Or, more precisely, claiming to be the victim in a tussle with Ottawa.
Just about every premier of Alberta has at some point improved his standing in the public opinion polls by picking a fight with the federal government, or complaining that we were the victim in a fight with the federal government. Most famous was Peter Lougheed's battle with the Trudeau Liberals over the National Energy Program, but Alberta politicians have managed to get riled up with head-popping frequency no matter which party was in power federally. And it didn't matter if the slight against Alberta was real or imagined.
In 2004, Ralph Klein offered his famous comment - "By God, Ottawa, keep your hands off" - even though no Liberals in Ottawa had threatened to put their hands on. For an Alberta premier, the only thing better than a friend in Ontario is an enemy.
During last year's Progressive Conservative leadership race, candidate Ted Morton grumbled that Alberta's oilsands industry was under sneak attack by federal environment bureaucrats.
This year, we have Redford in power, someone who has made a point of building, not burning, bridges with Ottawa. But even Redford has discovered a way to cry foul at Ottawa and rush to Alberta's defence - this time with a twist.
She is fighting not with the federal government, but with the federal official opposition.
During the premier's dinner in Calgary on Thursday, Redford received the loudest applause of the evening by promising to protect the province's interests against Ottawa, specifically federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, who last weekend had criticized the oilsands as an economic menace to the manufacturing industry in Central Canada. Praising Alberta as a "secure, responsible and environmentally conscious supplier" of oil to the United States, Redford said of Mulcair's comments, "It's better for people to comment once they have the information than before they do."
Redford wasn't exactly declaring war on the NDP, but neither was she wasting time setting herself up as Alberta's champion. You have to wonder, though, if she's secretly pleased she has at least one foil on the political front where she gets to rattle the sabre and draw applause from an audience on the home front.
Make that two political foils. Mulcair's comments earlier this week echo those made by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty last February, when he said Alberta's oil industry is driving up the value of the Canadian dollar, which makes it more difficult for Ontario firms to sell their products in the United States.
At the time, Redford called McGuinty's argument simplistic, and western-based economists supported Redford by saying job losses in Central Canada should be blamed on an inefficient manufacturing sector in Ontario and Quebec, not the oilsands.
McGuinty has since become more diplomatic, refusing to repeat his criticism of the oilsands. Given the sad state of the Ontario economy and the size of its provincial debt, it's easy to write off McGuinty's comments as envy. Indeed, it's not difficult to poke holes in the economic arguments proffered by McGuinty and Mulcair. But their comments do betray a very real animosity toward Alberta's oilsands felt by Canadians who don't see any positive impact of the resource on their lives.
Redford is trying to counter that negative image by promoting the oilsands as an engine of national growth and by engaging premiers in a discussion of a proposed Canadian Energy Strategy. We still don't know exactly what that strategy is other than an attempt by Alberta to get other provinces onside with building more pipelines to ship bitumen from Alberta to the U.S. and Asia.
However, this debate is not just about the economy, but the environment. And that's a problem for Alberta. The province has had a woefully inadequate environmental track record that includes fast-tracking virtually every oilsands project ever conceived while sidetracking environmental monitoring.
Under Redford's leadership, the province is working with Ottawa to set up a joint monitoring program on the oilsands.
But Alberta still has a long way to go. This week, the government bragged about a new report it had commissioned from Jacobs Consultancy indicating that the life cycle of oil from the oilsands is only slightly more greenhouse-gas intensive that any other oil.
However, the Calgary-based Pembina Institute pointed out in a counter report that the Alberta government is deliberately misinterpreting the results of the report to placate oilsands critics in Europe, and that "life-cycle emissions from oilsands production are 12 to 40 per cent higher than the average for conventional crude used in Europe, with the ... average oilsands barrel being 23 per cent more intensive."
This, then, is the biggest impediment to national acceptance of the oilsands.
Alberta might be able to convince Canadians that the oilsands industry is the economic engine of the country, but we have to do more to show Canadians we are reducing the environmental cost of running that engine.
Original Article
Source: edmonton journal
Author: Graham Thomson
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