So Now I Own a Pipeline

So now I own a pipeline. Not something I would have ever thought to put on my Christmas list, but who knows - I may need one someday.

Please forgive the sarcasm but I would have thought that it was obvious that there are some things that governments can legitimately  own and other things that they should never, ever consider owning. It is appropriate that the government own some infrastructure such as roads, bridges, certain buildings (e.g. Parliament, hospitals). The government also needs to own such tools or equipment (e.g. cars, computers, boats) that are required for it to its job. It can even be argued that the government has some responsibility to have some ownership in such things as transportation systems when no one else is able to do so. But never, never should  the government ever decide to buy a private corporation, one that historically made millions of dollars, just so that company faces no more risks.

That the government of Canada now owns a pipe lines raises all sorts of questions and potential liabilities. The most obvious question is there anyone in the government or its bureaucracy that knows how to create, expand or run a pipeline? Are they going to have to hire back the same company that just sold the pipeline to manage it? (speaking of keeping one's cake and eating it too). What happens if something going wrong and there is a spill? Who intercedes on the part of the country and its citizens? Who defends the rights of the citizens when the country owns the leaking pipeline?

I understand that the Liberal government has made a commitment to Alberta to insure that there is a way to get their oil  to market. I can even accept that if we believe it is necessary to transport oil to the west coast, that the pipeline is the safest and most effective way of doing it. I just cannot understand why I, as a tax payer, should have to bail out a company who got cold feet. If no private company wanted to accept the risk, then perhaps it is just a bad idea. Surely there was a better place to invest four billion dollars. Even within the oil industry, there must have been  better way to help Alberta - perhaps build refineries or even better invest in developing alternative energy manufacturing.  There is no way that Canada should have "helped"  a company that wanted to get out because it did not like our legal processes; there was no reason for us to make things easier for a company that was tired of playing by our rules.

While most Albertans may be happy with this solution, it is hard to see how any other Canadians will see this deal as a good one.  We will have to borrow the money to buy Kinder Morgan's pipeline, and then once it is all done and it starts to make money we will sell it back to them or to some other corporation just like them.

I do not want to be in the business of selling oil to the world....I do not want my government to do it either.

Boring...

I am bored. I have lots to do, people to visit, things to see. I have in fact a rather interesting life. There are even times when I wish I was just a little bit less busy. But I am bored with the news.

Just a few years ago I was "preaching' to my students that if they wanted to write better, they needed to write 500 words a day - it didn't matter what they wrote about, or even if the writing was that great. They just needed to practice the craft of writing. I myself was averaging 2000-3000 words a week. I had lists of things to discuss, the news seem to just bubble over with exciting things to think about and then to write about. Not all of it got published on the blog, but I was writing. I felt as if my mind was constantly active.

Alas, the news is no longer providing that level of stimulation. Perhaps it is that Trump dominates/contaminates the international news. The absurdities that are dribbling from that fool's mouth and the mouths of his confederates are seldom worth the effort to try to even guess what he is doing (dare I say thinking?). As the Canadian press has decided that the world can only be viewed through a lens that includes his perspective - the news is boring. Whether it is NAFTA, Korea or climate change -  his presence is so large, that  his shadow dominates everything.

Canadian politics don't seem to be that much more interesting. Yes there is the Kinder Morgan pipeline debate but that debate - like so many other complex Canadian decisions will be made by the Supreme Court. Politicians from all sides will huff and puff, they will threaten to blow down the very fabric of Canada, they will play to their constituents but at the end of the day they will live with what those nine judges say.

There is, of course, the provincial election in Ontario. If I still lived in that province I would find it perhaps an interesting debate, one that was worthy of being fully engaged in, but the election, seen from a distance of 3000 miles, looks like a movie I have seen before. A movie in which the ending is predicable  -no one will be happy a year from now. Perhaps I should be grateful that in Canada major news is when somebody who should not have,  gets invited on a trip with the Prime Minister. I guess that means that nothing too terrible is happening.

British Columbia politics, with the exception of the Kinder Morgan pipeline - are well past being passive and boring. If one was a cynic, perhaps one would wonder if Kinder Morgan is being kept in the public mind to keep our minds away from the more pressing issues of the day - to put us asleep with the mindless repetition of the same positions.

Perhaps it is because I am just jaded, or perhaps I am getting to the old man stage where I am just redundantly and uselessly cranky at everything. I do not want something terrible to happen, I am not like some junky looking for a fix of adrenalin to wake me up in the morning - but some meaningful dialogue about real issues would be refreshing.