Thomson: Redford and Clark ready to defrost relationship
B.C. Premier Christy Clark is coming back to Alberta for a visit with Premier Alison Redford.
We don’t know exactly when — Clark is hoping “in the next couple of weeks” — and we don’t know exactly what they’ll discuss. But you can bet on two things: they’ll talk about the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and this time Clark will use the front door.
When Clark last visited the Alberta legislature, she snuck in the back way.
That was July 19, 2012, and Clark was so worried about secrecy that she asked Redford’s office not to tell the media about the meeting. When word began to leak that Clark was in the building, Redford’s security detail set up a ruse to keep nosy reporters off the trail, going so far as to drive a black SUV to the front steps of the legislature as a decoy while the B.C. premier ducked out a side door.
At the time Redford was perplexed by the cloak and dagger act, saying after the meeting she didn’t understand why Clark had bothered to come.
For her part, Clark later said she’d only come to declare that her support for Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to ship Alberta’s oilsands bitumen to the West Coast would be contingent on B.C. receiving its “fair share” of energy revenues generated by the project.
That the two premiers couldn’t even agree on what was discussed at the meeting was just a sign of things to come. The misunderstanding marked the beginning of a meltdown in relations.
For the next 10 months, as Clark geared up for B.C.’s May 14 provincial election, she repeatedly demanded a piece of the oilsands action as a condition for approving the pipeline. Redford emphatically responded that would never happen.
In August, Redford made a point of travelling to Vancouver to make a speech that accused Clark of cynically attacking the Gateway pipeline simply to win votes back home. Clark, in turn, travelled to Calgary to denigrate the pipeline as “chump change” to B.C.’s economy and publicly declare that “there is no price we can put on our environment.”
The two simply stopped pretending to be civil. It was with more than a little understatement that Clark acknowledged relations had grown “frosty.”
Now, they’re ready for a big thaw.
The turnabout, of course, is thanks to Clark’s Liberals winning another majority government in last week’s provincial election. Clark might have lost her own seat but Redford phoned to congratulate her and invite her back for a visit. Clark happily said yes.
In an interview with Maclean’s magazine this week, Clark said it was a “really nice chat” and “we’re hopefully going to meet in the next couple of weeks.”
Most importantly — and you could almost hear the squeals of delight from the Alberta government — Clark also told Maclean’s that she sees last week’s vote as a mandate to increase natural resource development. If Clark is open for business in B.C., surely she’s open to business from Alberta — at least that’s the renewed hope in Redford’s office.
Clark’s press secretary, Mike Morton, says even if the two premiers can’t meet right away, the two will chat face to face during the western premiers’ conference in Winnipeg next month.
That won’t be quite the same. Symbolically, perhaps, Redford would much rather meet in her office, the very spot where their relationship went off the rails so spectacularly last year. But it probably doesn’t matter where they meet. Clark is already offering a veritable plantation of olive branches.
“I think we will have a very constructive relationship,” Clark told Maclean’s. “Yes, we have had a very public disagreement about the Enbridge pipeline and heavy oil movement. But you know, everything is resolvable. I know it’s been public — but that’s a really small part of our relationship, overall. It’s like a marriage: you might fight about who takes out the garbage, but you still sit down and have dinner together, and plan a future for your kids.”
Speaking of kids, Redford is so keen to kick-start the new relationship with Clark that she’s suggesting their preteen children — Redford’s daughter and Clark’s son — get together at the annual premiers’ conference in Ontario later this summer. Call it playdate diplomacy — and based on how badly the grown-ups have behaved, it can’t do any worse.
No matter how eager Redford is to hit the reset button on the Alberta-B.C. relationship, she’s not popping the champagne yet. They still have a lot to negotiate and it’s not clear how B.C. will manage to get its “fair share” of the economic benefits of the Northern Gateway pipeline. There’s talk of B.C. charging a toll to Enbridge but that would appear to invite Alberta to charge a toll on B.C. pipelines that transport natural gas across Alberta to the U.S.
There’s also talk of collaborating on an upgrader in Kitimat that would allow B.C. to profit from value-added products.
But nobody really wants to talk too loudly right now, not until Clark has safely won a seat in a byelection.
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