Canada is good at fuzzy-friendly. I just got a taste of it visiting the celestially beautiful Waterton National Park in southern Alberta. There are reminders everywhere of how it is symbolically conjoined these days with Glacier National Park in Montana across the border to create a single international peace park. Because, you know, the US and Canada are such good pals.

In the Trump-Trudeau era that’s no longer quite true, but let’s turn our eye to the other border that falls within Waterton’s boundaries, the one between Alberta and British Columbia. Never mind the health of Canada-US relations. How about Canada learns to get on with itself first?

The country’s two western-most provinces are not quite firing canons at one another, but almost. The issue is oil, specifically plans for a new pipeline to carry crude from the oil sands in northeastern Alberta across the Rocky Mountains to shipping terminals near Vancouver. Alberta is desperate that it gets built. Plenty of folk in British Columbia are desperate that it doesn’t.

To run for the most part alongside pipe that is already there, the new pipeline would triple Alberta’s oil-exporting capacity, providing a giant boost to the province’s economy, which it needs rather urgently, particularly after the recent period of depressed oil prices. About one quarter of the office space in Calgary, the energy capital of Canada, stands empty right now.

Thanks to opposing sentiment in British Columbia the fate of the $7.54 billion project, known as the Trans Mountain Expansion, hangs in the balance. The pressure is on. The Texas company due to build the pipeline, Kinder Morgan, has served notice it will walk away unless the provinces settle their differences and release the necessary permits by the end of next week.

The resistance of BC isn’t hard to fathom. Next year is the 30th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster that spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. It still haunts communities up and down the Pacific coastline. The bitumen oil squeezed out of Alberta’s sands is also of a particularly heavy variety, the kind that would sink to the ocean bed.

The question they ask in and around Vancouver is fairly simple: why should we take on the risk of another environmental catastrophe to help Alberta get richer? What’s in it for us? (Actually, what’s in it of for them is added prosperity for all of Canada, but that has been lost in the wash.)

There are other factors. Many, if not all, the First Nations communities whose land could be impacted by the new line also oppose it. That and something else are severely constraining BC’s serving premier, John Horgan. His government survives with support from the Green Party. The moment he showed any flexibility on Trans Mountain his political goose would be cooked.

A bit like Brexit in Britain, the pipeline project is about the only political topic folk here in Alberta at least want to talk about. And, boy, do they get hot under the collar. Tony, an estate agent in Calgary, is simply enraged, accusing BC of pilfering the pockets of every Albertan. Gary, a prairie farmer, says the whole thing is driving him just “nuts”. If it isn’t Alberta’s oil that flows onto world markets, it will be someone else’s, he reasons. What would be the sense in that? (And how did I get to visit and write about this anyway? By jet-fuel guzzling plane, no doubt.)

(Reuters (Reuters)

Here they view those opposing the pipeline on the other side of the mountain range as rank hypocrites. They were quite happy, for instance, recently to approve construction of a shorter pipeline across delicate wetlands to bring jet fuel shipped from Asia to Vancouver’s international airport. They also suggest that BC has fallen under the spell of gangs of professional environmental protestors and agitators, if they haven’t actually joined them on the streets.

Alberta’s premier, Rachel Notley, is a personal friend of Horgan. They are both from the left-of-centre New Democratic Party. But this feud is getting serious. First she briefly banned the import of BC wine into Alberta. Last week, she took a far more drastic step, signing a new law called the Preserving Canada’s Economic Prosperity Act which gives her the power to shut down all existing energy exports from Alberta to British Columbia should she choose to.

The impact on BC, if it still refused to surrender and accept the pipeline, could be severe. Prices at the pumps would instantly spike and damage would soon filter through its entire economy. Isn’t this what Russia did to Ukraine, shutting down its natural gas pipelines to the west?

“Albertans, British Columbians and all Canadians should understand that if the path forward for the pipeline through BC is not settled soon, I’m ready and prepared to turn off the taps,” Motley warned bluntly. “With pipeline capacity stretched to the limit, Albertans have the right to choose how our energy is shipped.” What she is attempting here, of course, is blackmail.

Many Albertans would like a future less dependent on fossil fuels. But Canada has not reached that future yet and not building this pipeline is not going to bring it any closer. That is the view also held by Justin Trudeau, the country’s prime minister. He wants it to happen and last week he tried to reassure Kinder Morgan with promises of federal help in the event the impasse starts to hurt its bottom line. But in the meantime he faces the real possibility of a serious trade war breaking out, not between Canada and a foreign partner but between members of his own federation.