Or, and I know this is going to sound crazy but bear with me. The unanimous decision by three federal court of appeal judges who spent hours upon hours upon hours who drafted a decision full of pages upon pages upon pages about how the NEB and federal bodies didn't do their due diligence ...
Spoiler!
in consulting about the project and defining the project scope right, maybe, just maybe, thought that the NEB and federal bodies didn't do their due diligence in consulting about the project and defining the project scope right.
It's crazy, I get it.
"Hey did you guys assess the risk to the coast and species near the coast due to the project?"
"No."
"Well do that"
Take the time to read it instead of jumping to conclusions.
It has specifics.
Upper Nicola was asking how they would be affected. The response was a resounding "We don't know." Great consultation, certainly meaningful.
The NEBs own meeting notes show they did not respond to concerns. That's not consultation.
I know it's easy to think "They don't want the pipeline and are asserting their authority to prevent it" but these guys were actively trying to figure out what was happening, what the impact would be and what their rights were. And Canada did not bother to give them responses in some cases. It's unconstitutional.
Here the SSN, in this specific instance, just wanted to make sure the project was safe. Not denied, they just wanted to make sure they would be prepared in the case of an emergency. They didn't get a response back.
Again, notice that Stó:lō wasn't asking for the project to be denied. They had 89 recommendations they felt necessary to implement to mitigate cultural and ecological important issues, and what did Canada do? Nothing. Not an acknowledgement, not an understanding that they have other mitigation techniques in place, not force Trans Mountain to go through the recommendation and respond appropriately to each one, just nothing.
It's what the First Nations had said. They had people at meetings, they had people taking notes, but they had no consultation. No two-way dialogue, no understanding that their concerns were heard and accounted for. In some cases throwing them a bone was too much.
There's a grey line. What is "meaningful consultation" when a First Nation wants no part? That's a tricky subject, absolutely. But what happens when they do respond, when they do provide concerns and mitigation techniques and get nothing back? How is that meaningful. It's against their rights. The Federal Court of Appeals wasn't against pipeline, their hands were tied. Federally we dun goofed. All they asked was for them to go back and redo phase three of the consultation. Reasonable given the stuff in the decision if you took the time to read it and appreciate the view from the First Nations, at least some of them.
They didn't say cave in, give the First Nations what they want and stop the pipeline. They more or less just said, respond to their concerns. Explain why and what. Make sure they are heard. Trans Mountain and/or Canada could have given a point-by-point break down of the 89 recommendations of Stó:lō and agreed, disagreed, or come up with some type of compromise for each one. Heck, they could have just gone through each 89 and said why they wouldn't be needed. But they didn't. That's on them, not the First Nations.
Keep those facts coming. I know how much work it took to create this post and I loved reading it.
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The're the real kind of politics that deals with jobs, the economy, taxes, the delivery of health care and education, etc. You know, the stuff most people actually care about.
Even among 18-34 year olds, Diversity and Equity (which seems to map closest to 'identity politics') is only the most important issue to 13 per cent of voters.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by fotze
If this day gets you riled up, you obviously aren't numb to the disappointment yet to be a real fan.
it was 57% last time, I think it will be lower not higher. people were pretty motivated last election to turf the PC's, or at least send them a message.
I say 47% turnout.
for the average Martha and Henry, I sense apathy.
this election it seems a lot of people now dislike the both the UCP and NDP and feel their vote doesn't matter, or just assume the UCP will win.
I don't think it's a "Liberal conspiracy", and I don't care who appointed them this isn't the US. I think those judges made a decision based on either not liking pipelines, O&G, or naively thinking that bowing to one tribe's concerns while ignoring the vast majority who want the project was some kind of reconciliation attempt. You had widespread shock and confusion at that ruling.
Thankfully, Ollig has already done wonderful work to advance this discussion. I've seen dozens of posts from you on this topic, but I don't ever recall you actually citing source material.
You earlier called the ruling incoherent...please elaborate with specifics.
Widespread shock and confusion? From who, and what were their specific issues?
Your belief seems to be the CANADA'S FEDERAL COURT OF APPEAL (the second highest court in the land) is populated by incompetent judges. Or at least the three judges on this case were incompetent/motivated by personal views. Those judges must have f###ed up dozens of other cases in their careers, too (again, ready and willing to read anything specific you'd like to provide). If you want to believe that, it's fine, but I don't know why you'd even bother getting out of bed every day, let alone spend precious time arguing on here with a system so stacked against you.
