Keystone XL: A Fiasco for Harper

For their first confrontation with the White House, Republicans, now in control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, have chosen to support the Keystone XL pipeline, which will force President Obama to block their initiative with a veto.

That will not conclude this issue, which will certainly see other twists and turns. Nevertheless, all of this is very harmful to Canada. First, it ruins relations between the two governments, and second, it leads to an unappealing de facto alliance between the Conservative government and the American Republicans.

Prime Minister Harper is responsible for this mess. Keystone XL has become a symbol for environmentalists, and for President Obama, who seeks to make his mark in the last two years of his presidency. It’s a pretty incendiary symbol in that it is based on the false premise that a pipeline generates greenhouse gases, and on the stigma of oil sands when shale oil is just as damaging.

But Prime Minister Harper should have taken these sensitivities and political constraints into account. He could find ways to make Canadian tar sands oil more acceptable to Americans, including President Obama, as well as take action to reduce its environmental footprint.

Instead, he has primarily chosen a path of stubbornness. His strategy — refusing to take environmental considerations into account, unwavering support for the oil sands, the logic of increasing production at any price, his bet that good lobbying and public relations campaigns will be sufficient to mitigate resistance — is a proven failure.

Not only has Canada become a black sheep in the world fight against greenhouse gas emissions, but Mr. Harper’s approach will eventually have a negative impact on the Canadian oil industry. You can see it in the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, as well as in the strong resistance to the oil’s arrival in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia.

If Stephen Harper, headstrong and obstinate, is unlikely to be moved by the outrage of environmentalists, he should perhaps be shaken by the positions taken by Preston Manning, the founder of the Reform Party, without whom he would not be prime minister today. Mr. Manning is now a member of the Ecofiscal Commission in Canada, an independent body that brings together economists, former state clerks, academics, and former politicians from all backgrounds to advocate for the introduction of a carbon tax. It’s like Jacques Parizeau was giving federalism one last chance.

“The ‘good idea’ the commission seeks to advance — and that I wholeheartedly support,” wrote Manning, “is that for any economic activity, especially the production of energy, we should identify its negative environmental impacts, devise measures to avoid, mitigate or adapt to those impacts, and include the costs of those measures in the price of the product. It’s the idea behind using carbon pricing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, water pricing to conserve water, garbage pricing to deal with waste, and road pricing to reduce traffic congestion.”

That will not, unfortunately, be enough to convince Mr. Harper, whose statements on the subject amount to a bunch of foolishness, notably his way of describing this fiscal tool that is the subject of a broad consensus as a “job killing carbon tax.” His way of refusing to take account of environmental considerations, in the name of economic interests, is going to backfire and harm the industry that he wants so much to help.