There’s almost no other way to put it: the prime minister seems to be losing his marbles. On Monday, the premiers of five provinces and the Northwest Territories sent him a polite, conventional open letter raising familiar concerns with the Liberal government’s resource bills C-69 (which creates a new regime for federal review of big infrastructure projects) and C-48 (the ban on oil tanker traffic along most of B.C.’s coast).
The premiers, who included the three Prairie conservatives, Ontario’s Doug Ford, and New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs, didn’t say anything you haven’t heard before. They claimed that C-69 is a “reform” that makes things worse for megaproject investors, who are already shying away from Canada, and that as passed by the House of Commons it tramples provincial responsibility for resource development. The tanker ban, they added, is just the putrid icing on the toxic C-69 cake.
There is some firm language in the premiers’ letter. They warn that “The federal government must recognize the exclusive role provinces and territories have over the management of our non-renewable natural resource development or risk creating a Constitutional crisis.” C-48 in particular, they say, “will have detrimental effects on national unity.”
This does not seem like an especially outrageous warning to deliver. Canada is, the last time anyone checked, a federation. Because Ford’s name is on the letter, the signatories represent more than half the country’s population, and in particular the interest of that half in resource revenue and jobs. The tanker ban, almost by definition, sacrifices the general welfare of a resource-reliant national economy and federal treasury for the perceived protection of one thinly populated region. That may be a worthwhile tradeoff on utilitarian grounds, but from a national unity standpoint it is inescapably what it is: a choice between what two different groups of Canadians want.
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