Last month's agreement between Ottawa and Alberta removes very few, if any, barriers to pipeline development while creating new chokepoints

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On Nov. 27 Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney smiled happily, celebrating their new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) about a possible bitumen pipeline to a West Coast port. It was mere optics. The MOU is not an agreement to build a pipeline, and its content won’t be useful for that purpose.

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The MOU contains several cleverly worded provisions that are pipeline-investment killers. The single most effective one is about the West Coast tanker ban. The MOU says that if the pipeline is ultimately approved, then an export provision will be enabled; but only “if necessary” and “through an appropriate adjustment” to the tanker ban law. Anyone spending tens of millions of dollars just to gain approval to start construction will want certainty before making any investment that it will be legal to transport the product to markets, and that enough tanker capacity will be authorized to match the pipeline’s capacity.

The MOU’s backward sequencing is clearly an investment killer. What if........

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