Prime minister Mark Carney met with Alberta premier Danielle Smith Friday morning in Ottawa, and by all accounts, they made progress on finalising the terms of the MOU that would see a west coast pipeline built, with Smith saying that their final sticking point is the industrial carbon price but she expects they will get to a “win-win” deal. I don’t actually believe it will be win-win because every deal so far has been an abject capitulation where Alberta gets to flout the rules, either with longer timelines than everyone else, or a weaker effective carbon price (because the province keeps instituting new credits that lower the price). Smith also keeps saying that this deal will help “quell separatism,” which is also bullshit because they don’t actually care policy (which you’ll see in a moment), and the fact that she is encouraging them is not exactly doing anything to quell the movement—quite the opposite, in fact. Everything she has done has encouraged them.
And then by mid-afternoon, the government released their consultation documents for their planned “streamlining” of environmental assessments, which pretty much involves gutting the systems worse than Stephen Harper did, puts unrealistic timelines on consultations (particularly for Indigenous communities which lack the resources to do the work in an expedited manner), and gives a whole lot of power to individual ministers to approve projects with fewer safeguards, which is ripe for abuse and corruption. None of this is good or positive, in spite of the whinging of certain industry executives because they simply don’t want to put in the work. Everything just feels like we’re going backward, and we’re back to “pollution is fine because we’re in a trade war,” as if there aren’t long-term costs and consequences.
Meanwhile, Richard Warnica of the Star went to Alberta and spent time with the separatists, and it’s a swamp of conspiracy theories and fabrications (which he performatively fact-checked a bunch of, and lo, it’s all false. All of it). It’s an absolutely disturbing read, but it also skirts some of the underlying issues—that this is a movement that is steeped in white and Christian nationalism (and these people were deliberately marginalised back in the seventies and eighties by the Lougheed and Getty governments), that has festered in a poisoned information ecosystem and a political ecosystem that has relied on scapegoating Ottawa for the past five decades rather than dealing with the reality of their situation (they’re price-takers for oil, and the fact that they’re a virtual one-party state has invited all manner of corruption in their system). So no, any regulatory changes that Mark Carney might push through won’t mollify them. Another pipeline will make no difference—the last one didn’t, and the province absolutely reneged on the “grand bargain” it was supposed to represent. This is a quasi-cult whose brains have rotted on social media and Fox News, and simply giving them everything they say they want won’t actually solve any problems. It will likely just make things even worse.
Ukraine Dispatch
A three-day ceasefire and 1000 prisoner exchange has apparently been agreed to, while Russia plans a scaled-back Victory Day parade (because they have no tanks left and they are paranoid Ukraine will attack). Ukraine is running short of air defence missiles after the massive assault over the winter.