Tar Sands, Social Movements and the Politics of Energy Infrastructure
by Amy Janzwood
UBC PRESS
2025/$34.95/312 pP.
As we approach the precipice of another pipeline battle, now is an opportune moment to pick up Amy Janzwood’s insightful and comprehensive analysis of the successes and failures of pipeline resistance in the opening decades of the 21st century. Janzwood recounts the divergent fates of two pipelines: the Northern Gateway, cancelled on the same day in November 2016 that prime minister Justin Trudeau approved the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX), which was completed in 2024. Janzwood, a political scientist, seeks to understand the conditions shaping the completion, delay or failure of oil sands pipeline projects in the recent past and uses these examples to flesh out some important answers.
With the spike in oil sands production that heralded the early 2000s came the need for added infrastructure to carry oil to international markets. Northern Gateway and TMX were but two of 19 projects proposed to the National Energy Board (now the Canada Energy Regulator) after 2006. British Columbia and federal politics are central to Janzwood’s story, notwithstanding that the oil originates in Alberta, because of the ways pipelines carry the hazards of oil and gas across jurisdictions.
The actors at the heart of Janzwood’s book are those who made up campaign coalitions opposing mega pipelines: Indigenous peoples, grassroots groups, non-governmental environmental organizations, politicians and community members. Interviews with many of the main players enrich Janzwood’s analysis, which is grounded in a sophisticated scholarly literature on coalition formation, influence, strategies and success.
From Janzwood’s account, we see how the coalitions against Northern Gateway changed the politics of pipelines in Canada. Their highly effective public engagement prompted minister of the environment Joe Oliver to publish an open letter decrying “radical” environmentalists standing in the way of development. More consequentially, Janzwood ties pipeline opposition to the Conservative government’s omnibus Bill C-38 in 2012 that weakened environmental legislation, including the Fisheries Act and the Species at Risk Act, in order to deregulate and facilitate resource extraction. If those were setbacks, Indigenous-led legal challenges, culminating in the Gitxaala Nation v. Canada decision, reaffirmed the federal government’s duty to consult affected First Nations. Janzwood argues convincingly that this decision created an opening for Trudeau to cancel the politically unpopular Northern Gateway and bring in a tanker ban on the northern BC coast.
The 2012 omnibus bill also changed the regulatory process in a way that stymied the campaign coalition’s ability to oppose the TMX pipeline as they had done so effectively with Northern Gateway. The coalition adapted by pursuing other strategies: questioning the legitimacy of the regulator, organizing major protests and undermining shareholder confidence in the viability of TMX. The Trudeau government purchased the pipeline from Kinder Morgan, enabling its eventual completion even in the face of continued legal obstacles and ever-rising costs. Janzwood emphasizes that it was nationalization that ensured the construction of the pipeline, even in the face of sustained and organized opposition.
One weakness in the book lies in Janzwood’s approach to workers and unions, whom she dismisses as “allies of extractive capital” despite a growing literature on and evidence of worker–environmentalist (or blue–green) coalitions. Still, whether you oppose or support pipelines, particularly amid the charged nationalist politics of the present, this book will be of interest. Janzwood has skillfully illuminated weak spots and sources of power on the evolving battlefield where pipeline infrastructure is at the heart of larger, existential debates about fossil fuel extraction.
Liza Piper is a professor of history at the University of Alberta, with a research focus on Alberta resource politics
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