PRIME Minister Mark Carney and the leader of Canada’s oil rich Alberta province took a major step Friday towards building an oil pipeline that could substantially increase crude exports to Asia.
Expanding overseas energy exports has emerged as a key part of Carney’s strategy to reduce Canada’s economic reliance on the United States, but plans for a new pipeline are facing stiff resistance over environmental concerns.
Alberta’s conservative Premier Danielle Smith was a relentless critic of Carney’s climate focused predecessor, Justin Trudeau, accusing him of suffocating the province’s oil industry, but she has sought to work with Carney.
Carney and Smith cleared a key hurdle toward a new pipeline on Friday by signing a deal on industrial carbon pricing, a system that extracts a fee from large scale CO2 emitters. Oil companies have been critical of the system, but Smith said Friday that the prohibitive rates set under Trudeau’s government had been “rolled back”.
AFP
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