rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Killing a northern pipe dream"

Over at the National Post, Don Martin recently wrote about how the Mackenzie valley pipeline, something that would transfer natural gas from the fields of the frigid Mackenzie delta south to North American consumers and in so doing jumpstart the local economy, seems to have been dismissed yet again for not the first time in forty years. This time, the federal government is the reluctant partner.

A clearcut slash ripped straight through the boreal forest and entered the Mackenzie River before emerging to disappear into the southern horizon — the prep-work outline for a 1,200-kilometre pathway set to become Canada’s largest-ever construction project.

This is the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline route, connecting the motherlode of Arctic gas deposits in the Beaufort Sea to the northern Alberta gas dissemination network.

But no pipeline equals no pipedream — and the $16-billion megaproject to create another energy frontier and give aboriginal communities an economic lifeline is now apparently dead.

[Minister of the Environment Jim] Prentice was still optimistic about the project just four months ago, talking of signing off on lingering aboriginal claims and getting the sluggish project review committee’s report before securing a federal sign-off for participating in the project.

But unless last week’s priorities committee’s nixing of any federal role in the project is overturned by a full Prime Minister Stephen Harper cabinet, the best, if not only, hope for Arctic and aboriginal economic stimulus is gone.

[. . .]

One top source in Natural Resources raises the ‘I’m not dead yet’ Monty Python skit to suggest there’s lingering life in the project, although that analogy ends badly for the bleating actor, who is quickly put out of his misery by a whack on the head.

Mr. Prentice did emerge on Tuesday to muddy the waters a bit, shrugging it off as a private-sector investment while insisting the “proponents continue to assess the fiscal framework put forward previously by the federal government.”

[. . .]

If, or when, the project dies, shock waves will be felt up and down a Mackenzie Valley where aboriginal enterprise had hoped to buy a one-third stake in the project amid giddy predictions they would eventually pocket annual dividends of more than $100-million.

Huge camps, some sleeping thousands of construction workers, were planned along the route as the pipeline snaked down a booming valley.
But the risk-sharing role of the federal government, exchanging a taxpayer’s investment of unknown size for a revenue slice linked to the price of natural gas, has been increasingly iffy for years.