Alberta got her cabinet minister, but the real focus will be on the new names in environment and natural resources, and how they apply the government’s ‘just transition’.
Justin Trudeau has appointed a minister for Alberta and a minister for troubled Alberta.
Randy Boissonnnault ends the fourth-largest province’s cabinet drought, which coincided with the two years that Alberta had no MP to elect Justin Trudeau.
The deputy from the Edmonton Center will be the minister of tourism, a youth portfolio within Innvoation, Science and Economic Development Canada. Every Alberta politician should be lucky enough to have regular trips to Banff and Jasper within his term of office.
But as with any modern cabinet, the selections that really matter to Alberta are the ones that govern the oil and gas sector and the carbon it emits in megatons. Enter concern. The activist Minister of the Environment literally enters. And it gives a sign that Alberta squirms.
Steven Guilbeault’s resume is quite well known in the oil-producing province: his extensive experience with the environmental group Équiterre and his campaign against pipelines and oil sands, he even reported that he lobbied within Trudeau’s cabinet last year against the condemned woman. Teck Resources bitumen mine. Just as Alberta industry was relieved when Guilbeault didn’t get his coveted Environment and Climate Change file in 2019, there is great anxiety that he got it this time.
Prime Minister Jason Kenney, whose moribund approval ratings have suggested he might use an external enemy to mobilize the Albertans against him, said Guilbeault’s activist past “suggests someone who is more of an absolutist than a pragmatist” and predicts that Ottawa may pursue a “radical agenda that will lead to mass unemployment.”
The appointment of Guilbeault by Trudeau definitely sends a signal, and perhaps anticipates this initial shock and concern from the energy sector and its political drivers. The message may be the same for the crowd gathering next week at the climate conference in Glasgow and the crowd that huddles daily for coffee in oil project trailers near Grande Prairie, Alta. This government itself wants to move faster and faster to curb emissions. Perhaps adopting a more activist bent. It’s not an inclination to get arrested for climbing the CN Tower to label Canada a climate killer, as Guilbeault himself did 20 years ago, but there is a change of direction at work here. Trudeau moved toward a more assertive approach ahead of the elections with stricter emissions targets and with electoral promises to demand more action from the oil and gas sector to reduce its overall carbon pollution rather than simply emissions per barrel as production expands.
But this is not a government that is suddenly going to do its best and abandon the federally owned Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, and the new environment minister will have to admit this point as well. For parts of the activist world where Guilbeault comes from – an American environmental activist affectionately tweeted Tuesday about the CN Tower stunt in 2001 and called the minister’s expectations sky high – the moderate and pragmatic tactic that Trudeau forces him to will be frustration.
The restraint will also come from the new Minister for Natural Resources, Jonathan Wilkinson, the Vancouver-area MP who has held the Environment post for the past two years and comes from the tech sector. Even Kenney praised him as a “bona fide partner” to Alberta’s government and industry. Ottawa and the business world increasingly see those ministries of Natural Resources and Environment as tandem files on the regulatory and climate change fronts, and with Wilkinson’s move, it further destroys the old days in which those two ministers they disagreed with each other as animators and enemy of fossil fuel development. Carbon emissions become their common enemy.
Alberta tends to be more nervous about rhetoric than actual politics; witness the long memories of a 2017 city hall comment from Trudeau that he would “remove” the oil sands, and this is where Guilbeault’s appointment can remain as incendiary as it seemed Tuesday. The environment and climate change may require the skillful contact of a diplomat with affected industry leaders, and there is little to inspire confidence on this front, both from the history of Guilbeault’s “tar sands campaign” and from his you struggle to communicate whatever bill C-10 would actually change. Expect Wilkinson and Trudeau to do a bit of cleaning up, and that Kenney is regularly summoned to thunder with big, big offense.
An important test, beyond Glasgow, will be how Wilkinson and Guilbeault handle their government’s buzzword: “just transition.” Natural Resources Canada quietly held a public consultation period this summer on this plan to support the fossil fuel sector through a decarbonized future without massive disruptions or job losses. Like the term “phase-out” that led Trudeau to so much hot water previously, a “just transition” is theoretically assumed to indicate gradual and measured change. The usual critics have overlooked any intentional nuance and forecast a quick and rugged government-ordered end to Alberta’s most vital and generationally lucrative industry. It will be largely up to Steven Guilbeault to maintain a firm and reassuring tone that this is not the case. His past does not suggest that he is perfectly prepared for this task, but it is the task that he has now.
Reference-www.macleans.ca