"This was the last chance for years. If there was going to be a pipeline to carry Alberta oil to the ocean in the next decade or so, the only option left was to put public money into Trans Mountain. When it came to it, with bad options and little time, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau took a big political gamble. It bought the pipeline. And Mr. Trudeau put his government on the line."
"But the government has bought it, at least for now, for $4.5-billion, and with it come all the risks of cost overruns or legal challenges and the awkward discomfort of angry protests – now doubly damaging because the operator of said pipeline reports to one Justin Pierre James Trudeau, Esq. It’s not really a massive fiscal risk for a national government. The purchase includes an existing, money-making pipeline that can be resold if the expansion is somehow blocked. Even a worst-case scenario, where money is sunk into construction before a court halts it, won’t destroy the bottom line of a federal government that spends $338-billion a year."
"But there wasn’t, for all the claims to the contrary, some other magic-wand way to make construction of the Trans Mountain expansion go ahead. This pipeline crisis was sparked, let’s recall, when the company promoting the expansion, Kinder Morgan, announced April 8 that it would pull out unless it could be certain that the B.C. government’s legal threats would not block the project – and short of B.C. dropping its objections, there was no way to to provide legal certainty by the May 31 deadline. By the time that deadline approached, it wasn’t just a generic pipeline at stake. The cost of doing nothing was high: a festering dispute between Alberta and B.C., a loss of investor confidence, the precedent of provincial threats blocking a federally approved major project – all over and above the lost jobs and the Alberta oil patch concern about the discount on landlocked oil."
Full article: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politic ... -the-line/