Saskatchewan firm's plan to export through Washington state instead of B.C. has David Eby fuming - "Premier David Eby expressed dismay on Monday that Saskatchewan-based Nutrien Ltd. has chosen Washington state over B.C. for a $1 billion potash export terminal. “I was really disappointed,” the premier told reporters when asked about Nutrien’s decision to go with Longview, Washington, on the Columbia River over Prince Rupert or Vancouver. The premier said the whole country would benefit from the investing in port expansion on the West Coast. Plus the U.S. location means that Saskatchewan potash will be hostage to the “whims” of President Donald Trump, who could impose tariffs on the exports or shut them down altogether... Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe had been in discussions with Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith about an oil pipeline through B.C. Talks from which Eby was excluded... the decision to go with Longview was not lightly taken, according to company’s chief commercial officer, Chris Reynolds. He told the Globe and Mail that Nutrien weighed 30 factors including rail rates and the cost of construction. The site in Washington “came out on top” every time. Longview was able to offer the company exclusive access to an unused berth at the Columbia River terminal, one formerly used for grain shipments. Nutrien has an established relationship in the U.S. Pacific Northwest as it already ships potash out of nearby Portland. Other factors cited by the company in making its decision were congestion and transportation bottlenecks on the Canadian side of the border. Nutrien also noted recent labour disruptions at B.C. ports. Longview, by comparison, was seen as more efficient and reliable. Transportation rates. Access to the port. Labour relations. Those are federal responsibilities... I spoke with BHP’s president of North American operations, Brandon Craig, when he visited the B.C. capital last month. He asked whether the B.C. government was serious about attracting further investment in resource development and mining... Looking back, I have to wonder if Longview would still have been Nutrien’s first choice, had the country as a whole acted sooner and with greater resolve to promote ports in B.C."
When you hate economic growth and promote policies designed to hurt it (not to mention uncertainty over Indigenous claims), then act hurt when people choose not to invest in your province. Clearly they'd never cause trouble over potash exports - only over a pipeline
Locked out of Ottawa-Alberta talks, Eby sneers from the sidelines | Vancouver Sun - "The B.C. premier has since dismissed the project. Just last week he denounced it “as a figment in the mind of a communications person in Alberta.” This week he made a prediction: “As each day passes and we’re told that it is just around the corner, it will become increasingly apparent to absolutely everybody that there is no pipeline project to speak of.” That was Tuesday. Next day the Globe and Mail headlined “Ottawa, Alberta close to deal that includes oil pipeline to B.C. coast.” Is it any wonder that the parties concluded Eby would have nothing positive to contribute to the discussions? Eby mocked the pipeline project in the CBC interview as being “advanced by a politician who frankly is in trouble at home.” Alberta’s Danielle Smith, presumably. He knows a thing or two about such rescue efforts. B.C. NDP insiders say it needed several moves before the recent party convention to elevate Eby’s prospects in the leadership vote from a feared 70 per cent to the 83 per cent outcome. One of those moves was a multi-billion-dollar sweetener to the government’s public sector wage offer. Another was an accord with coastal First Nations calling on the federal government to continue the oil tanker moratorium on B.C.’s northern coast... While Eby sees Alberta with its hand out for federal financing, he insists B.C. wants nothing more than for Ottawa to stay out of the way. “We’re not even really asking for help, we’re just asking, please stay out of the way so we can do this for Canadians,” he told the CBC host. Eby told a different story when a reporter asked recently about the federal government’s promise of a mere $150 million loan for the power line. “Your impatience with the federal government’s funding matches my own,” replied the premier."