At the end of the day, the pipeline side has lawyers, too. Anytime you want to do a massive project, an important process is to consider who your opponents will be, anticipate what their issues will be, and do your best to address them before they can even be raised (Ken King please read). Of course, you'll never please everyone completely, but you can avoid a lot of headaches and build a strong gameplan through this process.
You also seem very pessimistic about the next round of court challenges to come, that are apparently all ready to go. Is it impossible for the pipeline side to imagine what might be coming, and come prepared to win at the preliminary hearing? Of course, being angry at the world and believing everyone else is incompetent, unfair, or just out to get you is the easies option when things don't go your way.
A minority UCP government is the best result for Alberta in 2019. It provides some satisfaction to the disenchanted who (wrongly IMO) blame the NDP for Alberta's economic woes, but it also places a real spotlight on Jason Kenney so we get to see exactly what his governance skills are and he would be a short leash.
No party's going to raise the global oil price back into the $100s and bring back the 2000-2014 time period by wave of a magic wand. UCP supporters are not expecting that or assuming that to be true. Everyone's seen that annotated WTI price chart showing oil collapse from $110 to $50 in 2014, down to $25 in 2016 and up to the $40s $50s in 2017 that has the overlay that 'Notley doesn't control the price of oil.'
It's no coincidence that chart stops in early 2017, because that same chart if extended to today would show WTI's march to $65/bbl from $40/bbl in 2018/2019. Big recovery in global oil prices, but while other oil producing jurisdictions are in a period recovery and increased activity, we're still shedding jobs and investment:
-Devon is trying to exit Canada
-Nexen/CNOOC are laying off half their workforce over the next 12-18 months
-Encana's CEO has moved out of Calgary and now the organization is 'Head officeless'
-TransCanada is renaming themselves TC Energy to remove 'Canada' from the name and will begin to produce financial statements in US dollars.
-In that same vein Enbridge made a major US acquisition and likely will follow TC Energy
It's a matter of time before they both relocate their head offices south. These are two of Canada's largest companies!
-Imperial has shelved their Aspen expansion project (This isn't sitting idle to one day resume again, they have redeployed the people on this projects to other projects globally. It's just plain done!)
A large portion of Alberta's highest paid employment is at risk DURING a period of recovery in oil prices to the US and well AFTER the price collapse of 2014. We're not done hemorrhaging jobs here because the governments of the day are increasing taxes, increasing regulation, making it difficult to operate and the NDP's only answer to any of these problems is to spend more taxpayer dollars alongside more rules and regulations that are making things worse:
-Raising corporate taxes by 20% (2% / 10% = 20% NOT 2%)
-Implementing a carbon tax that other jurisdictions that compete for investment capital don't have to pay
-Spent billions on ripping up PPA contracts because they didn't understand the power industry
-Opposed Northern Gateway, Energy East, and Keystone XL Pipeline
-Tried to create a provincial protected park in the Bighorn that will freeze any development in wide swaths of crown land
Let's stop saying this incorrect nonsense narrative that Notely's 'done the best she could with the hand she's been dealt' Regardless of oil price or the Federal Liberal government handling of the TMX expansion file , Notely is incrementally worse in every sense of the word to the overall Alberta economy.
No getting rid of her isn't going to being back the good old days, and yes if the Federal government continues to be Liberal a lot of things will be out of Alberta's control, but it sure as hell beats the alternative. Multiple things can be true at the same time, that global oil prices had a huge negative impact to our economy AND our government made it incrementally worse. We can argue the semantics that the oil price impact is much worse than the NDP government, but I would point that we can't control global oil prices, but we can control who we vote for and that's why she must go at this crucial time.
Last edited by Cowboy89; 04-10-2019 at 03:59 PM.
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That's how you do an apology and make it 100% clear those are no longer your vies. The UCP candidates have failed time and again to do that, including Kenney.
I'd be surprised if Dion responds to this. He seems to only drive-by post with whatever anti-NDP stuff he finds on Facebook
Essentially, we have come to a point in any political debate, where if you are not unabashedly on the left, you are a Trump-like white nationalist bigot and retrograde. This thread is a living proof of this.
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"An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think." Georg Hegel
“To generalize is to be an idiot.” William Blake
It's no coincidence that chart stops in early 2017, because that same chart if extended to today would show WTI's march to $65/bbl from $40/bbl in 2018/2019.
