By Amanda Stephenson <\/p>\n
CALGARY, July 2 (Reuters) – The province of British Columbia announced a deal with Canada’s federal government on Thursday that maintains the federal ban on oil \u200ctankers along the country’s northwest coast, but appears to open the door to neighboring Alberta’s \u200cproposal for a new crude oil pipeline if a different route is proposed. <\/p>\n
The deal was announced just hours before \u200bCarney is expected to travel to Alberta to join Premier Danielle Smith as she announces her province’s proposal for a new pipeline with the capacity to transport 1 million barrels per day of Alberta crude oil to the B.C. coast for export overseas. <\/p>\n
Carney has tried to strike a balance between \u200cgrowing Canada’s oil industry, reducing its \u2060reliance on the U.S., and preserving some of Canada’s environmental policies. Canada currently has one West Coast oil pipeline to access Asian markets. <\/p>\n
Ottawa’s environmental policies, \u2060especially under Liberal former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, stoked anger in oil-rich Alberta and fueled a nascent separatist movement. The province is due to hold a non-binding referendum on October 19 to decide whether \u200bto \u200bbegin the process of splitting from Canada. <\/p>\n
While Alberta has \u200bsaid it favours a pipeline route \u200cto B.C.’s northwest coast, which is geographically closer to Asia than the province’s southern coast, B.C. has long been concerned about the environmental risk of a potential oil spill in the ecologically fragile area. <\/p>\n
But British Columbia Premier David Eby on Thursday appeared to open the door to a pipeline going through his province, as long as the tanker ban remains in place and the \u200cnorthwest coast is protected. <\/p>\n
“This agreement doesn’t require us to \u200bsupport any pipeline proposal from Alberta, however, as I’ve \u200bsaid before, we recognize our constitutional position, \u200band we do not have the authority to stop a new pipeline. \u200cWe will not be going to court \u200bto fight a pipeline project,” \u200bEby told reporters. <\/p>\n
Smith is expected to unveil her province’s crude oil pipeline proposal at 8 p.m. EDT (midnight GMT). The proposal does not yet have a private-sector proponent. <\/p>\n
The federal government \u200balso pledged to accelerate the \u200cbuilding of new liquefied natural gas projects in B.C. to triple LNG production in \u200bthe next decade. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Maria Cheng in Ottawa, Amanda Stephenson in Calgary and \u200bBhargav Acharya in Toronto; Editing by Paul Simao) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Amanda Stephenson CALGARY, July 2 (Reuters) – The province of British Columbia announced a deal with Canada’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[17,143,111,11410,39250,20950,8131,21947],"class_list":["post-113589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-carney","tag-canada","tag-federal-government","tag-mark-carney","tag-northwest-coast","tag-oil-tankers","tag-pipeline-route","tag-premier-danielle-smith","tag-province-of-british-columbia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}