At Issue - Alberta pushes for a West-Coast pipeline

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

At Issue this week: Danielle Smith announces her province's proposal for a west-coast pipeline despite pushback from British Columbia. More candidates enter the race for NDP Leadership and share their vision for the party's revival. And the Liberals announce another office and CEO to oversee major government policies.. Rosemary Barton hosts Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj.

Too many students are packed into overcrowded classrooms in Ontario schools, and it's hurting their ability to learn. But instead of helping our kids, the Ford government is playing politics, taking over school boards and silencing local voices. It shouldn't be this way. Tell the Ford government to get serious about tackling overcrowded classrooms because smaller classes would make a big difference for our kids. Go to Building Better Schools.ca.

A message from the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario. This is a CBC podcast. Hey there, I'm Rosemary Barton this week on At Issue, the podcast edition, for Thursday, October 2nd. What stands before us right now is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to unlock our wealth of resources and become a world-leading energy superpower. There is no project. There is no bridge to cross. Unless the Albertan government and the federal Canadian government are committing billions of taxpayer dollars to build this project. This is a Canada project, and this is a test of whether Canada works as a country. This week, we're asking what's to be made of the provincial push and push back over a West Coast

pipeline, plus what do we make of the names vying for the NDP leadership? So what's been made of the provincial push and push back over a West Coast pipeline? I'm Rosemary Barton, break it all down tonight. Chantelle Ibert, Andrew Coyne, Altheiraj. Obviously, not the first time that Alberta has said it wants a pipeline, but this was a fascinating move by the Premier from a political perspective and from a policy perspective. Chantelle, what do you think she's trying to do here?

You're right that it was a political move, because as far as a project were very, very far from a project, $14 million basically is an ad campaign for a couple of months. What I think is happening here is Premier Smith is forcing Prime Minister Carney to fish or cut bait, i.e., she's using this announcement of a project that is not a project and that won't be a project for even next spring to force him to decide, is he keeping the tanker ban? Is he keeping the legislation that is left from Justin Trude's legacy on climate, or is he not? And he has never said one way or the other, but the tanker ban is something that is, as you saw this week, very important in particular to BC and not just New Democrats, but also indigenous nations in BC. and it is also a signal that other Canadians who voted for Mark Carney

on the basis of his climate credentials are watching. So at some point, sitting on that fence and flirting with both sides is going to become more difficult. Though in some ways, Andrew, that's what C5 was about, being able to sort of sit on the fence and carve out the pieces of legislation that you wanted to carve out or exempt in order to get things done. But what do you make of Chantal's assessment there? Well, it's one thing to be making exceptions to your own regulations,

and it's another thing to be overcoming a bunch of other people's opposition, but that's not even the half of what she's asking here. Asking, by the way, with this, you know, asterisk attached to it, that if this doesn't work, then Canada doesn't work, which is a bit on the nose. But it's one thing to say, and she's right to, and obviously it goes to the territory, to say, you can't just be four pipelines and principle.

You've got to be willing to put some political capital behind it. So that's something to ask of them. And then, in this case, you're asking him to overcome the opposition of both the Premier of British Columbia and indigenous groups. Okay, maybe that's something that can be done. But to ask at the top of this that you've also got to scrap a signature piece of legislation that is extremely popular in British Columbia, where, by the way, you have 20 seats versus the two seats you have in Alberta, it's a tall order.

It doesn't mean it can't be done, but there's going to be a real question here is, Can the, can an equivalent amount of safety be achieved without a tanker ban? Can there be regulations that can mitigate the risk to an acceptable level? I'm not at all sure that's the case. He's certainly been put in a very, very tight spot. Assuming that a proponent comes along because the Premier has said she doesn't want to pay for a pipeline either. This is the beginning of a conversation and a process and to everyone's point here, Althea, a political move, which is what you wrote about today too. Yeah, I feel like Chantal just summed up my column.

but um sorry i think two things to know just to be clear we're of the same mind um two things to note first of all mark carney does not need to make decision on the tanker ban uh because he can use c5 to carve out an exemption to that and we will you know if it finds itself on the project list that is something that we can find out months if not years down the line i think what is interesting it's not just that she is forcing him to pick aside. Is he, you know, on the side of the climate MPs and his B.C. and Quebec caucus and not just them. And there's lots of people in Ontario, for example, who are also, I think that another bitumen pipeline is a terrible idea, especially on the North Coast. Like the, she talked about

the Northern Gateway. This is the, you know, all the people who were upset about the spirit bear and the Haida Gwai and the very deli. ecosystem up there. It's not just the caucus in Quebec and British Columbia, but that's where the chunk of the liberal seats and support is. So is he willing to sacrifice those seats potentially to curry favor with her on a pipeline project that is completely half-baked? Or is he going to say no? At least no right now and kick the can down the road and wait to see what she's, she can actually come up with. I think that's more likely the scenario.

