Last week we discussed the urgent need for Canadian energy firms to recognize that the people who want to put them out of business are not kidding, or backing down, and to be more vocal about their virtues and the harms of bad public policy. We quoted former Environment Minister Catherine McKenna asking companies to start “doing their part” and we agreed except we wanted them to do the opposite of what she wanted. And it’s even more pressing than it seems because of another very scary development, welcomed and promoted by governments who seem to have even less idea what they’re getting us into here than they do on energy. Especially in British Columbia, aboriginal groups have long been encouraged to believe, or at least humoured when claiming, that they never actually ceded land or authority to “so-called Canada” and that the federal and provincial governments therefore have no legal power to, among other things, approve resource projects then enforce the conditions including basic law and order under which they can be built. And governments are donning blankets and agreeing, sometimes tacitly and sometimes through legislation, a folly that threatens to break the country apart and paralyse its resource economy along the way.

It is routine to hear claims like “First Nations are sovereign peoples whose inherent rights predate the formation of Canada. Treaties are foundational to the creation of Canada and cannot be treated as secondary to federal legislation.” Or “All of Alberta sits on treaty land.” But the actual, frequently restricted text of the treaties are not cited, or read; instead they seem to give cosmic endorsement to the notion that the Canadian government’s authority does not extend to Canada. Including a recent stunning court ruling in British Columbia that government grants of land in fee simple did not convey unequivocal title, which the usual suspects blithely insist doesn’t mean people who no longer own their houses don’t own their houses even though they don’t. And it is routine for governments to endorse such statements, from verbiage about “traditional and unceded territory” to BC’s DRIPA legislation to a culpable failure to enforce the law.

For instance in Ontario, where an illegal blockade of a housing development in Caledonia forced developers to abandon the project after police flatly refused to enforce a court injunction to remove the protestors. Or in rural BC where, famously, a violent attack on a Coastal Gaslink pipeline worksite that included burning four police cars has led to no arrests even though the police seem to have a good idea who did it. But the government propaganda CBC outlet manages to blame it all on the cops, the companies etc. What fool would try to build a pipeline against that background?

Clearly the big issue here is governments who actually believe their approach will foster “reconciliation” and prosperity although there is no credible route to that outcome via this approach. But if you look at the web pages of Canadian energy companies, you find all kinds of soothing PR bumf about engagement with First Nations, aboriginal empowerment, reconciliation and so on and virtually nothing about Canadian sovereignty or the rule of law.

In consequence even if Mark Carney’s administration, and his fabled Major Projects Office, eventually do approve pipelines as part of the Memorandum of Understanding with Alberta, or anything else as a result of anything, the odds are extremely steep that it will be impossible to build. And they will be impossible to build because the government will not even try to use powers it possesses but claims not to, and by saying so risks forfeiting them de facto and even in law. And being stunned and babbling when the predictable happens.

Here let us add that this Major Projects Office was not met with the storm of derision it deserved, especially from what radicals might call Canada’s capitalist class. For some reason, possibly the government’s policy of bringing in massive amounts of cheap foreign labour so big corporations can make profits even while the economy goes down the drain, they greet such things with solemn faces and flattery. But as the editorial board of The Hub recently observed:

“Six months after Prime Minister Mark Carney launched the Major Projects Office with promises to build ‘at speeds not seen in generations,’ the initiative has yet to designate a single project under the Bill C-5 powers that would allow it to bypass federal regulatory barriers. Zero designations. Zero oil pipeline approvals. The office pitched as a red-tape cutter increasingly resembles a government financing mechanism.”

It is part of an overall crisis of governance in which spin occupies politicians to the virtual exclusion of policy, which they’ve forgotten how to do anyway. We hear endless talk of fiscal prudence, but when the deficit while scarily massive is slightly smaller than predicted because revenues were higher, not because they did anything important to cut spending or raise money, they immediately spend it all, just as they have done for many years. There’s actually virtually no policy initiative here, just claiming credit or deflecting blame for things they sit and watch instead of causing.

One significant exception was the BC provincial government making UNDRIP the law of the land with catastrophic consequences they subsequently denied were happening. But they are, and so even if the MPO actually approves a pipeline to the West Coast or anything of that sort, companies with no appetite for confrontation are especially unlikely to try to go ahead and build it.

Far better quietly to move their capital or even headquarters abroad, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has hypocritically done, evidently knowing that this country is a bad place to invest and getting worse. Brookfield Asset Management moved its HQ when Carney was chair and of the 567 companies in his current portfolio only three are Canadian while 91% of his assets are in US firms. If he doesn’t impose capital controls or otherwise trap them. But if they want to “do their part” for the country they currently call home, they should stand up and speak out now, and only leave if the result is even harsher rhetoric and even worse policy.

And while there’s still a Canada to defend, not just a “so-called” failed colonialist scrap-heap.