Trans Mountain Corporation and its financial overseer are making a pitch to keep the controversial, $34-billion pipeline in government hands indefinitely, possibly alongside Indigenous partners, The Canadian Press reports.
"It is a sovereign pipeline. It starts in Canada. It really ends in Canada. This is an incredibly strategic asset," Trans Mountain President and CEO Mark Maki told a Canadian Club Toronto luncheon on Monday.
Maki was joined on stage by Elizabeth Wademan, president and CEO of Canada Development Investment Corp. (CDEV). She said recent geopolitical turmoil has underscored the importance of the pipeline, which delivers oil sands crude from Edmonton to a marine terminal in the Vancouver area, from which cargoes can be sent to Asia.
"It has incredible value," said Wademan. "There's absolutely a case to be a long-term holder... I personally would love to see it owned by Canadians."
From the moment the government of then-prime minister Justin Trudeau bought Canadian taxpayers a pipeline in 2018, a parade of Cabinet ministers and officials have insisted they did not intend for the public to be the long-term owner, and would eventually sell the pipeline to the private sector, Indigenous groups, or a combination of the two. Indigenous participation is "absolutely still on the table," Wademan said this week, but negotiations are complex and take time.
She added that CDEV must keep all options on the table and "keep its finger on the pulse" for opportunities in the market.
Trans Mountain Corp., which owns and operates the pipeline itself, is a subsidiary of CDEV, which manages investments on behalf of the federal government and answers to the minister of finance. Wademan said CDEV is essentially a "friendly yet challenging shareholder" in the pipeline firm.
The original Trans Mountain pipeline has run from Alberta to the B.C. Lower Mainland since the 1950s. Six decades later, a Canadian subsidiary of Houston-based pipeline giant Kinder Morgan pitched a plan to expand the line through a project called TMX, enabling exports to Asia.
TMX ran into fierce Indigenous and other opposition and multiple court challenges, and Kinder Morgan, an offspring of the failed Enron empire, ultimately walked away. Ottawa bought the pipeline for $4.5 billion to ensure the expansion would be built. The projected cost of construction ballooned to more than $34 billion by the time it started up in May of 2024, up from the estimate of $7.4 billion seven years earlier.
Maki said the focus on the cost escalation misses a lot of context.
"It's like comparing a PC cost 20 years ago to today and what the capabilities are," he said, pointing to a regulatory environment that now appears to be shifting, as well as events beyond anyone's control around the time of construction, such as natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic.
There's no indication in the CP coverage that Maki explained his curious analogy between a one-off pipeline that was too big to succeed and a small, mass-produced consumer product-more comparable to solar panels, wind turbine blades, heat pumps, or storage batteries-that replicated quickly and plummeted in cost over time.
He did say the TMX system has been carrying 850,000 barrels of crude per day from the Edmonton area to its docks in Burnaby, B.C., getting close to its capacity of 890,000 barrels per day, CP writes.
That's not necessarily a good spot for Canada to be in, he said, as it means there's little flexibility for producers to get their oil to what he claimed are eager buyers across the Pacific. He said Canada needs a second West Coast pipeline-like the one Alberta is spearheading-and that it's too early to determine whether a northern or southern route to the B.C. coast would be best.
Trans Mountain is among the firms providing technical expertise to the Alberta plan, which is due to be submitted to the federal Major Projects Office by July 1.
His advice: "Take your time. Don't be in a rush to declare a north or south route."
The main body of this report was first published by The Canadian Press on May 11, 2026.
Source: The Energy Mix