But then she boxed herself in by saying that if it's not on the list come November before the Grey Cup, then this is a proof point that Canada doesn't work. And she's, like, fueling the separatist movement in her own province. So in a way they all have kind of boxed themselves in a certain way. David Eby has not said no, but I will note that he also faces a leadership review in November. And for him, maybe this is a gift from the gods because he gets to become Mr. Climate, Mr. Protection of British Columbia.

Maybe this is a good thing for him. Chantelle, yeah. Okay, but can we agree that you cannot carve out temporarily a tanker ban and build a pipeline to tight water? Technically you could, but I don't know how you would. They're going to get sued on this bill,

but the legislation seems like it would give them the ability to do that. Yes, but you cannot do it. temporarily. You either have a tanker ban or you don't because you're not going to have a project that may fall under a tanker ban later down the road. But can we also revisit recent history called Northern Gateway and forget about the romantic notion that a few tree huggers in BC were against it? So suppose that this project gets adopted by the federal government who then pushes it and there is a private promoter.

You are literally where Stephen Harper was with Alison Redford and the Conservative government of Alberta, facing off not the NDP in D.C., but facing off against Christy Clark, who was then Premier, and I said BC is rejecting this pipeline. So where do we get this impression that you can just railroad it back into BC? And yes, the seats matter to the liberals, but also the primary. minister's commitment to not force a project on a province? Andrew? Not force the province, but I hate that kind of language.

We have a federal government to do federal things. One of the primary federal things is to decide matters that transcend provincial boundaries. You're not always going to get everybody on side on whichever decision you make. And I think we really need to, I wish people would dial down the temperature. I know that's an unlikely ask, but it has to be a specific. established that it is at least the right of the federal government to make these decisions. It is certainly not the right of the Premier British Columbia to veto things. He can express all kinds of political opposition he likes,

but to be talking in terms as if the Premier of any province had a veto on these kinds of projects is just fundamentally anti-federalism. The Premier Smith is doing the opposite, right? Premier Smith is doing the opposite. Yeah, go ahead, Chantel. But it was Mark Carney's. that he wouldn't force any province. That being said, the federal government is not about to overwrite the environmental legislation of provinces,

or if that's the business that it's going to be in, that minority government will be replaced sooner rather than later, because the voters who did go to the liberals believed that Mark Carney believed in climate policy. Last word to you on this, Althea, not last word forever, but for today. for today. Well, so Mark Carney did repeat that to caucus on Wednesday, that if this, basically that this is kind of a half-baked project and that if British Columbia does not want it, it's not going to go forward.

But I don't know if that's really what he's telling Alberta, because behind, you know, like in the quarters of power here, we keep hearing that they're ready to lift the emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, as long as. Danielle Smith is really fully committed to the Pathways Plus project, which is on the, which was, which found its way on the first tranche of projects. And if they raise the industrial carbon price and bring in the methane regulations, it seems like they're kind of doing a nudge, nudge, wink, wink. So she's not wrong to kind of force him to stake out a position. I think there's a lot of liberals who would want to know, actually, where Mark Carney stands. And I'm not sure that they can kick that can, you know, maybe they can kick it down for a few more months, but that's about it.

Okay, as I said, we will, I'm sure, talk about this many times again, but we'll leave it there for tonight. When we come back, we'll take a look at the NDP leadership race. So who can rebuild the party after its collapse in the last election? How viable is the future for the NDP? That's next. We need to make a bigger table. that more people need to see themselves within our party. We need to go where people are.

In this moment of epic change and uncertainty, our party is needed as never before. So what's been made of the names vying for the NDP leadership? Can they bring the NDP back to party status? Let's bring everyone back. Shantelle, Andrew Lthea. Should say Avi Lewis is an NDPer, but he hasn't been an MP or a member of caucus or anything.

