as) engineering, consultation,” he told CTV News Edmonton on Monday. “These things are big, especially multi-provincial pipeline ideas, so companies really don’t want to take on that risk.”

Masson said Canadians have several challenges in “trying to think about improving market access, especially away from the U.S.”

“We have the ability to maybe de-bottleneck pipelines a little bit, but certainly trying to build a major pipeline across the country seems far away, too risky and too big a project for where we sit right now,” he said.

One political scientist says politicians are sensing a change in public sentiment for pipelines, for which there has been a mix of success and failure over the years.

“Now that Canada is sort of uniting together against the threats that are coming out of the United States, there’s a much greater openness to talk about pipelines,” Lori Williams, a professor of political science at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, told CTV News Edmonton on Monday.

She said as long as the spirit to work together as Team Canada stays alive between the provinces, “there are real possibilities” though where financing would come from is unclear.

“The problem, of course, is we don’t see a corporate partner willing to do this, so the question(s are) who’s going to build it, who’s going to pay for it, and will that public opinion support be sustained long enough to actually get the pipeline built?” Williams said.

Talk of building pipelines from Alberta in several directions isn’t new. They’ve been hotly debated in recent decades; some projects have been built and some haven’t despite billions spent on development.

Keystone XL, Northern Gateway and Energy East all failed to go forward.

Enbridge, however, managed to replace and expand its Line 3 to Minnesota. The Coastal GasLink liquid natural gas pipeline reached the west coast through northern British Columbia. The Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion is now in operation.

Masson, however, suggests one of them, Trans Mountain, isn’t exactly inspiring.

“The federal government did get that pipeline built, but it wasn’t built on time, on budget and it doesn’t leave a taste in anybody’s mouth that building a pipeline is something a private sector company would want to take on the risk for,” he said while recounting the Kinder Morgan expansion project between Edmonton and Burnaby, B.C. – its price ballooned from $5 billion to $34 billion – that Ottawa eventually bought outright in 2018 for $4.7 billion to keep it alive.

Masson said while “there seems to be an alignment” in Canada that building more pipelines will help Canada be less vulnerable to the whims of the U.S., “the problem is we just don’t have the business conditions for that.”

“This is a lot about rallying around the flag, I think,” he said. “But it’s not something that I think is going to result in any pipelines happening soon, especially from Western Canada to the east.”