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By: Rick Bell
Published: April 21, 2020
They say you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth but when it comes from Justin Trudeau you look in the mouth.
We didn’t see what we wanted to see when we had a look last Friday. We didn’t get the love from the prime minister we were told we were getting.
Far from it. Like that’s never happened before.
Yes, there was dough to clean up orphan and inactive wells. We knew that.
Yes, there was coin for “primarily repayable contributions” to support further oilpatch spending to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, focusing on methane.
No, there was no hold on future carbon tax hikes and no rollback of Trudeau energy policies.
It was clear soon after Trudeau started speaking. This was no big deal. Where was the whole enchilada?
Where was the much-ballyhooed billions upon billions of an oilpatch bailout, a dollar figure equal to how much more Alberta gives to Ottawa in one year than it gets back.
What little Alberta did score was clearly chosen for a reason.
It wouldn’t anger the self-anointed defenders of a rainbows-and-unicorns vision of Mother Earth or potential Liberal voters or Quebec.
And it didn’t.
Tzeporah Berman, the ultimate warrior of Green warriors, praised Trudeau.
For Trudeau’s part, the prime minister said we’re all in this together and he is our helping hand and his Liberal government was helping millions of workers in all industries but the oilpatch faced “particular challenges.”
So in the prime minister’s words translated from French: “We thought we had to do a little bit more and that is just what we’re doing.”
No kidding. A little bit more indeed. A little bit.
The PM added how his government would “see if more needs to be done.”
Two newshounds asked him if there was more.
Oh, Trudeau talked about credit for some oilpatch outfits but it was all very pie in the sky. Lots of sky, not so much pie.
Many called it a good first step. It made them feel better. Claiming a small victory is far less soul destroying than a big defeat.
The story, of course, was no big deal down east. It’s Alberta, a very long way from where the important people live, those who tell us what Canada thinks.
Their Canada, no matter how much we play nice.
By Monday things go from bad to worse where we find out the square root of squat is not the bottom.
We see the oil price collapse and actually go below zero bucks a barrel, where somebody has to pay somebody to take oil off their hands in a crazy world where so much oil is stored up and COVID-19 wreaks its havoc on the economy as well as the health of Canadians.
On this history-making day, Premier Jason Kenney says he’s still looking for Trudeau to offer up a credit backstop of $15 billion to $30 billion so the oilpatch can find a way through 12 to 18 months of extremely low oil prices.
Kenney reminds us a dozen years ago the oilpatch helped protect Canada’s economy including saving jobs in the auto industry.
“Albertans are absolutely right to expect and to demand at least similar treatment,” says the premier, calling these times “an obvious crisis.”
Kenney says the Alberta government is in touch daily and sometimes hourly with Trudeau’s Ottawa to work out a package for Canada’s oilpatch.
He hopes for good news in the days to come.
“Canada cannot afford to risk the future of half a million jobs,” says Kenney.
On this day, we knew Shannon Stubbs, the Conservative MP from this province’s heartland, would step up to the plate.
Stubbs doesn’t take any guff from the Ottawa establishment and doesn’t quake in her cowboy boots at the thought of scrapping with the PM and his minions.
On the contrary.
Stubbs says the Liberals took their not-so-sweet time to put out their nowhere-even-close-to-enough announcement.
No meat on the bone, no details. Just the usual promise of more to come.
It’s like the old T-shirt gag.
Trudeau Promised A Bailout and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.
Stubbs is not pleased, to say the least, when commenting on what Trudeau has done so far.
“It does nothing for the big picture, nothing to help companies literally collapsing in real time.”
Then the MP hands down one hell of a prediction.
“This is carnage. If the energy sector goes down we’re all going down.”
And Trudeau at the helm. Lifeboats anyone?
rbell@postmedia.com
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