The question that leads tonight’s adjournment proceedings was a question I put in June, before the House rose for the summer. Unfortunately, the response came from a minister whose areas of responsibility do not actually fall within the parameters of the question I asked. It means that this time the representative for the Minister of Transport is here. However, my question did not specifically relate to transport. It was a tangential issue.

My question was one of constitutional authorities. In particular, I put it to the Prime Minister that since he was well known in opposition as an individual who believed that the provinces should exert their jurisdictional authorities to the maximum to press back against heavy-handed federal intrusion into their areas of authority, I wondered if he had now changed his mind. Those of us in British Columbia felt very clearly that the Prime Minister was pushing a particular project on the people of British Columbia whether we liked it or not.

Just to make it clear to all present today, to refresh their memories, the question I put was the following:

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister for many years expressed concern as an Albertan about the heavy-handed intrusion of federal policy on the will of Albertans.

Right now, British Columbians oppose supertankers on the coastline, the Union of British Columbia Municipalities opposes supertankers and today’s polls show by a margin of three to one that British Columbians do not want oil tankers on their coastline. Will the Prime Minister run roughshod over the will of British Columbians for his pet project?

In that brief question I was alluding to something that is famously known as the firewall letter. This was back in January 2001, when our current Prime Minister was not serving in the House but had left a position as MP to become the executive director of the National Citizens Coalition. In that capacity, he co-signed a letter with University of Alberta professor Tom Flanagan; with Ted Morton, who was described in the letter as Alberta senator-elect; with the head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation; and with other Albertans, particularly Ken Boessenkool, who is now an advisor to Christy Clark.

The irony is not lost on British Columbians. This famous letter was designed to do the following. The current Prime Minister wrote in 2001 about what could be done to extend provincial powers to “limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction”.

Perhaps I will have better luck tonight. I will put my question again.

Has the current Prime Minister lost track of his previous concerns that provincial rights, privileges and powers, and particularly the will of the people of a province, should be respected and that in fact he should be guided on the matter of the Enbridge proposal and the supertankers, which British Columbians do not want, by the will of the people of British Columbia and not his own preference for expansion of bitumen production?

Pierre Poilievre: Mr. Speaker, I will begin by addressing the constitutional and jurisdictional questions that the member posed. I would point out the very obvious, that even the most strong believer in the principle of subsidiarity would accept that the federal government is responsible for regulating shipping and the associated industries. That is because ships cross borders. It is an international business and it would be impossible for it to be adequately regulated on a province-by-province basis.

The member mentioned oil tankers and the safety-related issues around them. The reality is that oil tankers have been moving safely into west coast waters since the 1930s. This, contrary to the member’s remarks, is nothing new. In fact, a total of 82 oil tankers arrived at Port Metro Vancouver in 2011. During the last five years there were 1,302 tankers that arrived at that same port. During that time period, nearly 200 oil and chemical tankers safely visited the ports of Prince Rupert and Kitimat. They follow international and Canadian requirements, including double hulling of ships, mandatory pilotage, regular inspections, and aerial surveillance. With double hull, the bottom and sides of the vessel have two complete layers of water-tight hull surface. Tankers that are not double hull are being gradually phased out. For large crude oil tankers, like the Exxon Valdez was, the phase-out date for single hull vessels was 2010, which means that all large crude oil tankers operating in our waters today are double hull.

In compulsory pilotage areas, the pilotage authorities require tanker operators to take on board a marine pilot with knowledge before entering a harbour or busy waterway. The department ship inspectors are on board and they inspect foreign vessels, including oil tankers, entering Canadian ports to ensure they comply with all of our rules. In 2011, there were 1,100 inspections carried out across Canada, 147 of them on oil tankers.

We also have the eye in the sky which watches tankers as they approach our shores. Transport Canada performs aerial surveillance over Canadian waters to detect pollution from ships. In 2010-11, crews observed more than 12,000 vessels, nearly one-third of which were over west coast waters. It is an effective prevention tool because potential polluters know that Canada is watching and we have the power to prosecute.

What I am about to say is very important, so I ask that the member listen carefully. The good news is that over the last 20 years there has not been a single major oil spill in Canadian waters. We will work to ensure that the next 20 years are as successful as the last.

