This article was published by The Energy Mix on Jan. 12, 2026.
By Mitchell Beer
Alberta is demanding even faster federal approval of a bitumen pipeline to British Columbia’s west coast, even as a former provincial energy minister admits the project would have “zero” chance of attracting private investors without federal subsidies to “backstop” it.
The new demands came just six weeks after Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a controversial memorandum of understanding (MOU) that envisioned an accelerated, two-year approval schedule for at least one new pipeline. Smith issued her latest letter to Carney after Donald Trump’s bombing and kidnapping raid in Venezuela became the latest pretext to demand ever-faster federal action on the pipeline plan despite a glutted global market for oil.
“Alberta intends to submit its application for a pipeline to the Major Projects Office by June—and [Smith] asked that it gets approved by this fall,” CBC reports.
“Within the current geopolitical context, timelines of up to two years are still woefully long and risk putting Canada at a disadvantage,” Smith wrote. “Any delay risks ceding market share, losing investment, and undermining Canada’s competitive position in a rapidly changing global energy landscape.”
When the MOU was signed in late November, impact assessment experts warned that even a two-year approval period would be too short to allow for thorough review of a major, new pipeline, or for engagement with Indigenous and other affected communities. Short-circuiting those steps could help land a project in court, where it would only face further delays.
Smith’s letter also sidestepped major questions about the years it would take to refurbish Venezuela’s decrepit oil production infrastructure, whether U.S. fossil companies are willing to invest, and whether there will significant global demand for new oil—from Venezuela, Canada, or anywhere else—by the time any new project could be completed.
A west coast pipeline would also need federal subsidies, Smith’s former energy minister, ex-pipeline lobbyist Sonya Savage, told a CBC podcast. Without taxpayer support, “I would say it’s not just diminishing, the likelihood of a private sector proponent.… I would almost say it is zero at this point,” she said.
While the MOU explicitly calls for any new pipeline to be built and financed by private companies, Savage said a federal “backstop” to cover cost overruns, like the massive, 584% budget increase that plagued the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, would not be a new concept for Canada.
“The TransCanada mainline gas line in the 1950s would not have been built without federal government intervention,” she told CBC’s West of Centre podcast. “They set up a Crown corporation, they backstopped it. Enbridge’s Line 9 in the 1970s would not have been built without a federal government backstop.”
In a release Monday, the Calgary-based Pembina Institute called on both governments to “stay true” to the language about “strong regulations that will drive down oil and gas emissions” that accompanied the release of the MOU.
“Alberta using this moment to lobby in public against what it is now calling an ‘overly aggressive’ industrial carbon price raises more questions about the outcome Alberta has in mind—especially given it already agreed in the MOU to strengthen its system,” said Executive Director Chris Severson-Baker. “This is in addition to the regulatory changes Alberta pushed through in December—days after signing the MOU—that weakened its industrial carbon pricing system and effectively moved the goalposts on the negotiation before it had begun.”
Severson-Baker added that, “far from being a reason to further expedite a pipeline proposal and weaken Canadian climate policy, the Venezuela situation should give further pause for thought and reassessment about the best economic bet for Canada going forward.”
“42 days after signing the ‘grand bargain’ MOU with the federal government, Alberta is trying to change the terms of the agreement, leveraging the current situation in Venezuela,” veteran climate analyst Dan Woynillowicz wrote on LinkedIn. “Underpinning the MOU is a commitment to ‘good faith’ collaboration,” but “I don’t see how seeking any and every opportunity to change the terms of the MOU or shift the goalposts can be seen as living up to this.”
On Substack, fossil industry analyst and communicator Bill Whitelaw praised Savage for “speaking her truth” on the taxpayer backstop that private investors would expect before pouring their own money into a new pipeline project. That “loadsa dough” subsidy won’t happen, he said, as long as there’s a chance that Alberta separatists will succeed in pulling the province out of Canada—much less making it Donald Trump’s sought-after 51st state.
“Ottawa will need to pony up big bucks to bolster an already-thin business case,” Whitelaw wrote. “Fellow Canadians would never countenance Ottawa forking over billions to a province that can’t be bothered with Confederation.”
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