Smith MAGA Ballot Produces Carney Carbon Gold Rush Pledge

This Week In Annexation II.4

Carney and Danielle Smith making the announcement -- image via Mark Carney on X

By Gabriel Haythornthwaite, The DNA Report

With only 16 days to go before the Smith MAGA ballot, The DNA Report concludes This Week in Annexation with a crowning piece of federal electioneering in Alberta’s pre-annexation referendum.

“The Canadian taxpayer is going to make a lot of money on this pipeline.”

With that assessment on October, banker-PM Mark Carney officially designated the Pacific Link pipeline (set to be punched from Alberta through to the BC westcoast) “as a project of national interest”. For the second time in three days, Carney weighed in upon an election campaign with a multi-deca-billion dollar fossil fuel boondoggle—this time from a press husting in Fort McMurray, Alberta with Governor Danielle Smith and the ‘separation’ vote hanging over the country.

Carney’s pandering to Albertan oil heavies has been given the transparent beard of a vat of gold for taxpayers at the end of the appeasement pipeline, but…first, the public will be compelled to front up 90% of the dough mountain needed to build the thing.

Construction of Pacific Link is estimated to cost between $35b and $44b over six years—more than the current pipeline record-holder, the Trans Mountain Expansion which ran up an extravagant $34b public tab. The Canadian and Albertan governments are each putting up a 45% taxpayer stake with the Canada-based Pembina Pipeline Corporation investing the remaining 10%.

Dubbing her pipeline as “co-operative federalism” in action, Governor Smith has every reason to be pleased at the big fish she has brought back to oil country. The constitution blackmail strategy Smith adopted during last year’s federal election, with its ten demands on behalf of the immensely powerful fossil fuel cartel, is working better than any charm. Not only are the feds ponying up at least $16b for this gargantuan scheme, Carney’s play of the ‘national interest’ card also overrides the constitutional treaty rights of First Nations and the provincial jurisdiction of BC.

If Canadian taxpayers want to know what they can expect for their billions sunk into the oily Smith-Carney pipeline, consider the record of getting zero back from previous such ‘investments’ which still run up costs even if just from the debt racked up alone. Another sterling record to observe is that of the Albertan rulers’ brilliant management of oil royalty revenues, sitting at a total of $32b after 50 years (Norway’s Oil Fund is one hundred times larger at $3.3 trillion) while facing more than a quarter trillion in derelict company clean-up costs.

CEO Carney’s ‘step-right-up’ messaging that appeasement will make the taxpayer rich is reminiscent of the old fashion saying “you can’t cheat an honest man”. Anyone thinking they will and should get rich via a record mass pollution project has to fall under that saying. And the working class taxpayer experience with these ‘investments’ is reminiscent of the old SCTV comedy song satire of Going Down The Road crooning that ordinary folks seeking fortune “always get a potful but they never get a pot of gold.”

Editorial cartoon for Tuesday Dec. 2, 2025: Graeme MacKay/The Hamilton Spectator

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Gabriel Haythornthwaite is a former labour-allied school board trustee in BC and currently advises First Nations around political and intergovernmental relations. He is also a leftwing writer and political organizer.