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Don Braid:
The Senate committee has rigged these hearings to ensure that most of the testimony comes from coastal supporters of Bill C-48
A Senate committee has ruled there will be no hearings in Alberta on Bill C-48, the atrocious tanker moratorium, which should really be called the Alberta Product Ban.
The committee will travel to Terrace and Prince Rupert, B.C. But the senators have twice voted down pleas to hold hearings in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
On Friday NDP Leader Rachel Notley sent a letter asking the Senate to reconsider. She urged Albertans to do the same.
“They don’t think the people of Alberta should be heard . . . I gotta tell you, this is kind of an unprecedented stampede of stupid,” Notley said.
“I’m stunned. Albertans deserve better from Canada,” she said.
UCP leader Jason Kenney said, “It’s ridiculous that the Liberal-appointed majority in the Senate won’t even consider hearings in Alberta, where the Trudeau government’s series of anti-oil and gas policies are having a damaging impact on jobs and communities across our province.”
Bill C-48 has passed the Commons and is now in the hands of this Senate transport committee, the last line of defence against final approval.
Tankers, obviously, are all about ocean transport of products transported from inland places.
But the Senate’s transport committee is not interested in hearing from provinces that need transport.
If that bunch won’t listen, who ever will?
Senator Elaine McCoy told the committee Bill C-48 would effectively ban oil shipments from B.C.’s north coast. Michelle Cochrane/Postmedia
Veteran Alberta senator Elaine McCoy told the committee there would “effectively be a ban on any kind of shipping of oil from Canada from that region.
“That means that we as a country will have told three provinces that they cannot exploit or sell their natural resources. Those provinces are British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.”
McCoy isn’t a committee member, so she could speak but not vote. The same is true for fierce C-48 opponent Senator Doug Black, who says: “It angers me, as a senator from Alberta, that is being hurt, which I would suggest is being targeted, that my colleagues wouldn’t say ‘I can find two days to go and listen to Albertans.’”
The committee has rigged these hearings to ensure that most of the testimony comes from coastal supporters of Bill C-48.
It’s hard to miss the echo of Bill C-69, the equally horrible legislation that focuses on environment and social concerns for project approval, to the exclusion of economic benefit.
Bill C-48 was conceived on a whim by Justin Trudeau before he was prime minister. It’s part of the Liberal plan to ensure that nothing like Northern Gateway can ever be proposed again. The Liberals are even deaf to First Nations who want to build a northern pipeline.
Clearly, the craven majority on the Senate committee is unwilling to cross Trudeau’s dewy romantic vision of that lovely coast, whatever the cost to prairie economies.
This news drops into Alberta at the start of an election campaign in which every party agrees many Albertans are already furious at Ottawa.
On Friday, a new Environics Institute survey showed that a majority of people in Alberta and Saskatchewan think we get so little out of Canada that we might as well leave.
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Discontent is almost as strong in Atlantic Canada. And that part of the country, by clueless coincidence, was also excluded from the hearings on Bill C-48.
Some Atlantic senators wanted hearings there because the region has knowledge to share about safe tanker transport of oil products. That might actually have helped senators understand that tankers can co-exist with a clean, healthy environment.
No such federal ban is proposed for the Atlantic, of course, even though much of the landscape there is every bit as pristine and precious as B.C.’s north coast.
Black has done research and could find no comparable ban to C-48 anywhere in the world.
But nothing quite like Alberta’s oilsands industry exists anywhere in the world, either — so how else can a bunch of tame, unelected senators give it a hard time?