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Back in January 2001, our future Prime Minister sent a letter to Premier Ralph Klein in which he called for Alberta to exercise its Constitutional provincial powers to “build firewalls around Alberta.”  The letter was co-signed by Harper’s mentor from the University of Alberta Tom Flanagan, Ted Morton (at the time described as Alberta Senator-elect), the head of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and other Alberta luminaries, including Ken Boessenkool, (described in the letter as former advisor to “Stockwell Day, Treasurer of Alberta,” who is currently none other than Premier Christy Clark’s Chief of Staff.)  Stephen Harper, who claimed top spot in the list of signatories, was at the time President of the National Citizens’ Coalition.

The letter set out what the signatories believed to be Constitutionally allowed steps Alberta should take,  including: withdrawal from the Canada Pension Plan, ending the provincial contract with the RCMP,  a provincial take-over of health care decision-making, and collecting revenue for the province from income tax.  The aim of this bullish use of provincial powers was “to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach on legitimate provincial jurisdiction.”   

What a difference a decade makes.  Now Stephen Harper is so confident of the right of the federal government to insist on an over-land pipeline to a tanker route through the most treacherous waters on earth that he committed to the project’s approval and completion before the provincial government had so much as uttered a word on the project’s acceptability.  (I leave it to Patrick Brown to set out the nature of Christy Clark’s rather belated demands, but at least she has asserted that British Columbia has something to say in the matter. I leave for another day that other Constitutional objection to the Enbridge project – the constitutionally protected inherent rights of First Nations.) 

NDP leader Adrian Dix has announced he has a high powered legal panel, led by the well respected lawyer Murray Rankin, reviewing the province’s legal options.  The ugly reality is that if Stephen Harper is prepared to push this through, he can.  The Constitution allows the federal government to over-ride provincial powers under Clause 10 of Section 92.  If the federal government declares the Enbridge project to be “for the general advantage of Canada,” provincial rights are trampled.

In a recent piece in the Ottawa Citizen, Stephen Maher recalled the last time a premier approached a prime minister with the idea of requesting provincial objections be squashed through the invocation of Clause 10 of Section 92.  In 1966, Newfoundland’s first premier, Joey Smallwood, had gone to Prime Minister Lester Pearson to ask for the federal muscle of Clause 10, section 92 to force Quebec to accept transmission lines across that province to bring electricity from the Churchill Falls project in Labrador to be sold to Canada and the US. Smallwood recalled later that Pearson had begged him not to make the request because, “if you ask me I’ll have to say yes, otherwise we would not really be a country.  But I am asking you not to ask me, because we will not be able to keep the towers up.”    Smallwood did not ask and suffered the impact of a lop-sided deal to sell power to Quebec ever since.

Stephen Harper has already hinted that he is prepared to use the federal over-ride power.  In a January 2012 interview he said, “What I think I’d make clear is that I believe selling our energy products to Asia is in the country’s national interest.”

In addition to the Constitution, the prime minister has a precedent of expropriation.  Back in 1999, the federal government expropriated the seabed under the Nanoose torpedo testing grounds when British Columbia decided to end the contract allowing testing.  In that case, the Expropriation Act was used.  225 square km of BC territory was expropriated to allow the military tests to continue.  That was a first, but would Stephen Harper get away with expropriating the whole territory required to build the Great Pipeline of China?

Commentators like Stephen Maher will say that so long as BC objects, no federal government will force the construction of pipelines over provincial lands, nor force ports to accept high risk supertankers for bitumen and diluent.  And it is true, that to force such a thing would tear at the heart of Confederation and do real damage to our sense of ourselves as a nation.  But that does not mean Stephen Harper won’t do it.  No previous Prime Minister was sufficiently reckless and ruthless as to shut down Parliament to avoid a confidence vote he knew he would lose.  The Prime Minister has promised Beijing this project will proceed.  He has declared that those who oppose the project are “radicals.”  

Has Stephen Harper abandoned the idea that provinces have rights?  Is he prepared to ride roughshod over the wishes of the vast majority of British Columbians?  Has he reversed himself or is it merely the case that provinces only have rights when they seek to promote fossil fuel expansionism, never to manage such development?

Perhaps it is time for Mr. Harper’s former colleague, Mr. Boessenkool, to brief Premier Clark on how to build a firewall.  And maybe he could remind the Prime Minister of how he once urged provinces to resist and object “to an aggressive and hostile federal government … encroach(ing) on legitimate provincial jurisdiction.”

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