At least they’re finally being honest. After years — heck, decades — of pretending to engage constructively on climate issues, whether that was international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement or domestic policies like carbon pricing and carbon capture and storage projects, Canada’s oil and gas industry has dropped the veil. Any attempt to regulate or restrict their carbon emissions, no matter how small they might be or how much money they happen to be making, are apparently intolerable. 

Just ask Murray Edwards, the chairman of Canadian Natural Resources and one of the longest-standing and most influential leaders in the oilpatch. “We’re saying, if we invest in Pathways, we think that should be sufficient investment in decarbonization of the sector. And then putting an additional carbon tax on it will make the sector uncompetitive and burdened with costs that are going to reduce the ability to make further investment.” In other words, they’d like to have their cake and eat it too. 

It’s worth remembering that Canadian taxpayers would be footing most of the bill for that project in the form of tax credits worth an estimated $19 billion. That is, of course, on top of the more than $30 billion Canadians have already spent on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. You can be sure that industry will also be demanding some amount of federal taxpayer participation in any new pipeline to the West Coast. At some point, you’d think their decidedly un-capalist appetite for public subsidy and support would have some limits — or, at least, some associated shame. 

But, then, these guys — and yes, they’re still almost entirely guys — don’t “do” shame. They also don’t do learning. I think they genuinely believe that eliminating the tanker ban and Bill C-69, along with industrial carbon pricing, would........

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