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Originally Posted by Bownesian
I'm less encouraged.
When asked: "If the National Energy Board green-lights the Energy East pipeline, will your cabinet approve it?", he gave a word salad answer that when distilled down effectively said: maybe/maybe not.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by burn_this_city
He ran on supporting EE and TMPL, now he's waffling on both.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Peanut
And actively campaigned against Northern Gateway, the only pipeline out of the "big pipelines" group that actually has NEB approval.
The whole pipeline situation is a head scratcher. To put it mildly.
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I watched the press conference and the first question (and a few others) were on pipelines and specifically on Energy East. I didn't think he waffled at all, and didn't give a maybe/maybe not either. I'm just going to paraphrase here, but he basically told Rick Bell point blank
"we had a government who tried all kinds of things for the past decade and despite all those efforts they weren't able to build a single pipeline. My strategy is totally different but I'm confident that it will work."
He also commented about the ERB approvals and said (again paraphrasing, so don't crucify me on semantics!) " I'm not going to pre-judge ERB and their processes. I'm not going to politicize this process."
Basically the ERB is non-partisan and they have to give their approval. Its not something that can be circumvented, so we'll have to wait and see. To me that doesn't sound like waffling at all though; that's a pretty clear indication that once the approvals are there he wants it built.
And frankly, why wouldn't he? Its a pretty big feather in his cap to say during the next campaign "we got this pipeline rolling despite our predecessors not being able to do it." Politically there are a lot of reasons why the federal government should be all over this.