DEBORAH STILES • Guest Opinion
As Canada’s Ambassador to the U.S., Kirsten Hillman, observed in an interview on CBC’s The House, cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline is “obviously very disappointing for Albertans and people in Saskatchewan who are already in a difficult situation.”
It means more lost jobs — always awful news. Yet, U.S. President Joe Biden’s executive order should not be viewed as an attack on Canada, or even as an assault on good jobs; rather, Biden’s decisive action in cancelling Keystone XL means that Canada can get on with the creation of more stable jobs, through its own efforts, and get both pandemic and climate crises in hand.
While we here in Nova Scotia contend with more severe wind and weather events and the languishing of efforts to implement recommendations of the Lahey report on forest management (resulting in fewer trees with which to hold back both wind and soil erosion), our economy, even before the pandemic, was in a state of flux.
With each dying breath of the dinosaur industries of oil, gas, and coal, more and more workers from away have come back to where they wanted to be anyway: home to Nova Scotia, P.E.I., Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick. Tough times, yes; but tough times equal extra pressure to create and support truly local jobs — in renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and other sectors of the bioeconomy. To have workers live where they work — not flying across country every two or three weeks, exacerbating climate change while enduring the risks of flying during a pandemic — now, that’s economic progress.
Cancellation of this particular pipeline also means that Indigenous nations in the U.S., as well as farmer and rancher neighbours to the south, who have all opposed this pipeline, will be able to get on with their lives. True, some Indigenous Peoples as well as business interests in Canada have been hurt economically by Biden’s decision, but it is up to all Canadians, and to our governments at all levels, to replace jobs harmful to the environment with economic opportunities in renewable energy and other forward-looking sectors.
The costly fool’s errand Alberta Premier Jason Kenney went about on, with regard to spending money on Keystone, is yet another example of poor leadership. With his bullying, bluster and taxpayers’ money spent in putting into motion work toward this pipeline — even though it was clear that, even had Biden not won the U.S. election in November, local and state resistance to this particular pipeline in the U.S. was not going to go away — Kenney and those using this cancellation to promote another false narrative about how jobs are being lost are quite simply behind the times. It is disingenuous to cry foul when you know what’s coming down the pike.
Alberta crying foul — even asking the federal government to ante up to compensate for Alberta’s poor decisions — is akin to what those allying themselves with the former U.S. president have been doing to try and make political hay amid a brush fire.
As Emily Atkin of the online climate change newsletter Heated, notes, the outrage in the U.S. oil and gas sector over the cancellation of Keystone XL is “a revealing window into how Republicans and the fossil fuel industry plan to fight the new president’s climate efforts: By lying to the public about the enormous threat climate change poses to the economy and human life, while whipping them into a frenzy about the loss of temporary construction jobs.”
It’s sheer foolishness. By this logic, given the exceptional job Atlantic Canada has done in controlling the spread of COVID-19, every dollar for development ought to be landing here, rather than equitably distributed throughout the country, since we here in this region are not costing the rest of the country money by being forced to bring in the military to prevent people from dying in long-term care homes.
But as we are a Confederation, Canadians truly are all in it together. Sure, there’ve been certain historical points at which Canadian and American interests have intertwined and been brought forward, together; but there have been other points in history when it was clear Canadians needed to say “No,” or to accept a “No.”
Biden has helped Canadians to “Just say no,” as Nancy Reagan used to simplistically say (to an equally complex problem). With all due respect to our marvellous political cartoonist, Bruce MacKinnon (Jan. 22) and Margaretsville resident Paul Moase (“COUNTERPOINT: “Biden body blow”), Biden’s action in cancelling Keystone is not a fisticuff to Canada. It’s a helping hand, one to get us on with the difficult but necessary national work to create jobs in renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, green tech, and the bioeconomy.
Deborah Stiles is a former director of the Rural Research Centre, Nova Scotia Agricultural College (now Dalhousie Faculty of Agriculture).