Braid: With tanker ban on the table, it's B.C. Premier Eby's turn to gripe about Ottawa - "NDP Premier David Eby is flopping around like an angry walrus in B.C. It sure is fun to watch. Eby sounds almost like an Alberta premier during the Justin Trudeau regime, when Ottawa systematically piled up laws that stifled the province’s economy... There’s a big difference, though. They had just cause for fury. Eby does not. Bill C-69, the north coast tanker ban, the emissions cap — Trudeau’s Liberals did everything possible to phase out Alberta’s main industry. This was exactly what the coastal New Democrats wanted. They loved it all. Now, Eby furiously opposes an end to the tanker ban, or even a limited exception. He moans that his province was left out of “secret” talks among Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ottawa. He claims, incredibly, that every energy project in B.C. will collapse if the tanker ban is lifted. Eby says coastal First Nations have a $1.7-billion economy that will somehow vanish... More than a few of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s MPs see the tanker ban as sacred, including Jonathan Wilkinson, the former environment minister. That used to work. But now the game is changing... Eby has just been showered with riches from Ottawa. Yet he continues to carp. Carney’s government approved four major B.C. projects , worth roughly $100 billion. No other province got anything close. Alberta received nothing in that phase. Just days later, Eby handily survived a leadership vote at his own convention. This guy doesn’t sound grateful to Ottawa or anyone else. Eby often notes that Alberta got the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion that cost more than $30 billion in public money. He never adds that many overruns were caused by years of NDP obstruction, led by the late NDP premier John Horgan. Remember Horgan’s promise to use “every tool in the tool box” to block the pipeline? He meant it. NDP efforts to impede every step — new laws, permit denials, suspiciously lax policing of demonstrations — eventually drove proponent Kinder Morgan right out of Canada. The Trudeau Liberals, after gutlessly refusing to challenge B.C.’s opposition, had to grind their teeth and buy out Kinder Morgan. Eby was B.C.’s attorney general during much of that time. He was surely involved with the legal strategy. B.C. tried to legislate restrictions on the flow of bitumen. Both the B.C. Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional. For anyone who has followed this sorry tale, it’s downright bizarre to hear the 2025 version of David Eby trying to make Trans Mountain sound like B.C.’s great gift to Canada. The premier talks tough, even though he has only a one-seat advantage in B.C.’s deeply divided legislature."
Trouble in 'Team Canada' as B.C.'s deputy premier raises spectre of pipeline lawsuit - "Eby has said that the pipeline and the lifting of an oil-tanker ban off the B.C.'s north coast could threaten "real projects" worth of billions of dollars by eroding the "fragile consensus" among First Nations for resource projects in the northwest... B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad had quoted Moe as saying that Eby was "'not being part of Team Canada.'" "It's obvious nobody seems to want to work with this premier," Rustad said in the legislature... Eby said... "he and the leader of the Conservative party were having secret meetings with the premier of Alberta about a non-existent pipeline project that undermines support for major B.C. projects that will employ thousands of people and bring billions of dollars into this country."... Carney said on Tuesday that B.C. and First Nations would have to agree to a pipeline, although Energy Minister Tim Hodgson's office told The Canadian Press that the government wouldn't give B.C. a veto over such a project."
Indigenous figures sabotaging the economy won't stop them demanding more money, so it's a one-two punch
Majority of Canadians — including B.C. residents — support Alberta’s pipeline push, poll finds - "Richard Masson, executive fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy and former CEO of the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, said the poll may reflect how Canadians are feeling since President Donald Trump rocked Canada’s relationship with the U.S. “People are starting to say we need to be able to take care of ourselves and we need to do the things that we can do within our country to manage our relationships with the rest of the world,” he said. “And selling products that we can produce is a part of that.” In a 2021 Angus Reid poll, 63 per cent of Canadians said environmental protection should be prioritized over economic growth. Now, the recent poll shows 57 per cent of Canadians say economic growth is the more important factor... Nearly half of Canadians either want the federal government’s oil tanker ban repealed (23 per cent) or excused for the northern B.C. pipeline project (26 per cent). Nearly 30 per cent of Canadians want to keep the tanker ban in place. In B.C, 44 per cent lean towards opening the province’s northern coast to tanker traffic either entirely or at least for this project."
Unpopular policies are only evidence of oligarchy if they hurt the left wing agenda
Martyupnorth®- Unacceptable Fact Checker on X - "Former B.C. Premier, Christie Clark, drops a huge truth bomb.. "The Americans are moving all of this heavy oil from Alaska right down the same route at 12.1 nautical miles offshore in international waters. All kinds of oil is moving along that coast all the time every day and week. So for Canada to have a tanker ban that only affects Canada, and only constrains the Canadian economy while the American economy thrives is ridiculous" We just love shooting ourselves in the foot in this country."
Smith says future of industrial carbon tax should be at level 'industry can afford' - "“I think we’d have to get approval from the major projects office to get a private sector proponent,” Smith said. “So we’re prepared to take it through the first couple of stages. Because, let’s face it, our industry has been bitten before,” adding she believes any proponent needs a high level of approval certainty. B.C. Premier David Eby has slammed the continued lack of a pipeline proponent when it comes to the federal backing of the project, saying it risks serving as a “distraction” from focusing on other major infrastructure projects that currently have private sector support and financing. “There is not one private company that has stepped up to say, if you build it, we’ll buy it. If the approvals are in place, we’ll build it. Not one,” Eby said on Thursday."
