Shortly after Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith formally signed their memorandum of understanding on Thursday, Smith joked to reporters in Calgary that she would love for “pipelines to be boring again.”
It’s not clear that pipelines have ever been boring — they have been associated with political tumult in Canada for at least 70 years. And given the great questions that are still tied up in both the idea and the reality of an interprovincial pipe — the unresolved work of reconciliation, the lack of a complete answer to the present and future threat of climate change, the fear for national unity — it is difficult to imagine that a pipeline could easily be made boring in this moment.