-Raising corporate taxes by 20% (2% / 10% = 20% NOT 2%)
You make a lot of good points here, many of which I agree with. Two quick nit picks:
I'm not going to internet sleuth the exact date that the graphic first emerged, but I'm guessing it was early-mid 2017? Not exactly a coincidence that it would end there... (also not a deliberate conspiracy to not get an updated version, this is just how memes work).
Proportionally 20%, grossly 2%. Both figures are correct, both are useless on their own. Maybe we can all just be accurate/honest and say from 10% to 12%?
This is exactly why the NDP strategy has devolved into mud slinging and special interests.
When forced to defend their economic record, there is no defense.
A prudent rule for a new government, faced with a recession should have been "first, do no harm." Obviously the opposite occurred. The NDP made a really bad situation far worse, and far more prolonged.
It is very difficult to control the price of a global commodity. However, governments absolutely can and do impact the competitiveness of their jurisdiction based on their policy decisions.
NDP policy, in tandem with Liberal policy, has made Alberta less competitive on a global basis for capital. That is an undeniable fact.
The result is that Alberta continues to trail global peers as a capital investment arena. That means: 1. Layoffs. Resulting in: 2. Lower Government revenues driven by lower corporate and personal income taxes and reduced royalty revenues. Culminating in: 3. Reduced services in areas reliant on government spending (healthcare, education, etc.) or, as an alternative to 3.: 4. No reduction in government spending, but accumulation of debt at generational levels.
The NDP appeal to certain social issues, I understand that. But there must be some acknowledgement, somewhere, that their policies have left this province on the path to fiscal ruin. We have a ways to go to get there. But $100Bn in debt at the end of their next term? That would take a decade plus of $10Bn surpluses to pay off.
Their fundamentally flawed ideology proved inflexible at a time when Alberta's economy needed steady leadership, not incremental burdens.
The NDP experiment needs to be ended and identified as the colossal failure that it was.
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"I am actually more excited for the Oilers game tomorrow than the Flames game. I am praying for multiple jersey tosses. The Oilers are my new favourite team for all the wrong reasons. I hate them so much I love them."
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Stop me if too far off topic, but why are elections in Canada still being held on a Tuesday? Has everyone just given up on attempting to raise voter turnout?
Move it to a Saturday, or have fixed dates with a holiday.
PS. If I did make the effort to get a mail in ballot I think I'd go UCP. From what little I know the NDP broke a carbon tax promise and have not done enough otherwise with the economy to redeem themselves. Time to give someone else a try as unappealing as that may be.
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The masses of humanity have always had to surf.
Stop me if too far off topic, but why are elections in Canada still being held on a Tuesday? Has everyone just given up on attempting to raise voter turnout?
Move it to a Saturday, or have fixed dates with a holiday.
PS. If I did make the effort to get a mail in ballot I think I'd go UCP. From what little I know the NDP broke a carbon tax promise and have not done enough otherwise with the economy to redeem themselves. Time to give someone else a try as unappealing as that may be.
Saturday? That would definitely lower turnout.
Why would you need a holiday to vote? The longest it has taken me was like 10 mins max.
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Or, and I know this is going to sound crazy but bear with me. The unanimous decision by three federal court of appeal judges who spent hours upon hours upon hours who drafted a decision full of pages upon pages upon pages about how the NEB and federal bodies didn't do their due diligence in consulting about the project and defining the project scope right, maybe, just maybe, thought that the NEB and federal bodies didn't do their due diligence in consulting about the project and defining the project scope right.
Alrighty so first off thanks for the post, it took time and I enjoyed reading it. I've trimmed it up to save space. Reading any decision like that on its own where none of us have any insight into what the norms were before the scope of the decision makes things sound reasonable on their face. A similar effect occurs when reading Bill C-69, nothing sounds too onerous or overbearing but without knowing what was previously required and the degree of difficulty in meeting those existing standards having a glance over doesn't have the proper context or provide any insight into why people are upset with it.
Certainly listening and "grappling" with a meaningful two-way dialogue sounds perfectly logical. But what constitutes grappling? How much back communication is needed? Who determines when the party is satisfied? Are these First Nations even on the pipeline path? Are their requests reasonable?
