Danielle Smith\u2019s role has been surprising and disappointing. With time pressure on Carney to have early success regarding his \u201cbuild Canada\u201d imperative, she unwisely allowed the pressure of time to work against Alberta. With recent active expansion of Enbridge and TMX underway, and the almost fully approved South Bow project, about 1.2 million barrels per day of additional capacity are, dare I say, \u2018in the pipeline.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
South Bow will have optionality to add another 500,000 barrels per day, taking future capacity to 1.7 million. A more experienced negotiator would have recognized the advantage of time and negotiated accordingly. Instead, Premier Smith accepted the punishing carbon tax increases and reduced Alberta royalties (to be recompensed with carbon tax revenues).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Instead of playing a shell game with taxpayer money, a true conservative would have stood her ground and, in turn, made decarbonization of oil in Alberta conditional upon first being imposed on the almost million imported barrels per day consumed in Ontario and Quebec.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Instead, Alberta is a playground for one of the world’s leading climate crusaders. This \u201cclimate action\u201d will play well with Carney’s pals in Europe, at the World Economic Forum where he was a director, and at the United Nations where he was \u201ca special envoy for climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rather than protecting Alberta interests, the Premier is acting like a Western Captain Canada with similar falling ratings of Ontario’s Captain Canada, Premier Ford. Insisting she wants to demonstrate how Canada can work, her acquiescence to an outcome unprecedented in the world more demonstrates how Canada does not work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Smith played her hand deftly by insisting Albertans have the right to be heard. But recently she has come out very strongly as a federalist, at times appearing to be an ambitious politician with federal aspirations. Proudly announcing that she \u201ctrusts Mark Carney\u201d is also revealing and disappointing \u2014 his bending and often breaking the truth is a matter of documentation, not opinion.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Danielle Smith\u2019s role has been surprising and disappointing. With time pressure on Carney to have early success regarding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[164,3178,111,16366,3119,10281,3940,12468,11580],"class_list":["post-138070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-carney","tag-alberta","tag-danielle-smith","tag-mark-carney","tag-mou","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-column","tag-pipeline","tag-socialism","tag-western"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138070","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=138070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}