If Canadians are going to have to pay the $10 to $15-billion cost of expanding the Trans Mountain pipeline, it's important they aren't bound by side deals that are not in the public interest made by the project's former corporate owner.
In the weeks and months ahead, there will be many political casualties of the Liberal government’s crisis surrounding the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. The first of these, however, was the carefully-crafted illusion that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s (CPPIB) investment decisions are free from political influence. Over two decades, the Board had painstakingly constructed the pretence that Board decisions stood above retail politics.
The linked document, Trade Unions and Just Transition: The Search for a Transformative Politics, deals with a crucial part of the urgent global need to transition to a post-carbon energy system. Though it doesn’t come right out and say it, the text also proves that this must also be a post-capitalist social-economic system.
Thousands of fossil industry jobs in Alberta are gone forever, even if oil prices ever return to $100 per barrel, and the shift has nothing to do with the province’s never-ending quest for a pipeline to tidewater, a leading government economist admitted this week.
“I’ve learned as an economist to never say ‘Never,’ but even if it were to come back, because of the use of better technology and innovation, the energy sector will not need as many people going forward,” ATB Financial Chief Economist Todd Hirsch told CBC Radio’s Edmonton AM.
In the month of October, with almost 2,000 people working to build the Site C dam, a total of 18 apprentices were getting on-the-job trades training on the construction site of British Columbia's most expensive public-infrastructure project in history.
"That's pathetic," Premier John Horgan said in an interview.