Here's a quote from someone at Energy Probe, so obviously slanted towards one end but again I think it's important to get some context besides just reading walls of text from judges that all feel a certain way: link https://ep.probeinternational.org/20...ations-part-2/
Quote:
Apart from saying that the two-way dialogue must “grapple with” FNs’ expressed concerns, the FCA offered no specific suggestion as to how this could work in our governmental system. Nice-sounding language such as “two-way dialogue” does not explain what is supposed to go the other way, from the consulters to the FNs. The FCA commented that the additional consultation it required would not be onerous and could be conducted quickly. That is easy for the court to say when it does not have to figure out how to do it.
Compliance with this FCA decision will be a problem for any future consultation, for two reasons.
First, the people doing the consulting (front-line public servants) are not the people doing the deciding (the Cabinet). The consulters cannot offer any personal opinions about an expressed concern because such opinions would be taken as binding the Crown. They also cannot make any commitments or offer any predictions about what the Cabinet may decide to do at a Cabinet meeting that has not yet been held.
Given how our government actually works, it is unclear how the Crown could ever avoid the FCA’s criticisms unless the entire Cabinet met in person, several times, with each FN. The Cabinet cannot meet repeatedly with numerous FNs while still trying to run the Canadian government. However, the SCC held in the 2017 Clyde River case (para 22) that a Minister had no such duty. Whatever “grappling” the FCA expected the consulters to provide, it offered no explanation as to how this could work under our system of government.
The second reason is that some FNs are unalterably opposed to the construction of the proposed project. Their purpose in participating in the consultation process was not to have their concerns satisfactorily addressed, but to prevent the project’s approval. Why should they ever agree that the consultation was adequate when their strategy is to make it appear inadequate in their future court action? And their strategy succeeded.
The FCA’s reasons for decision show no awareness that some of the FNs were gaming the system, for example, through:
creating meeting agendas with so many items that the agendas could never be completed;
proliferating numerous “concerns” of questionable relevance to their Aboriginal rights and interests;
asking for scientific and other studies to be conducted that might take years to complete; and
asking for extensions of time to respond to information the consulters had provided.
This addresses, somewhat, your quoted portions by the Nicola first nation and one that I can't spell, especially the section where they kept asking for predictions, even just reading that I thought that the government bureaucrats probably aren't in a position to offer something like that that would be considered binding and this seems to echo that. It also seems to set that standard that every item brought forward by everyone has to be considered, responded to by people that have authority to respond to it which is extremely onerous and probably not to the satisfaction of the groups doing this in bad faith. For the group that had 89 conditions, what were they? Were they reasonable? Attainable? Do you really think if they had responded "No" to each of them instead of the general commitment they made that this nation would have been satisfied with that or the FCA would have considered that meaningful two way dialogue? This analysis and others I've read either supporting or opposing this decision seem to point back to the same thing: Consultation vs consent. This decision pushes our consulation more towards consent by all parties, which is more difficult to achieve (imagine trying to consent by all parties on the recent Calgary airport expansion for example). The piece quoted from above finishes on that note with this quote:
Quote:
The FCA has given FNs a new, unique right, unavailable to anyone else in Canada, to challenge the federal Cabinet’s project assessment decisions on broad public policy grounds. The court did this through a major expansion of the Crown’s constitutional duty of consultation, from Aboriginal rights issues to virtually any issue a FN says is of concern to it. Because consultation is a constitutional duty it cannot be amended or restricted by legislation, so the Canadian government is helpless to correct this situation unless and until it succeeds in having this part of the decision reversed by the SCC.
So look, obviously this person has their agenda in taking issues with this decision but what seems clear to me is that giving consent is giving a veto, which may be what a lot of people want, but it will result in projects not going ahead and FN in favor of the project getting vetoed by other FN. The expansion of what was commonly and practically understood to be the duty to consult was what surprised a lot of people and where this court may have gone over their skis. Or established a better standard depending on your mindset. We'll see what happens in the summer I guess but to me this is just a wide open standard that parties that are undeniably trying to obstruct can drive a Mac truck through and restart this all over again.
Last edited by DiracSpike; 04-10-2019 at 05:44 PM.
Stop me if too far off topic, but why are elections in Canada still being held on a Tuesday? Has everyone just given up on attempting to raise voter turnout?
Move it to a Saturday, or have fixed dates with a holiday.
PS. If I did make the effort to get a mail in ballot I think I'd go UCP. From what little I know the NDP broke a carbon tax promise and have not done enough otherwise with the economy to redeem themselves. Time to give someone else a try as unappealing as that may be.
If you don’t like Tuesdays, there are advanced polls.
Besides, Tuesday is named for the god of war, which is becoming increasingly appropriate given the way campaigns are going.
