This is a guest post by Mitchell Beer. It originally appeared on GreenPAC.

The pitched media battle between Mayors Denis Coderre of Montreal and Naheed Nenshi of Calgary shows just how quickly the political debate can get nasty when the things that matter most to us are at stake.

It also points to what’s been missing so far in a suddenly much more open federal conversation on Canada’s energy choices and climate responsibilities.

The firestorm began last Thursday when Coderre, representing the 82 municipalities of the Montreal Metropolitan Community, came out against TransCanada Corporation’s controversial Energy East project. After careful study, he said, the MMC determined that the 1.1-million-barrel-per-day pipeline would deliver $2 million per year in economic gain to the Montreal region, against $1 to $10 billion in clean-up costs in the event of a major diluted bitumen spill.

‘Call a Spade a Spade. It’s a Bad Project.’

“An oil spill can’t just be turned off, and it would affect multiple waterways, including water basins and groundwater — you have to take all of this into consideration,” Coderre said. “Call a spade a spade: It’s a bad project.”

While groups like Montreal’s Équiterre applauded the MMC’s “courageous decision,” Nenshi went on the offensive — alongside premiers Rachel Notley of Alberta, Brian Gallant of New Brunswick and Brad Wall of Saskatchewan, Alberta opposition leader Brian Jean and federal opposition leader Rona Ambrose.

“The prime minister said he didn’t like Northern Gateway, he has said he did like Keystone,” Nenshi told CBC Radio’s The House Saturday morning. “I think it’s time for him to say he does like Trans Mountain and he does like Energy East.”

Nenshi went so far as to frame Energy East as a nation-building project, while comedian Rick Mercer scolded Coderre (and, presumably, the 299 other Quebec mayors who oppose the project) for thinking locally, rather than nationally. Veteran Quebec affairs correspondent Chantal Hébert was quick with her retort: “What has not panned out is their Pollyannaish strategy of selling the plan for an oil pipeline as a nation-building project—liable to bring the country together in the way that the railroad did in the 19th century,” she wrote.

We All Want the Same Things

But if you cut through the immediate controversy, it looks like Nenshi, Coderre and most of the rest of us are looking for the same things.

We all want steady, secure, well-paid jobs for ourselves, our families and our communities.

We all want clean water, whether it flows through the Bow River or the St. Lawrence River. (And we want a stable enough climate to reduce the likelihood of the Bow River overflowing its banks.)

Most of us want climate action that aligns with the 1.5°C long-term goal for average global warming that Canada and 186 other countries adopted at the United Nations climate summit in Paris last month.

We can all get carried away by an inspiring nation-building project that brings the country together on the eve of its 150th birthday. (Admit it. You know you can.) Even if Energy East is not that project.

And we should all want to see Alberta recover quickly and well from what Notley herself described as the “boom and bust roller coaster ride” of fossil fuel development in her election night victory speech last May 5. Anyone outside the western oilpatch who’s celebrating Alberta’s pain should consider some emergency nation-building of their own.

But that doesn’t make Energy East the solution. We’ve known for years that the large majority of the world’s fossil fuels are unburnable in any reasonable climate scenario, and there’s little reason to expect the project to survive a multi-trillion-dollar carbon bubble. With oil prices expected to stay low through 2018, and competing renewable energy options becoming more affordable by the day, it’s hard to imagine why TransCanada would even want to try.

So, yes, we should all be prepared to get behind a grand nation-building project that will deliver stable, secure jobs and put Canada on a path to drastically lower carbon emissions. We could start by committing to a plan to deliver a million climate jobs (actually, a million person-years of climate employment) over the next five years by investing in energy retrofits, public renewable energy, transit and “higher-speed’ rail.

That’s the kind of nation-building that brings people, cities and regions together, rather than driving them apart.

Mitchell Beer is President of Ottawa-based Smarter Shift and curator of The Energy Mix, a thrice-weekly digest on climate, energy, and low-carbon solutions.

