There’s no punch to Trudeau’s pipeline pledge. He needs to put the gloves on – by Claudia Cattaneo (Financial Post – February 2, 2018)

http://business.financialpost.com/

If Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was serious about supporting the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, he’d act with the urgency Canada’s pipeline crisis deserves, not parrot promises no one believes he will keep.

During a stop in Edmonton Thursday, amid rising tensions between Alberta and British Columbia over the long-delayed project, Trudeau said the $7.4 billion expansion would get built and that the federal government would stand by its decision to approve it.

“It’s important to get our oil resources to markets other than the United States for the Alberta economy, for the Canadian economy to continue to grow and we need to do that safely,” the Prime Minister said on an Edmonton radio station.

Here’s the problem: That promise has no credibility because there have been zero consequences for undermining it, as B.C.’s NDP/Green government keeps doing. The province’s most provocative move came this week when it announced a plan to restrict transportation of bitumen until there are further studies on its behaviour in a spill, effectively giving itself power over the expansion — even if it has no jurisdiction and it’s been federally approved.

Here’s the other problem: There is no deadline to keep that promise, and the project could run out of money before Trudeau delivers.

For the rest of this article: http://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/theres-no-punch-to-trudeaus-pipeline-pledge-he-needs-to-put-the-gloves-on