[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by ThePrince

Haven't posted in a while, but this was too egregious to not reply to. At best, you're severely minimizing the timeline of events or at worst, you have zero understanding of what actually happened here.

You’re entitled to your opinion.

Firstly, you're looking at the value of the pipeline completely incorrectly. You absolutely cannot include the revenues to the province as those would be revenues the province would be getting whether the pipeline was owned by the government or not. That should have been pure upside to taxpayers had a private corporation like Kinder Morgan built and operated the pipeline, like they would have if the government (federal and BC provincial) hadn't completely railroaded it. So congratulations, the federal government paid $30B+ for a pipeline that's worth $15-25B per your own sources.

You’re moving the goalposts here. All I said was the costs would be recouped, which they will be. Would it have been a greater benefit to the taxpayers had KM been able to build it themselves? Yes, absolutely. I haven’t disputed that at all, in fact I even said that how this played out was not ideal.

Secondly, you are misremembering the timeline of events and how they played out (intentionally? perhaps, as it doesn't fit your narrative). The BC government intentionally threw up legal roadblocks hoping Kinder Morgan would back out of the project. They brought forth multiple frivolous lawsuits knowing they wouldn't win given pipelines that cross provincial boundaries are federal jurisdiction. The federal government did not in any way have to supersede laws in order to combat this - Trudeau had the power as Prime Minister to refer the case(s) directly to the Supreme Court to rule to expedite the legal decisions and put an end to the frivolous BS, but refused to do so because of political optics.

So that's why Kinder Morgan dropped out, and why Trudeau had to hold the bag because if he didn't, Canada would be seen as an investment hellhole where you can just be railroaded.

Your entire point here seems to be predicated on the assumption that KM would have stuck around even had the cases been expedited. If KM stated they would have(I honestly don’t know if they did or not so please share a link if that is the case) I will take that comment back.

Kind of odd to argue that the government wouldn’t expedite it due to political optics but then decided that buying and completing the project themselves would somehow be less egregious to the people you believe they were trying not to offend in the first place.

But please keep minimizing the actions and repercussions of the parties at play who absolutely could have done more to prevent the colossal waste of taxpayer money and prosperity for Canadians.

I’m not minimizing anything. There were a lot of mistakes made along the way, but unlike yourself and a number of other people who make similar arguments I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that there was going to be any certainty of outcome had they acted differently.

We arrived at a situation where KM was walking away due to systemic problems with our courts.

Should the laws be changed to prevent this from happening in the future? Yes.

Should governments be allowed to apply changed laws retroactively to ongoing legal cases? That’s a pretty slippery slope that could easily be abused to circumvent our courts which need to remain politically neutral and I think you’d agree with that regardless of which parties are involved. Keep in mind when you allow them to do so when it suits what you want you’re also consenting for them to be allowed to do so when it’s for something you don’t want.

Given this current government’s past actions in multiple situations I think you’d have a hard time arguing that you’d be comfortable with them specifically doing so to suit their needs.

It was unfortunately a real #### sandwhich of a situation for our country and I don’t think any Canadians should be to happy with having to eat it. But given the options at the time when KM announced they had made the decision to walk away I’d prefer this outcome to no pipeline at all. I’m assuming you agree with at least that much.