The Canadian Press
Joan Bryden
KANANASKIS, Alta.—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his 30 ministers holed up at a luxury mountain resort in Alberta yesterday to discuss the devastation wrought by plunging oil prices on the province’s economy.
Premier Rachel Notley met privately with Trudeau, then gave a detailed presentation to about half the cabinet in the evening, at which she drove home the message that a healthy Alberta economy is a necessary precondition for robust national economic growth.
She spoke of the desperate need for a pipeline to get the province’s oilsands crude to tidewater and for a quick start to job-creating infrastructure projects.
Notley also reiterated her objections to a recent boost in Employment Insurance benefits for hard-hit regions of the country, which wound up excluding Edmonton.
“I think that the interests of Alberta were well-served today,” Notley said following her presentation.
“I made the case again that Alberta’s economic health really is linked to Canada’s economic health.”
However, she got no specific promises on any of the issues she raised.
And not all cabinet ministers attended the detailed session with Notley, choosing instead to attend other presentations being given at the same time or to flit from one to another.
Among those who didn’t plan to attend Notley’s presentation was Finance minister Bill Morneau, whose maiden budget last month introduced the EI changes and promised billions in infrastructure funding.
“I’m going to another presentation right now. I think hers is over-subscribed,” Morneau told reporters during a brief break.
Nevertheless, he said the mountain location of the three-day retreat was “very much on purpose because we wanted to be here in Alberta . . . to understand better the challenges.”
Morneau defended the formula by which the federal government calculated which regions of the country are entitled to beefed up EI benefits, but appeared to leave the door open a crack to modifying it.
“That’s where we’re at right now and I appreciate that Premier Notley, you know, is anxious to make sure that people across the province are well-served,” he remarked.
On pipelines, Natural Resources minister Jim Carr said the federal government understands “how important the energy sector is for Canada and for Alberta; we know that the sector is going through a very difficult time at the moment.”
But he offered no new hope for speedy approval of any of the three proposed pipelines that currently are mired in the environmental review process and facing stiff uphill battles with public opinion.
“We want to move our natural resources to tidewater sustainably, and we’ve announced a set of principles that will guide us along that way,” Carr noted.
Notley said she agrees with the approach the Liberal federal government is taking, which she argued is more likely to produce results eventually than the pipeline cheerleader approach taken by the previous Conservative governments in Ottawa and Edmonton.
“You know, two Conservative governments—both at a federal level and at a provincial level—came together to fail on the issue of getting a pipeline approved because they paired that with a refusal to deal with climate change and a refusal to deal with the fact that people distrusted the process that was in place,” she argued.
Like Trudeau, she noted Canadians are more likely to support a pipeline if they have faith in a beefed-up environmental review process.
