But it was a visit that didn’t seem to accomplish much and left some Alberta officials scratching their heads as to why Clark bothered to come at all.
And it left Redford politely fuming over Clark’s refusal to take a position for or against the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline that would ship Alberta bitumen from Edmonton to Kitimat, B.C.
“It’s incredibly frustrating to me,” Redford said after the meeting, as she likened Clark’s equivocating on Northern Gateway to U.S. President Barack Obama delaying a decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would ship Alberta’s bitumen to the U.S. “When Obama made his comments with respect to Keystone, a Congressional leader said to me, the only thing worse than a negative decision is no decision because it creates so much uncertainty. It’s important for political leadership to set a framework for what the direction can be going forward. Some people will agree with you and some people won’t but to give some certainty around your position is important.”
Clark has studiously refused to state her position on Northern Gateway despite mounting pressure from B.C.’s New Democratic Party, which is firmly against the pipeline and is well ahead of Clark’s Liberal party in public opinion polls.
A few days ago, Clark suggested she would be clarifying her position later this week, but that promise was shrouded in a fog of semantics when she suggested she still wants the federal approval process to run its course, to “find out what the facts are about the risks and the benefits” of the pipeline.
Redford might be itching for an answer one way or the other but she apparently resisted any urge to lecture Clark, who had asked for the Thursday meeting in Edmonton as she made her way back to B.C. after an earlier unpublicized meeting in the morning with Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall.
Clark talked about issues expected to be discussed at next week’s premier’s conference in Halifax, including health care and a national energy strategy. But the issue that Clark kept coming back to, according to Redford, was Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline.
“She feels right now, I can’t put words in her mouth, a fair amount of pressure to be making comment with respect to this,” said Redford. “There have been columns in B.C. in the last couple of days about whether the government is going to take a position on Gateway and that kind of thing. So, I think that was more the context of it.”
Interestingly, Clark didn’t seem to be telegraphing that she thought Enbridge’s proposal should be scrapped. But she was concerned about the black eye Enbridge suffered last week with the release of a scathing report into the company’s “Keystone Kops” response to a massive pipeline spill in Michigan in 2010.
“A lot of what I think she wanted to chat about today was her ongoing concern as the premier of B.C. with respect to what’s going on with Enbridge and what her thinking is about that,” said Redford. “She wants to make sure that she’s holding them to some pretty strict environmental standards.” Clark focused on three issues: consultations with First Nations and making sure Enbridge had stringent protocols to protect water and land from spills.
It sounds, though, like Redford did offer some advice: “If I was in her shoes, I would be trying to set in place a set of conditions that from my perspective would allow the project to go ahead but that would work with industry, not just Enbridge but other companies that are looking at pipelines in B.C., to try to come up with a framework that makes sense to let that investment come into the province. And I think she’s sorting that out.”
But this is a one-sided review of a two-person meeting. I don’t know what Clark thought because she slipped in and out of Edmonton without making a ripple.
She was so worried about secrecy that she asked Redford’s office not to tell the media about the meeting, and when word began to leak that Clark was in the legislature, Redford’s security detail set up a ruse to keep nosy reporters off the trail, going so far as to drive a black SUV to the front steps of the legislature where it was parked with the engine running as if expecting a VIP to make a quick exit out the main door. The decoy worked. As a couple of curious photographers and reporters gathered by the front door, Clark ducked out a side door and into another black SUV.
Clark’s press secretary, Mike Morton, said the B.C. premier called for the meeting, not to reveal a position on Gateway but to talk about topics in advance of next week’s premier’s conference: “She decided she wanted a meeting with her counterparts and she felt it was best to do it face-to-face as opposed to over the phone.”
The secretive get-together came a day after Redford held her own unannounced 90-minute dinner with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty in Toronto. That too, was described as a sounding-out session ahead of the Council of the Federation meetings in Halifax from July 25-27.
Redford told reporters that she and McGuinty talked about health care fee structures, the Canadian Energy Strategy and the outlook of the economy.
“I took the opportunity to talk about a Canadian Energy Strategy and was very pleased with his response,” she said. “What I’ve always said, and what he supported, is that a Canadian Energy Strategy makes a difference with Canada’s economy, so that was nice to come to some consensus.”
But what Redford would really like is some positive consensus from her fellow premiers, especially Christy Clark, on the Northern Gateway pipeline.
Original Article
Source: edmonton journal
Author: GRAHAM THOMSON
No comments:
Post a Comment