National Observer columnist says politicians, media are reinforcing victimhood while failing to test economic assumptions behind pipelines, LNG and long-term oil growth
Alberta’s political grievances are less a product of mistreatment by Ottawa than a durable political strategy that protects provincial leaders from accountability, journalist and columnist Max Fawcett says..
In an interview (see video below) with Energi Media, Fawcett said every province has legitimate disputes with the federal government because friction is built into Confederation. Alberta differs, he argued, because conservative politicians have spent decades turning those disputes into a permanent culture of victimhood.
“We have a political culture here, federally and provincially, that exists to pour concrete onto those grievances and reinforce them,” he said. The result is a public conversation in which global commodity cycles, provincial policy failures and Alberta’s dependence on a volatile industry are routinely recast as evidence of federal hostility.
Fawcett said that narrative also discourages political and business leaders from challenging separatism or other claims they know are misleading. He described the silence of influential Albertans as a leadership failure driven by the desire to retain access to power.
The conversation then widened from grievance politics to the quality of Canadian journalism. Fawcett rejected a blanket criticism of the news media but said shrinking newsrooms and the loss of specialist reporters have weakened scrutiny of complex energy policy. General-assignment reporters are often expected to cover several unrelated beats and lack the time or background to test claims about LNG economics, pipeline demand or future oil production.
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That weakness matters because governments of different political stripes are presenting new fossil-fuel infrastructure as an obvious economic benefit, he said. Fawcett pointed to debate over LNG Canada expansion and a proposed new West Coast oil pipeline as examples where assumptions about costs, production growth, commodity prices and long-term demand deserve much harder examination.
Fawcett continues to defend the federal purchase and expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, arguing that its wider effect on the price received for existing Canadian barrels made it a sound public investment. But he said the same case cannot simply be extended to future pipelines requiring expensive new oil production.
He argued that governments are underestimating the possibility of a much faster global energy transition. Even assigning a modest probability to sharply lower oil demand should lead policymakers to reduce risk and test projects against less favourable scenarios.
The deeper failure, Fawcett said, is a lack of imagination about Alberta’s future. Rather than treating bitumen as valuable only when burned, governments could pursue higher-value materials and industries with longer-term prospects.
Without a more honest debate, he warned, Albertans may eventually confront job losses and failed investments and ask why no one told them the world was changing. “We tried,” Fawcett said. “We sure did try.”
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