A Canadian government agency has guaranteed fresh commercial loans of up to C$3 billion ($2.2 billion) to the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project that has suffered repeated cost overruns.
It confuses me, honestly. It's not like the liberals gained any voters in Alberta by spending billions on the construction on this pipeline to keep them happy instead of just denying it's construction which would have gained them voters in the provinces that may actually be swayed by their actions.
There is literally no reason for any political party except conservatives to do anything for central Canada because there's no way anyone there will ever vote for anyone else, other than a few people in Calgary or Edmonton maybe.
Loans have to be paid back, so this is less "flushing tax dollars down the drain" and more "gee whiz I sure wonder where this money could have been spent instead," right?
From that perspective, this is basically an infrastructure grant for Alberta... And frankly, if that's how Alberta wants to use its chunk of federal infrastructure spending, more power to them.
Vancouver gets SkyTrain expansions (and massive housing projects and the corresponding wastewater/landfill infrastructure), Montreal gets the REM, and Alberta gets the Trans Mountain expansion. Sounds fair enough to me.
Yeah, oil companies can absolutely be trusted to not walk away from a dangerous, unremediated, poorly maintained site once the value has been extracted and management has been made even more wealthy.
Oh. Wait. Actually, they leave multi-billion dollar clean-up projects behind when the money runs out, like clockwork.