The East Coast's Decades-long Pipe Dream
Could a pipeline into Northern New Brunswick help solve the region's slow moving energy crisis?
Hi Everyone - I hope you’ve been enjoying your summer. I took a couple weeks off to hang out with family and friends in Ontario and New Brunswick, and now I’m ready to get back to writing and prep for what should be an active autumn. This column reflects some of the things I’ve been mulling about as I’ve driven around the backroads here on the East Coast. Cheers - Lisa
There’s a certain spot on the Waterford Road where cell phone service dies.
It’s just beyond the last farm, about 15 minutes past Sussex Corner Elementary School, as the road dips down and then curves left, past the tourist sign for the Urney Road covered bridge and just beyond that, the entrance to Poley Mountain.
Regardless of provider, no conversation can continue past this point, which is why a few years ago Poley Mountain Resorts installed its own small system so skiers and mountain bikers could have access to wi-fi while on the hill or in the chalet.
Living in the Maritimes means learning to accept that infrastructure is rarely as expansive as the views.
It’s as if the strip of southern Canada that runs east-west along the Canada-U.S. border is an all-inclusive resort and everything beyond that a nice-looking RV Park where you sometimes have to jerry-rig your own solution.
The cause of this discrepancy is usually credited to two long-standing reasons.
First, the population is small and dispersed. For instance, New Brunswick is home to roughly the same number of people as Winnipeg, MB spread across an area 14 times larger.
The second reason is our terrain. The four Atlantic provinces are part of the Appalachian Region, which closely resembles our country’s largest topographical feature, the Canadian Shield.
The same rock formations that create the business case for copper, tungsten, and zinc mining turn investors away at the thought of laying and maintaining telecom and energy transmission systems that service all of the East Coast.
That doesn’t stop Atlantic Canadians from asking for better access to phone service, the Internet, passenger trains, airlines, and energy; services that are well-funded and accessible from Vancouver Island to Quebec City.
Enter the Eastern Energy Partnership, the $8-billion pitch to power up Atlantic Canada’s energy infrastructure so the East Coast can at long last be fully connected to the rest of Canada.
Initially, energy wasn’t at the top of the wish lists for the four Atlantic premiers when they individually pitched Prime Minister Mark Carney and One Canadian Economy Minister Dominic LeBlanc on potential nation-building projects last spring.
For instance, New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt said she was focused on four projects to support nation building: develop critical minerals; modernize national defense via CFB Gagetown; boost the province’s modular housing production to address Canada’s housing shortage; and develop the province’s energy infrastructure, which could include nuclear, wind and biomass, to lower costs by increasing supply.
The response from the federal government was...meh.
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Now back to the story…
LeBlanc, who spends his days flying between Washington, Ottawa, and his home on New Brunswick’s eastern Acadian shore, told his provincial counterparts they were thinking too small.
Western Canada seeks to extend pipelines from Alberta and Saskatchewan’s oil and gas fields to ports on B.C.’s Pacific coast and Manitoba’s Arctic coast, Ontario has eyes on developing its northern Ring of Fire for critical minerals, and Quebec is focused on its long-standing hydroelectric dominance.
Dream bigger by working together and do it quickly, he said; a big ask that has historically been difficult to achieve amongst Canada’s smallest provinces.
Nevertheless, in the first week of June on the eve of a meeting between Carney and the premiers, the Eastern Energy Partnership was announced.
An idea that is both decades and weeks in the making.
The announcement caught people in the region’s energy sector by surprise. I was at a bio energy conference the week the Partnership debuted and no one knew what it was.
It turns out to be a McGuyver public policy pitch, combining existing potential projects, such as Nova Scotia’s wind farms and nuclear power in New Brunswick, with some old ideas revived for their nation-building traits.
For instance, the debate over whether to lay pipe to connect the Maritimes into the not-quite-transCanadian natural gas transmission system had been popping up since the 1970s.
Montreal’s Q and M Pipe Lines Ltd., a subsidiary of Calgary-based Alberta Gas Trunk Line Co., proposed an extension of its line from Quebec City down into New Brunswick to connect to Halifax and to Saint John before crossing the border at St. Stephen to connect into the American system.
This would bring Alberta natural gas to Canada’s East Coast, a response to the 1970s Energy Crisis that had caused prices to spike only a few years earlier.
The development of Nova Scotia’s offshore natural gas reserves near Sable Island was an added bonus, because natural gas could flow in either direction.
But Calgary-based TransCanada Pipeline argued against it, saying a coast-to-coast pipeline would delay Sable Island’s development, significantly reduce the Province of Nova Scotia’s royalty return and compete with Western Canadian gas in Ontario.
The preferred route was to send gas from Canso to Moncton, Fredericton and down to St. Stephen, with laterals into Halifax and Saint John, which is the path of the current Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline that has now inspired the Eastern Energy Partnership.
There was a second attempt to connect gas through northern New Brunswick to Quebec in the mid-1990s but it also failed for both economic and political reasons.
The old arguments from the 1970s resurfaced along with western arguments of political favouritism because Prime Minister Jean Chretien publicly backed the proposal alongside nationalist Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard.
So the Maritimes, once again, remained unconnected to the rest of Canada.
Now the idea is back, 20 years later: a nation-building opportunity contained within 300 kilometres of pipe.
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