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Originally Posted by Torture
Exactly. My wife works at the Canada Energy Regulator (Formerly the National Energy Board) and they all knew at the time that Harper trying to ram them through was going to wind up in court challenges and delays.
Those court challenges came, the pipeline companies/NEB lost, and Trudeau increased regulations to increase the legal certainty that if the CER/NEB passed something that it would actually get through.
I am not arguing that Trudeau or the overhaul of the regulations is perfect, but there's more to the story about why we can't build pipelines/LNG export/etc. That certainty in the regulatory environment that ThePrince is looking for is exactly what the Libs were aiming for by increasing the bar.
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The court challenges and delays were going to happen no matter what. The BC government kept challenging the project in court, when they were fully aware that pipeline projects crossing provincial boundaries were the federal government's jurisdiction. They kept wasting taxpayer money on challenges they knew they would lose, hoping that Kinder Morgan would back out of the project.
And all the while the federal government knew they could put an end to this by fast-tracking the case to the Supreme Court, but they refused to do so because of optics. So no, they weren't clearing anything up or giving straightforward answers because they knew what BC was doing was illegal and refused to do anything about it. Which again from the point of view of investors and companies looking at future projects, why would you invest in Canada when this type of stuff happens?