Margareta Dovgal: Liberals twisted themselves into pretzels over their own pipeline MOU

Playing politics with pipelines is a time-honored Canadian tradition. Tuesday’s events in the House of Commons offered a delightful twist on the genre. 

The Conservatives introduced a motion quoting the Liberals’ own pipeline promises laid out in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Alberta, nearly verbatim. The Liberals, true to form, killed it 196–139 with enthusiastic help from the NDP, Bloc, and Greens. 

We all knew how this would end. Opposition motions like this never pass; no government, especially not one led by Mark Carney, is going to let the opposition dictate the agenda. There’s not much use feigning outrage that the Liberals voted it down. The more entertaining angle has been watching closely as Liberal MPs twist themselves into pretzels explaining why they had to vote “no” on a motion that cheers on a project they claim to support in principle.   

Liberal MP Corey Hogan dismissed the motion as “game-playing” designed to “poke at people”. 

And he’s absolutely right to call it a “trap” for the Liberals. But traps only work when you walk into them.  

Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty deemed the motion an “immature waste of parliamentary time” and “clearly an insult towards Indigenous Peoples” because it didn’t include every clause of the original agreement. Energy Minister Tim Hodgson decried it as a “cynical ploy to divide us” that “cherry-picked” the MOU. 

Yet the prize for the most tortured metaphor goes to the prime minister himself. Defending his vote against his own pipeline promise, Carney lectured the House that “you have to eat the entire meal, not just the appetizer.” 

It’s a clever line, and it also reveals the problem. The “meal” Carney is serving is stuffed with conditions. Environmental targets or meaningful engagement with Indigenous communities aren’t unrealistic asks. A crippling industrial carbon price as a precondition might be though.  

But the prime minister has already said the quiet part out loud. 

​Speaking in the House a few weeks ago, Carney admitted that the agreement creates “necessary conditions, but not sufficient conditions,” before explicitly stating: “We believe the government of British Columbia has to agree.” 

​There is the poison pill. Handing a de facto veto to a provincial government that has spent years fighting oil infrastructure is neither constitutionally required nor politically likely. Elevating B.C.’s “agreement” to a condition, which is something the MOU text itself carefully avoids doing, means that Carney has made his own “meal” effectively inedible. 

Hodgson’s repeated emphasis that the Liberal caucus supports “the entire MOU, the entire MOU” only reinforces this theory.  

This entire episode forces us to ask whether the MOU is a real plan to build a pipeline, or just a national unity play designed to cool down the separatist temperature in Alberta. My sense is that Ottawa knew they had to throw a bone to Premier Danielle Smith because the threat of the sovereignty movement is gaining real traction. But you can’t just create the pretense of negotiation to buy time.  

With the MOU getting Smith boo’ed at her own party’s convention by the separatists, it’s debatable whether that bone was even an effective one to throw.  

There is a way. The federal government has the jurisdiction. If they really wanted to, they could just do it, provided the duty to consult with and accommodate Indigenous peoples was satisfied. Keep in mind: no reasonable interpretation equates Section 35 of the Charter to a veto.  

Instead, the MOU is baked with so many conditions that the Liberals have effectively laid the groundwork for how they’re going to fail.  

With overly-hedged, rather cryptic messaging, Liberals have themselves given considerable weight to a cynical theory, that the MOU is a stalling tactic, not a foundation to get more Canadian oil to the markets it’s needed in. Maybe Hodgson is telling the truth, and caucus is unified because the radicals are satisfied that “the entire MOU” ensures that a new oil pipeline will never reach tidewater through BC.  

So, hats off to the legislative affairs strategists in the Conservative caucus. The real test of Carney’s political power continues: can he force a caucus that prefers fantasy economics into a mold of economic literacy to deliver on the vision Canadians signed off on? Or will he be hamstrung trying to appease the radicals from within?  

Margareta Dovgal is managing director of Resource Works Society.