So he's tried this before. We only have a handful of contenders. Althea, why don't you start us off? How big a deal is this? What has to happen for the NDP to gather some momentum? Well, I think if you're a new Democrat, you're probably encouraged that there is actually a few people who want this job. So there's a caucus member, Heather McPherson, the Edmonton MP, who has come out before in favor of a pipeline and is trying to broaden the tent. She's already budding heads with another one of her caucus members, Leah Gazan, over some of the comments she made about a purity test in the party.

So you kind of feel like if the NBD is not careful, they might fall into the same trap as the Green Party and get consumed with identity politics. And then that becomes the main issue. And then you have Avi Lewis, which I think is the person that Heather McPherson was kind of addressing with that purity test, who was the co-author of the Elite Manifesto, which probably is somewhat. responsible for the fact that Thomas Mulcair didn't have a job after, who basically called for keeping the oil in the ground. So there are clear differentiations between the candidates. And then you have Rob Ashton, who's a union leader from British Columbia. I interviewed him this week for our podcast. It's political. And he is really not a politician. And not like Mark Carney says

he wasn't a politician. Like he listens to your question and then takes a moment to think about it and basically told me that he's not going to have positions. Like, he's going to assemble his caucus and they're going to debate the issues and then they're going to have a vote. And he will go out and defend that in a, you know, united front, even if he personally disagrees with it. Yeah. Which is unusual, especially in the kind of political environment in which we live, where it's very leader-centric. And you kind of wonder, maybe you can do that with seven MPs, but can you do that with, like, 120? Yeah. I mean, if you can get back there, because that's what's at stake, Andrew, right? It's choosing a leader who can carve out some space

somewhere on the political spectrum to attract people back to the party. Yeah, they're getting a little bit of an assist from Mark Carney, who is having to define himself under the pressure we described in the first segment. And in the so doing, you know, certainly some progressives, I'm sure, will have decided he's not what they're looking for and they're going to be taking another look at the NDP. So it's a moment of opportunity for them. It's maybe a positive way of spending it. They're, But, you know, other parties and the NDP itself have been counted out before and their brand proved to be enduring. But they do have, you know, really large definitional questions.

Are they going to be the party of the traditional working class and try to reconnect with union voters, some of whom are who are straying towards the conservatives, or are they going to be the party of downtown progressives with the constellation of issues far beyond wages and standard living for working people? to see how toxic that can be, just to refer to the thing that Althea mentioned, you know, Heather McPherson made a statement, which is a pretty standard statement for a leadership candidate to make, of I don't think we want to be too, you know, have too much of an ideological purity test,

we need to have a big tent, et cetera. And for this, she was accused of, quote, unquote, tacitly endorsing white supremacy. Because if you follow the logic, if you're not having an ideological purity test, you're telling minority, equity-seeking, groups to take up seat at the back of the bus or whatever rhetorical trope you want to attach to that.

One has a feeling this could get quite nasty before too long. Yeah, I mean, you can see how the divisions inside the party, the broader membership, could lead to big problems. The Middle East is another area where it's been percolating along online and other places. So, Chantal, how necessary is this to go well for the party to survive? Because no one's counting them out, but this has to unfold in a certain way, I would think. This is a party that says it wants to be a national party and a contender for government, but it is the only main national party that actually does not insist on having some equal way to all regions of the country.

I, if I recruit a fan club in one place, Montreal where I live, I can actually win this, which tells you how more exposed than the conservatives and the liberals they are to single-issue movements taking advantage of that campaign to elect a person that they like best. First problem, second problem, yes, they've disappeared from Toronto, they've disappeared from Quebec. They're not very present in Atlantic Canada. I looked at those three candidates. They all have interesting features. I can't wait to see how any of them

would handle a French language leaders debate because from what I've heard of their French, they basically have left it at the door when they announced that they were running. Althea, I'll give you the last 30 seconds in terms of how important it is that this be successful in order for the party to come back. Well, Shauna is not wrong about the one-member, one vote,

and that does distort things, and that's one of the reasons that, frankly, Jagmeet Singh was able to win on the first ballot back in 2017. But that's for the NDP members to decide if that's a system that they want to change. What it does mean, though, is if you're Alexandre-Burges, the lone NDP MP in Quebec, and when you think back about the orange wave that propelled the NDP to official opposition back in 2011, it's really hard to see how any of the candidates flying for the leisureship at the moment would be able to do that, because to Chantès's point, they don't really speak French.

