An oil leak right in Vancouver harbour, with slicks washing up on the pristine shores of English Bay and Stanley Park — that certainly gets voters paying attention to the environment in an election year.

Clean up of shoreline at Vancouver’s English Bay-courtesy Vancouver Observer

April’s spill from a cargo ship’s own fuel tank was small as these things go — less than 3,000 litres, 80 per cent of which was cleaned up within a few days. The point is that it happened not at sea or in a remote northern inlet, but within sight of downtown Vancouver, one of the most celebrated cityscapes in the world. Vancouver’s famous beaches were closed until further notice.

Federal, provincial and municipal politicians subsequently engaged in an unseemly blame game over the Coast Guard spending six hours getting booms in place to contain the leak — and allegedly waiting 12 hours before notifying the City of Vancouver. It also happens that the Harper government closed the nearby Kitsilano Coast Guard station, minutes away from the spill scene, as well as an Environment Canada emergency station and a Fisheries and Oceans marine mammal contaminants program.

What does this incident have to do with the oilsands and pipelines? Nothing and everything. Much of the controversy has been about the speed of the response to the spill. Premier Christy Clark made efficient spill response one of her five conditions for supporting new pipelines through British Columbia to tidewater on the West Coast. B.C., she said at the time, demands a “world-leading oil response prevention and recover systems.”

Well, this wasn’t exactly world-leading, was it? Which is where the pipeline companies come in — through no fault of their own. Kinder Morgan comes to mind first.

The $5 billion twinning of Kinder Morgan’s Trans-Mountain pipeline would increase its capacity from 300,000 barrels per day to 850,000 barrels. All that extra oilsands capacity would flow through lower B.C. to an expanded marine terminal in — you guessed it — Vancouver harbour. Large tankers would carry the heavy crude from Vancouver to refineries in Asia.

Next comes Trans-Canada, with its $12 billion Energy East pipeline project that would carry 1.1 million barrels per day through six provinces from Alberta to refineries in Quebec and New Brunswick. There’s fierce opposition to it in Quebec — not just from environmental activists but from farmers who want to know what it means for their back yards.

photo courtesy: TransCanada

And let’s not forget Keystone XL, Trans-Canada’s stymied $8 billion project to transport 800,000 barrels from Alberta to Texas refineries on the Gulf Coast. Long delayed in the courts and by President Barack Obama’s clear opposition, it certainly will not be approved before there’s a new president in the White House in 2017.

Altogether, we’re talking about nearly 3 million barrels a day of new pipeline capacity in political limbo. And then there are the environmental issues. Canada accounts for just two per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions; the oilsands are responsible for only 0.15 per cent of global GHG emissions.

But nobody can pretend Canada is a world leader on fighting climate change. We signed on to the 2009 Copenhagen target of reducing emissions to 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. We’re on course to miss that target … by a lot. As David McLaughlin, former head of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, recently wrote in Policymagazine: “Without additional measures, Canada will miss its target by … almost 50 per cent.”

The provinces have taken over the climate change and energy file from Ottawa. That Quebec City meeting was organized and hosted by Premier Philippe Couillard. He’s not just at the table of the federation — he intends to lead it. It’s easy to take issue with the cap-and-trade agreement he announced with Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. But the important thing is that Ontario and Quebec are close partners again, and the Canadian federation will work better for that.

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L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy.  He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.

(full comment at iPolitics)