Tapping the full potential of the oilpatch will require real progress on the government-owned Trans Mountain Pipeline — shovels might be in the ground, but there’s no end in sight to the legal hurdles the project faces, writes Joe Chidley. Grim. Gruesome. Gloomy: the short-term prospects for Canada’s oilpatch invite any number of depressing adjectives. Following an October election that effectively shut Alberta and Saskatchewan out of representation in Justin Trudeau’s new minority government (even though Alberta and Saskatchewan’s preferred party won a plurality of votes countrywide), November hasn’t done the West any favours. At the start of the month, there was the symbolically rattling announcement that Encana was moving headquarters out of Calgary to the States — and losing the Canadian element of its name by taking on the thoroughly nondenominational (and odd) moniker Ovintiv. That roughly coincided with an oil spill along the Keystone pipeline (operated by TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada Pipelines – another oof! there) in North Dakota. The loss of pipeline capacity saw the price differential between Western Canadian Select and West Texas intermediate crude rise more than five dollars. Keystone came back online on Nov. 10, but the political fallout probably hasn’t […]