I think Heather McPherson has the best French out of the bunch, and I don't know. Like, you might need simultaneous interpretation in order to do the French debate. So it's going to be a challenge. But I do think that this is, like they're not looking at this like we're vying for power next term. They're thinking about this as a progressive rebuild, and they're focused on getting those blue-collar union voters that left them. We're going to take a short break here. When we come back, we'll look at the Liberals' latest agency designed to help defense procurement and what these offices say about the PM's management style.

That's next. Today, I'm very proud to announce the Defense Investment Agency. The goal or aim of this agency is to equip the Canadian Armed Forces with the tools and equipment they need at the speed of relevance. So do these offices tell us anything about the Prime Minister's style of management? Let's bring everyone back. Chantal, Andrew, and Althea. I know everyone's chomping at the bit to talk about management style. But I think it's interesting that the Prime Minister is creating these different bodies

to deal with different issues, building homes, the major projects, now defense procurement, and putting these private sector people in charge in order to, I guess, report back to the ministers involved, to have these things done. Andrew, what do you make of it in terms of an approach to getting big things done? I have no problem with it in principle.

I think it's a well-established idea that what we want our elected politicians to do is to set the broad policy parameters. We don't necessarily want the meddling around in the intricate decision-making below the scenes where we can't watch them because there's all sorts of opportunities there for political flammary, et cetera.

So that's why we set up Crown corporations as independent organizations, quasi-independent organizations, it's why we have the Bank of Canada. There's a lot of precedence for that kind of idea. I also certainly have no objection to bringing in a bit of outside blood. Not every repository wisdom is in the Ottawa bureaucracy. My question, particularly with regard to the defense agency, is how new an approach will it actually have? What we really need is not just arm's-length procurement decision-making the method, but we need to get out of the idea that procurement should be for 100 other purposes besides procurement, that it should

be for regional development and industrial policy, and all the things that we burdened defense spending with in the past, which is why we have such depleted military. So it would be certainly more refreshing and more innovative if it were to be given a mandate that said, your job is to get the best equipment you can at the lowest price that will equip our forces to do their jobs. Everything else comes second, if not third. Though there is a defense industrial strategy coming in the months ahead. Unfortunately, yes. Yeah, that would feed into all of this.

Chantal. Yes, and when you looked at the notes that came with the announcement, you see that there is this component of benefiting industries in Canada. So there is not a big change in culture on that front. I'm just curious about the notion that you are going to speed things. up by slowing them down. Because whether you are efficient or not in the private sector, these people are not taking on existing organizations that actually run in some way, shape, or form that reflects the way that they would manage. They have to create them, not from scratch,

but I was reading the mission statement about pooling together, this and that and that. Well, that takes time. It's not going to happen in three weeks or at the end of the year. And every single time that you create those organizations, you need to give them a fairly significant amount of time, I'm not talking weeks, before they can actually hit the ground and do whatever they're meant to do.

So I'm slightly conflicted by this approach and the notion that it will really speed things up in the way that Mark Carney hopes. Yeah, I mean, though it sounds like the prime minister has said that he is not going to allow that kind of time that these things have to unfold quickly, whether they do or not. I don't know. Althea, your thoughts? Sometimes I think the liberals forget that they have a minority government.

These are great things that you could see, great big things that you could see a result in a few years' time when they have it. But I don't know that they'll have that road way to achieve the outcomes that they want. That being said, I think that the prime minister, likes the clear lines of accountability that you find in the corporate sector, and here are new bodies being established in that way. There are real problems with procurement that this seeks to address. You know, your quote from Steve Fuhr talked about the speed of relevance, and that has been a really big problem. You know, by the time that the order is in and the things get delivered, there's no longer the things the military needs. And that's,

that's what that is hoping to address. There are bigger issues, though, because to Chanty's point, it's the same people making the decisions, and that will require a culture change, a change where people are far less risk-adverse, and that's not going to come immediately. No. Okay. I thought that was interesting. That is at issue for this week.

What do you think of Alberta's proposal for a pipeline? Is this a cause for concern when it comes to national unity? Let us know. You can send us an email at ask at cbc.ca. Remember, you can catch me on Rosemary Barton Live. That's Sundays at 10 a.m. Eastern. We will be back here in your podcast feeds next week. Thank you for listening.

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