Energy Corridor Op-Ed

The trans Canada energy corridor we need to build

Survey data shows half of all Canadians support the Trans Mountain pipeline. Canadians instinctively grasp the need and the wisdom of linking what powers our economy, as well as what it produces.

The first corridor across Canada was the Canadian Pacific Railway, to move people. Over the decades, the railway was augmented by roads. Long-haul people movement has mostly gravitated to the air; short-distance travel to the roads. Railways today mostly move freight and natural resources east-west, linking producers and consumers.

After moving people, freight, agricultural products, wood and minerals, comes energy: overwhelmingly oil, gas and electricity. These strategic Canadian resources originate far from where they are consumed and lack a Canadian east-west corridor.

It makes little sense to burn oil (in locomotives) to move oil from Alberta and Saskatchewan producers, to western shipping ports and eastern refineries, where it is converted to usable products. The least-risky, and lowest-cost way to move the oil and gas Canadians will produce, consume, and need for generations is through a dedicated pipeline. Canada needs that ‘energy railway’ to ship Canadian oil and gas to Pacific markets and expand existing pipeline capacity to central Canada markets.

Long-term, sustainable economic development means not the reduction of carbon emissions to zero, but to carbon emissions below the ability of the surrounding environment to rapidly absorb them.

Urban transit’s steady shift from oil to other fuels, such as electricity, natural gas, and hydrogen won’t displace oil, nor should it. Oil will power inter-regional and interprovincial transit and shipping, aircraft, heavy machinery, commercial, industrial and construction equipment. Oil will still be used for plastics, lubricants and other applications. Natural gas will heat existing homes for generations.

To replace oil, urban transportation and other applications will shift to electricity. Nearly 85 percent of Ontario’s electricity comes from Candu nuclear reactors and hydroelectric dams, mostly generated far from where it is consumed. Saskatchewan, Alberta and Nova Scotia will shift their electricity generation fuel from coal to renewables, and possibly nuclear. The pan-Canadian challenge lies in sharing power generation capacity for its efficient use, and not ‘stranding’ electricity because it can’t be transmitted to where it is needed.

Few Canadians realize there is no high-capacity electricity corridor to transmit electricity between western and eastern Canada through Canadian territory. A utility executive once summed up the Manitoba-to-Ontario electricity transmission capacity issue to me as “trying to power your house by sending electricity through a piano wire.” Manitoba has an electricity capacity surplus. Getting Manitoba power to southern Ontario, mostly for summer peak needs, means re-routing electricity south of the Great Lakes, through the USA, before connecting back into the Ontario power grid.

We need to send oil and gas back and forth between eastern and western Canada and transmit electricity in both directions.

Internal politics was a factor in building the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 19th century. Post-Confederation in the 1860s and 1870s, the Government of Canada saw a victorious Union army that was the equal of any European army of its day move west across the Mississippi River to knit together the east and west coasts of the United States across the prairies. What, they wondered in Ottawa, was to stop the U.S. Army from turning north and taking what is now western Canada?

America was exhausted, physically and financially, by the Civil War of 1861 to 1865. A third war with Britain within a century wasn’t a risk that the U.S. Congress of that day would entertain or could afford. But fear of that potential invasion was one of the forces that spurred Canada to draw people to the west and stitch the new country together with an iron road.

Canada’s indigenous nations need a 21st century energy corridor to broaden their economic engagement with Canada and the provinces. Public ownership of the Trans Mountain pipeline means Canadian federal and provincial governments can do with oil, gas and electricity what Canadians did with people, freight, agricultural products and natural resources. A trans-Canada energy corridor is a national and not a regional priority, as strategic to Canada’s long-term well-being in the 21st century as a transcontinental railway was in the 19th.

Bill 5

Province rams election bill through

One level of government messing around in another level of government’s jurisdiction and operations almost always ends badly. Nonetheless, Ontario has chosen this path to force its Bill 5 through the Legislature. The bill’s two operative parts:

• Cancels region-wide elections for the influential post of Chair of Peel Region. The same cancellation affects York, Niagara and Muskoka regions;
• Imposes a 25-member city council on the City of Toronto, negating a thorough process that chose a 47-ward system for that city.

Bill 5 was time-allocated to truncate debate in the Legislature. It was not referred to a Legislative standing committee to hear outside output. No amendments were sought or were accepted. The government did not campaign on the bill, and its introduction came halfway through the municipal election period.

From time to time, the Province does step into matters of local government. Most recently in Peel Region, it happened when the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board was manifestly unable to resolve serious deficiencies. After months of effort to work with the Board and its trustees, Ontario sent in a supervisor to head the Board. Within a bit more than a year, the Board had been handed back to its trustees for governance. When the Province has historically stepped into local governance, it has been for a strong reason, and to fix something that had visibly gone wrong, and then only when no other option would work.

Challenge

A federal or provincial Bill becomes law once it has cleared third reading. Bill 5 has passed at third reading. After this, the Governor General (for federal bills) or Lieutenant Governor (provincial bills) must ‘proclaim’ the Bill in the name of the Queen. At this point, the bill is law.