Photo: Clive Clamm via Flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Several prominent western Canadian politicians came out firing at Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre’s announcement yesterday that Montreal-area municipalities will oppose TransCanada’s Energy East oil pipeline project. The outraged western leaders were not exactly polite in their criticism either.

“He’s wrong on this one. There’s no better way to put it,” Calgary Naheed Nenshi told CTV’s Power Play. “The alternative is more oil by rail and people in Quebec know the dangers of oil by rail, tragically.”

“I trust Montreal area mayors will politely return their share of $10B in equalization supported by (the) west,” Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall said on Twitter.

The 82 municipalities of the Communauté Municipale de Montréal (Montreal Metropolitan Community) voted yesterday to oppose the 1.1 million barrels a day proposed pipeline going through their jurisdictions. The environment risks outweighed the meager economic benefits of the project, according to the political body representing nearly four million Quebecers.

"We are against it because it still represents significant environmental threats and too few economic benefits for greater Montreal," Coderre told reporters in a press conference yesterday.

“Call a spade a spade: It’s a bad project,” Coderre said.

Alberta’s provincial politicians also took shots at Montreal’s concerns about Energy East. Alberta’s Wildrose Leader tweeted that the Montreal-area municipalities cannot “benefit from equalization and then reject our pipelines.” The Alberta government called the announcement “both ungenerous and short-sighted.”

Earlier this month, the British Columbia government came out against Kinder Morgan Trans-Mountain pipeline project and Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan requested the regulatory review of the project be suspended. Neither announcement was met with the same outrage from politicians in the oil patch.

Some of the criticism showed a clear lack of understanding of the Energy East project by pro-pipeline politicians.

Nenshi seems to have mixed up Energy East with Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline when he tried to justify Energy East as “a pipeline that already goes to Montreal. This is a project to modernize it, to bring it up to even better standards.”

Some 3,000 kilometres of the 4,600 kilometre proposed Energy East pipeline do exist as a TransCanada natural gas line stretching from Alberta to the Ontario-Quebec provincial boundary. The remaining kilometers of pipe will be a newly constructed pipeline in Quebec and New Brunswick.

The new pipeline would be built in the northern municipalities of Montreal should the project receive regulatory approval.

Nenshi’s and other western Canadian pro-Energy East politicians’ praising the pipeline for its potential to supply eastern Canada with western Canadian oil overlooks eastern Canada’s inability to refine large amounts of oilsands (tarsands) bitumen. The three eastern refineries lack the equipment to process heavy bitumen.

As Andrea Harden-Donahue of the Council of Canadians points out in a recent article, by the time Energy East comes on line eastern Canadian refining needs will likely already be met by rail, tanker and the existing Line 9 pipeline with Atlantic Canada offshore oil, U.S. light crude as well as western Canadian crude.

“When it comes to U.S. imports, the fact is it is cheap light crude and a likely ongoing choice given refineries desire for the best bang for their buck,” Harden-Donahue writes. “This leads to the conclusion that 978,000 barrels of the 1.1 million BPD is destined for export.”

How bitumen is going to help eastern Canadian refineries has yet to be adequately explained by Energy East supporters.

Alberta and Saskatchewan politicians’ condemnation that Montreal is sucking oil and gas provinces dry through equalization payments smacks of typical ‘Quebec bashing’ seen before in Canada. It also skirts around the issue that only half of natural resources wealth is subject to the equalization system because natural resources are under provincial control.

“Despite having a higher than average ability to fund services, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland receive more in federal spending and transfer payments than they contribute,” the Mowat Centre states in a 2014 press release on Canada’s “broken system of federal redistribution.”

At the end of the day, the most diplomatic response to Coderre’s announcement from the pro-pipeline side came from Energy East’s proponent TransCanada:

“[We] will continue to listen to other elected leaders in Quebec and stakeholders across the province as we take their concerns and input seriously.”

Image Credit: City of Calgary via flickr

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.