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The province’s interests will not be served by the current federal government, which recently implemented changes in the regulatory process to projects well after their applications were filed. These proposals cost hundreds of millions of dollars to mount and plans were long ago made that relied on a reasonable consistency and predictability in the regulatory process. Although the government has claimed that the objective of these changes is to restore “public trust and confidence,” the practical effect is to increase the probability of rejecting these proposals, most notably through the inclusion of upstream carbon-emission impacts, beyond the scope of the pipelines themselves. What should be managed as a matter of carbon policy is instead being imposed on the approval of infrastructure projects.

There should be a quid pro quo with the rest of the country.

This is the same logic Barack Obama relied on to reject Keystone XL. It will now be invoked against proposals for the Energy East and Trans Mountain pipelines. Meanwhile, the federal government has de facto impugned the integrity of the NEB with no substantive reasons other than its decisions on Northern Gateway and the reversal of Line 9 did not conform to the expectations the country’s most radical NGO elements.

In pursuing its apparent carbon policy, the federal government has said it is committed to meeting GHG-reduction targets tabled at Paris that are fundamentally implausible, even by 2030, without massively contracting Canada’s existing hydrocarbon industry. Yet Environment Minister Catherine McKenna has said “Paris is a floor not a ceiling” for carbon-reduction ambitions. How extreme does she expect Canada to be in its pursuit of de-carbonization?