What has never been made clear, however, is how the bill itself will work. This ‘nitty-gritty’ detail comes in the form of regulations which specify how the bill’s provisions will work. What are the regulations that govern Bill 5? Not published as of August 14.

Cities are ‘creatures of the Province.’ This means that the legal basis on which cities operate is dictated by provincial legislation, mostly the Ontario Municipal Act and the Ontario Municipal Elections Act. The City of Toronto has its own specific act: the City of Toronto Act. It is sensible for Ontario’s 400 + municipalities to operate on a common framework, and for each municipality to choose its council in a manner compatible to other provincial towns and cities.

Canadian courts are properly cautious about a challenge to a bill passed (regardless of what you think of the government or its process) by a provincial legislature or by our federal Parliament. As such, the threshold for a court to strike down legislation is a steep one.

But is it possible?

The City of Toronto is considering a challenge. The candidates for the position of Chair in the four affected regions lack the financial resources to do so. Here are some considerations the courts may be asked to weigh:

• Consent of the Governed: Those affected by laws are expected to have a say in what those laws are, and how they work. The Premier never mentioned the measures in Bill 5 while seeking his party’s leadership. The measures in Bill 5 were never mentioned by the government in its election. Affecting municipal elections was not part of the government’s Throne Speech (its legislative agenda). No opportunity to offer input at committee was available. The affected parties were not merely unsupportive, but solidly opposed to the proposals in Bill 5. Will the courts accept an argument that Bill 5 does not have the ‘Consent of the Governed?’
• Arbitrariness: Nowhere else in Canada are municipal ward (or provincial riding) boundaries drawn on the same population basis as federal ridings. Were such a looney idea widespread, the Atlantic provinces would each have about two dozen provincial representatives. Halifax would have a mayor and four city councillors. Montreal, with its urban community of nearly two dozen cities and 1.75 million people, would be governed by a mayor and about 18 councillors. The population size of federal ridings is a one-size that may fit the federal government, but is impractical at every other level. Cities themselves, and not their upper-tier governments, need to be able to choose how many people it takes to operate as effective and responsive organizational entities;
• Unworkability: May a government use its legally-elected majority to redefine how an election proceeds when it is half over, and do so by means unspecified in the legislation? How do candidates switch wards (in Toronto), or wind up campaigns already well underway? How are expenses reconciled and reimbursed?
• Outside Provincial scope: The Province was not asked by any city to undertake this reorganization initiative. Ontario (and the other provinces) may properly undertake to ensure that municipalities function, and elect their representatives, according to the accepted terms of a level playing field. But the Province is indisputably interfering in an independent level of government’s functioning, and doing so in a manner that will cause maximum confusion, and very possibly, injustice.

Perhaps there are other legal considerations that Toronto – or other plaintiffs – may user to challenge the Province.

Post-legislation precedent

The precedent created by Bill 5 would allow, for example, the Province to declare that Mississauga would, after 2022, be governed by a mayor and six councillors; Brampton by a mayor and five councillors; and Caledon by a mayor and one councillor. The Province could, as the original author of the various regional acts, arbitrarily dissolve entire regions without consultation, and create megacities modelled on federal riding boundaries. That, in fact, was actually done by the Harris government in the late 1990s. When federal riding boundaries change in the future, would this then cascade into changes in municipal boundaries?

By cancelling the election of the chairs of four Ontario regions (Peel, York, Niagara and Muskoka) while allowing regional chair elections in other regions (Halton, and others), is the Province saying that it alone reserves the right to change the terms of those regional elections as well, or simply to take upon itself the power to appoint all regional chairs? The various acts governing cities and the regions don’t envision this possibility, but don’t preclude or forbid it either.

Bill 5 is both bad legislation, and dangerous legislation.

New web site

Moving on with life

Merlin and I have been inseparable since Merlin came home in February of 2016.

My former MPP Constituency Office in Meadowvale closed in late June of 2018. We have returned the keys to our landlord. The Legislature has taken back its property. If you are looking at this site to reach the new Member of Provincial Parliament for Mississauga-Streetsville, the Constituency Office address and telephone number may have changed.

My former staff and I have, for the past 15 years, enjoyed the privilege and responsibility of serving our neighbours in Lisgar, Meadowvale and Streetsville. Life continues. We thank the many friends we made during our years of service for their contributions to making our northwest corner of Mississauga a better and stronger community.

I listened to suggestions, and am considering some options during a short breather after the hectic life I lead as the local Member of Provincial Parliament for Lisgar, Meadowvale and Streetsville.

Please do not send e-mail to our former Constituency Office e-mail addresses any longer. My former MPP e-mail address no longer works. I welcome your e-mails and letters. To get the postal address for personal mail to Bob Delaney, please request Bob’s postal address at the e-mail address below.

You can still reach former MPP Bob Delaney by e-mail at mailbox@bobdelaney.com.