Regardless of the fate of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, the Texas-based company received a fine gift from the Canadian taxpayers Tuesday: $4.5 billion.
That isn’t what it’ll cost to actually build the pipeline, of course. Assuming it actually is built. But no price was apparently too great for Ottawa to pay to secure the nebulous-sounding “investor confidence.”
Taxpayers might be forgiven for wondering why, if the pipeline is such a good investment, was Kinder Morgan in a hurry to unload it.
Much has been made of the “political uncertainty” caused by scalawags at the helm in B.C. But it’s hard to identify much that Premier John Horgan’s government has done that’s had a real impact on the project to date.
The economics of this pipeline remain anything but sure for reasons unrelated to provincial politics.
Taxpayers now get to take on the financial and environmental risks. The legal uncertainty posed by First Nations lawsuits – which have upended more than a few large resource projects – is also still real.
To the conservative investor, the pipeline might not look like such a great opportunity. But it wouldn’t be the first time the feds bought political points through a good old-fashioned bailout.
Economically – if in no other way – all of Canada now has a vested interest in the pipeline’s completion and success.
Our federal government hurried to bail out Kinder Morgan, but if this pipe dream goes up in smoke there will be no clueless benefactors running to bail out Canada.
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