'Tremendously risky': Alberta's pipeline pact with Ottawa no guarantee a company will build it, analysts say - "Companies like Enbridge Inc., South Bow Corp. and TC Energy Corp. are prioritizing quick, low-risk projects or expansions of existing assets that deliver reliable returns, MacNeil said. “If I’m an Enbridge, why would I stop doing that to take on a long, high-regulatory-risk build? What’s in it for the pipeline company?”... despite broad enthusiasm in the oilpatch at the idea, experts who analyze capital flows in the sector warn that it may still be unlikely a private-sector proponent steps forward. Memories are still fresh and debt is still lingering from the troubled Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, whose price tag exploded from $7.4 billion to more than $34 billion. Kinder Morgan Inc.’s struggles with the B.C. government and local authorities during construction of TMX — which ultimately led the U.S. pipeline giant to sell the project to Ottawa in 2018 — remains a cautionary tale, Randy Ollenberger, managing director of oil and gas equity research for BMO Capital Markets, said... many of the same analysts and investors argue the underlying economics remain strong for a new export pipeline linking growing production in Western Canada to Asian markets — with some arguing that investor reluctance stems from risk, not from lack of demand"
Left wing logic: sabotage the economy with regulation and lawsuits, then proclaim that since the private sector is not stepping forward, there's no point trying to do anything. Of course, if Alberta goes through the US instead, they'll be denounced as "traitors"
Gary Mar: Build a safe B.C. tanker route instead of a ban - "For Eby, a key point will be the 2019 Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which prohibits large crude oil carriers along the northern coast of British Columbia. The original intention of the Act may have been ecological protection but the effect has been to shut the door on opportunity before it ever had the chance to open... The idea of oil tankers as looming environmental threats is stuck in the era of Sony Walkmans and VHS tapes. The facts tell a different story. Modern tankers are double hulled, sharply reducing spill risk. Navigation systems today are far more advanced than anything available in the 1980s. International safety rules are strict and enforceable. Canada requires ships to be guided by licensed marine pilots and has among the highest safety standards anywhere. And since double hulls became mandatory, global spills from tankers have fallen by more than 90 per cent. Most importantly, the northern British Columbia route has never had tanker traffic, meaning Canada could design the safest, most environmentally protected shipping corridor in the world, built from the ground up. If Norway can move tankers safely through fjords, if Japan can operate in some of the busiest waterways on Earth, if Alaska balances ecological protection with responsible shipping and if Eastern Canadian ports manage tankers every day, then Canada’s West Coast, with its governance standards, technical capacity and Indigenous partnership potential, can certainly do so... None of Canada’s ports rank among the world’s 50 busiest, even though more than 80 per cent of global trade moves by sea. For a trading nation, that is not simply a statistic, it is a warning"
Of course, environmental concerns are just an excuse. The people who don't want tankers (minus the indigenous people after they have been bribed) just hate fossil fuels
Left wingers keep claiming there's no point developing fossil fuels because demand will peak in 2030, but not only has the IEA changed that forecast, they pretend not to remember all the previous predictions of peak oil and similar fantasy
B.C. premier introduces new economic plan, asks Ottawa to be 'relentless and remorseless' in pursuing growth - "Eby said he told fellow premiers and Prime Minister Mark Carney in a conference call Monday that Ottawa needs to be "relentless and remorseless" in pushing economic growth to deliver prosperity for the country."
Meme - Tony Alta.: "Hear me out @ABDanielleSmith. It's an oil pipeline - but we tell Eby it's for fentanyl to get it approved."
Potash mine was openly seeking a port, so why was B.C. in the dark? | Vancouver Sun - "“Premier David Eby is blaming everyone but himself for Nutrien building its new port facility in the U.S. not Vancouver,” wrote Moe on his X account on Saturday. He linked to an interview he gave on Regina radio station CJME. “When someone makes a decision not to invest in your area, you should look in the mirror, not blame others,” Moe told host Evan Bray. “He (Eby) feels like he can pick and choose which projects are going to land in Canadian West Coast ports, and that just simply isn’t the way. And so Nutrien has made the decision that they have made.”... Eby’s hostility to the oil pipeline was “in no way positive for an investment like this to land.” As for Eby’s assertion that he had “no idea” Nutrien was looking at West Coast sites for potash exports, the company announced its intentions in a news release six months ago."
