the blog quebecois

Gordon Laxer:

If you think B.C. opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline is fierce, wait until you see Quebecer’s opposition to letting “dirty tarsands oil” into and through their province. Quebec holds the key to such a pipeline. You can’t get through Canada to New Brunswick without passing through Quebec.

[ . . . ]

It would be best for corporate advocates of a west-to-east pipeline to brush up on the meaning of “accueil glacial,” French for “frosty reception.”

Last year I was in Montreal speaking to environmentalists. As a long-time advocate of using domestic oil to ensure Canadian rather than American oil security, I asked them if Quebec would take western oil. The answer was yes if it was non-fracked, conventional oil. But if it’s “tarsands” oil, we’re not interested. We’d rather stick with oil imports from Algeria, merci.

The difference now is that Quebec has a sovereigntist government and the environmentalists have been brought in from the cold. As Daniel Breton, a long-time, prominent green activist and Quebec’s new environment minister, declared: “The greens are in power now.”

Perhaps you should be reading up on that Constitution you never signed. This is clearly the jurisdiction of the federal, not provincial government. Not that you've ever cared about those distinctions.

But I'll bet Premier Mushface cares a great deal about other constitutional gimcracks. Such as the 8 billion dollars a year that Alberta contributes to her socialist paradise. It should be reduced by a few zeroes -- say nine of them -- next time around (though I would caution against leaving it in the hands of Redford, who's every bit as stupid, albeit with better cheekbone definition).