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On April 8, the energy company Kinder Morgan announced it was suspending plans to expand its Trans Mountain pipeline. The news should have been cause for celebration on the Canadian left. Instead, it’s only ratcheted political tensions to new heights. The pipeline was supposed to transport bitumen across 610 miles, from Alberta’s capital Edmonton to the British Columbia city of Burnaby, and has been in the works since the project was approved by the federal government in 2013. The British Columbia provincial government had other ideas, however. Under pressure from indigenous groups and the Left, its New Democratic Party (NDP) government has worked to prevent construction from being launched within the province. This is what led to the April 8 announcement, which also contained an ultimatum: either an agreement allowing the pipeline to go forward would be reached with the BC government, or the project would be abandoned. While Kinder Morgan complains it has been “unnecessarily harassed” by the BC provincial government, activists actually have indigenous groups to thank for the project’s suspension. They mounted strong protests and weathered arrests in a show of resistance that has now proved decisive. In response, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that Canada was “a country of the rule of law,” and that it was in the “national interest” to build the Trans Mountain pipeline and vowed that it would happen. However, a new story from The National Observer suggests that instead of following the rule of law, the approval process of the pipeline was rigged. But Trudeau isn’t alone in his opposition to the BC NDP. The pipeline’s boosters come from within the social-democratic party itself. For instance, Alberta’s NDP premier, Rachel Notley, has staked her 2019 reelection chances on getting the Trans Mountain expansion built. She’s threatened to throttle oil shipments to BC as punishment for its intransigence, and claimed that Alberta is willing to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline if Kinder Morgan backs out. Canada is in uncharted territory here, with one province threatening to embargo another. Adding fuel to the fire, there have been musings that Ottawa should withhold transfer payments to BC over the controversy. The NDP now has the only two provincial governments it leads at loggerheads over this issue. This threatens to deepen the crisis of social democracy in Canada.

The Canadian Context Canada is one of the few advanced economies that is a net energy exporter. Its vast natural resources drove its colonization and its economic development. The Biblical line “hewers of wood and drawers of water” was used by Canadian economist Harold Innis to describe Canada’s economic development in 1930. At times, this focus on extraction was offset by the Canadian elite’s desire for industrialization, which began as early as 1867, in part to prevent the country’s annexation by its southern neighbor. But since the early twenty-first century, as deindustrialization advanced and China’s demand for natural resources increased, the Canadian economy has reverted to its dependence on exporting “staples.” This has led to a massive increase in the influence of the oil industry in the country’s politics. Given these developments, it is hardly surprising that Canada is falling behind on meeting its carbon emission reduction goals. The Trudeau government blames this on the previous prime minister, Stephen Harper, who pulled Canada out of the Kyoto Accord. This ignores the fact that Trudeau continues to support the construction of new oil pipelines. That Trudeau’s Liberals want to have it both ways is not surprising; they have always governed that way. But the contradictions of proclaiming support for climate targets while continuing to expand fossil fuel production is going to end up haunting the NDP.