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.
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.
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.
And again, Alberta is missing other critical infrastructure as a result and as a province is happy about that.