Potash mine was openly seeking a port, so why was Eby government in the dark? : r/ilovebc - "He was not in the dark, he just did not care enough to worry about it and now it has gone south."
"He has a reputation for being extremely difficult and demanding. His primary skillset was developed from the protest techniques of the academic progressive movement. In the real world, those skill sets are detrimental to honest engagement and everyone outside of that academic progressive mindset group, knows it, so they avoid him. The potash deal and the pipeline deal are the obvious ones, but there are many more lost opportunities created by him."
"Easy answer No one trusts Eby. Everyone knows if there is not a huge payout to the natives he will not aprrove any project"
Jasmin Laine 🇨🇦 on X - "For years, Canada has lectured America on values and climate and “shared priorities” while our own industries collapse, our energy sector gets strangled, and our debt explodes. You can’t tell America how to run its economy when you can’t manage your own. So when Ontario ran that Reagan ad, it hit a nerve. Not because it was wrong, but because it exposed how weak Canada’s position has become. Trump—as usual—seized the moment to reassert dominance and to make it clear: in this relationship, Canada talks, but America decides. Whether you think his reaction was fair or not, it signals something deeper…that Canada’s “moral authority” no longer carries any weight. Our leaders still act like values are currency in diplomacy, but values without power are just noise. That’s exactly how we’re being treated right now. The good news? If the government uses this as a wake-up call to repeal the laws and policies that made us this vulnerable in the first place, the future could still be very bright. But every second we spend clinging to the same failing status quo, failing red tape that’s driving investment and the private sector to become obsolete in this country, is another reminder to the world that their money is not wanted or valued in Canada. That’s a dangerous game and it’s nobody else’s future but our own on the line. Ideology or prosperity. You don’t get to have both. Pick one."
Porn no longer subject to Canadian content quotas, says CRTC - "Under the CRTC’s definition of the term, it’s not enough to have a Canadian performer or a Canadian setting. Rather, it’s determined via an elaborate “points” system... In extreme cases, this means that a video of a Canadian couple having sex in Canada and directed by another Canadian would not qualify as Canadian content if only 74 per cent of the financing was provably Canadian. In 2014, a trio of Canadian pornography channels, including the gay-centred Maleflixxx, came close to losing their broadcast licence over claims that there simply wasn’t enough Canadian pornography to fill their schedule. With the channels broadcasting 24 hours per day, the CRTC required them to ensure that at least 8.5 hours of that was Canadian erotica... it did quote at length the change’s most vocal critic: Canadian adult filmmaker Kate Sinclaire, whose Ciné Sinclaire content is produced in Winnipeg. Sinclaire told the commission that “exempting adult programming from Canadian designation will harm creative workers, harm film training, harm creativity, harm public opinion of sex workers, help monopolies, and open the Commission up to jurisdictional and Charter-based legal challenges.” The decision to exempt adult programming from CanCon quotas comes just as the CRTC is finalizing the terms of how it will impose new government controls across large swaths of the Canadian internet... The Online Streaming Act could have imposed not only quotas on the Canadian content of adult websites, but subjected them to other CRTC mandates such as closed captioning, use of Indigenous languages and quotas on the ethnic representations of performers."
