Face It, One More Pipeline Won’t Save Us from Trump |
As day follows night, the United States’ intervention in Venezuela triggered Canada’s favourite response to international calamity: a call for more pipelines.
Not just any pipelines, of course. “Canada must immediately approve a pipeline to the Pacific Coast,” declared federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney a few days later. He was late to the party—the demand had already been made by Alberta premier Danielle Smith and captains of the oil patch, as well as the Globe and Mail’s editorial board. “A new oil pipeline to the Pacific coast isn’t merely desirable,” opined the paper’s Sunday Editorial. “It is a national imperative.”
What these arguments prove is the vice grip pipelines have on our national imagination. They collapse a vast range of options for diversifying Canada’s economy and reducing our dependence on the US to a single question: Who else can we sell our oil to?
Worse, they buy into the false narrative peddled by the president of the United States: that Americans will have no trouble seizing and rebuilding Venezuela’s shattered oil infrastructure. The Donald Trump administration could have asked for no better spokesperson than Smith when she warned Carney that “renewed Venezuelan crude production, supported by United States investment, will ultimately increase the amount of heavy oil bound for US refineries and directly compete with Canadian production for limited refining capacity.”
History suggests otherwise. The past two times the US deposed the leader of an oil-rich nation—Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011—both went down in infamy for unleashing years of violent chaos that reduced oil production in each country. It took Iraq around seven years to restore production to pre-invasion levels, while Libya’s production still hasn’t recovered from the chaos wrought by US intervention.
Historical comparisons only go so far. But Venezuela’s current reality is even more devastating to the logic of Trump and Canadian pipeline enthusiasts alike. Unlike Iraq and Libya, whose dictators maintained........