You can’t build a nation by targeting favoured industries - "Today’s Liberals are not the first federal government to try to nation-build. In the weeks before the September 1984 federal election, deputy minister of finance Marshall Cohen prepared policies the new government could use, whichever party it might be, to improve Canada’s poor economic performance, including its slowly growing productivity. It was a much different approach than we see in the 2025 budget, in which nation-building will be directed by the government rather than the market. Which approach best serves economic growth? Cohen’s platform included corporate tax reform that reduced rates and broadened the tax base by trimming exemptions and deductions. As finance minister Michael Wilson phrased it in his 1985 budget, which enacted many of Cohen’s suggestions: “The proposals advanced for discussion are not designed to increase revenues from corporations, but rather to raise the same tax funds in a simpler manner while reducing government intervention in market decisions and narrowing differences in tax burden across industrial sectors and types of investment.“ Under the government of Pierre Trudeau, the corporate tax favoured manufacturing and processing, in part to offset a manufacturers’ sales tax that hurt the industry’s competitiveness... The Trudeau II and Carney governments have continued to favour manufacturing, as well as clean energy and critical mining. In 2018, the Liberals brought in accelerated depreciation for clean energy investments and manufacturing and computer equipment. And they returned to differential sectoral taxation, taxing financial firms at 18 per cent and clean energy at 7.5, instead of the general federal rate of 15 per cent. This latest budget heightens the preferences for manufacturing and processing. The 2018 accelerated depreciation package returns, while a “productivity super-deduction” allows the sector to expense structures as well as equipment — though both preferences phase out by 2034. The effect is to create an even greater advantage for central Canadian manufacturing... Taking account of the budget changes and including provincial corporate taxes, manufacturing companies are taxed at the rate of minus 2.2 per cent. A negative tax rate may seem strange but simply means companies are effectively subsidized on their marginal investments. Other industries are taxed much more heavily, however. For example, the METR for Alberta’s oil and gas industry is 29.5 per cent and for its service industries, above 20 per cent. Across all industries, the METR is 15.8 per cent, rising to 21 per cent by 2034 when investment preferences are phased out. Effective tax rates don’t just affect tax competitiveness. They also distort the allocation of resources, reducing productivity as businesses are induced to invest in too many low-return projects. So, has accelerated tax depreciation been a boon to investment? Not at all. As the C. D. Howe Institute has shown, business investment has declined over the past 10 years. Investment in machinery and equipment, which benefited most from the 2018 tax preferences, has fallen by 10 percentage points. True, depreciation incentives may have kept investment from falling even further. But other factors are preventing them from causing actual investment gains. Those factors are not hard to guess: regulations, carbon policies and the Trump tax reform (which permanently cut the U.S. corporate tax rate from 39 to 24 per cent, including state tax rates). If companies aren’t investing much in Canada, the tax savings from accelerated depreciation are slight and mainly benefit marginally profitable investments. By contrast, reductions in corporate tax rates would apply to all industries and provide greater benefits to profitable investments. Rate reductions in this country did boost investment in the century’s first decade, while in the U.S. they have supported stronger investment performance than here or in the EU since 2018. Have manufacturing tax incentives worked over the decades? In this country, manufacturing value-added fell from 17 per cent of GDP in 2000 to nine per cent in 2021. Manufacturing employment is down from 20 per cent of total employment in 1972 to nine per cent in 2022. Other industrialized economies have experienced similar trends as manufacturing has shifted to low-wage countries, including China. Instead, their growth has taken place in the service sector. Marshall Cohen and Michael Wilson had it right. Targeted tax incentives won’t build Canada. What will is improving productivity by getting the government out of the market’s way. Don’t expect a big investment boost from the budget’s tax measures."
Clearly, we need even more regulation to fix this
This doesn't stop environmentalists claiming that oil and gas is "subsidized" when it really is hit harder than other industries
Thread by @ExnerPirot on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "If you want to understand why Canada's west coast ports have become uncompetitive, read and weep the decision statement by then-Minister Guilbeault that approved the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 with *370* conditions after a 10 year review assessment process.
iaac-aeic.gc.ca/050/documents/…
Expansion of Canada's most important port subject to 54 pages of environmental hoops. Don't tell me this was a judicious amount. Don't argue that it wasn't excessive."
Peter McCaffrey on X - "In Canada, to export products, you need 10 years of applications and reviews, after which you may or may not get approval (depending on how a politician is feeling) and even if you do, it will be conditional. In the US, you can just start shipping today. Which would you choose?"
Kirk Lubimov on X - "I don't understand how our politicians have such disconnect between what could be and results. Minister of Finance François-Philippe Champagne: "Bragging, Canada was the first country in the world to have an AI national strategy and Canada was the first country to have a Quantum national strategy." And yet we are not in the top 10 in either field, with single American companies have more capital invested than our whole sector worth, and some of the leading companies we did have left for the US. Bureaucrats need to understand that what requires to develop a PowerPoint presentation and industries are very different."
Left wingers always conflate output and outcomes. Which is one reason why their solution is always to spend more money
Dr. Leslyn Lewis on X - "The Canada Infrastructure Bank spent only $4 million on actual projects last year, yet paid $38 million in salaries and almost $9 million in bonuses. Meanwhile, they project $204 million in credit losses. That's almost a quarter billion tax dollars lost. The CIB's own numbers show that for every dollar taxpayers put in, they get about a penny of value back. Despite these facts, the Liberals are pouring another $10 billion into their losing bank. This government shows how out-of-touch it is, tossing billions into failing programs like it's pocket change, while hard-working Canadians line up at food banks just to afford the basics."
Clearly, they need to spend even more money
