Redford meets Marois as Alberta deals with pipeline concerns on Eastern front

QUEBEC - The premier of Alberta has a meeting planned on the touchy subject of interprovincial oil flows — and, this time, the meeting's with a potentially tough customer in Quebec.

Alison Redford has struggled with a pipeline controversy in the west. Now she'll discuss one in the east with Pauline Marois, premier in the pro-independence Parti Quebecois government.

Marois announced to reporters in Quebec City today that she will meet with Redford at the start of a premiers' conference in Halifax.

She says she wants to know more about the Enbridge pipeline.

The plan would reverse the flow of an existing pipeline to bring Canadian oil, to Canadian customers in the eastern half of the country.

The project is being reviewed by the National Energy Board. And Quebec's environment minister, who until recently was a staunch environmental activist, has expressed alarm about the project and said Quebec wants to launch its own review.

That minister appears to have tempered some of his remarks.

Marois is now promising to have constructive relations with her counterparts in this, her first interprovincial meeting, since she won the Sept. 4 provincial election.

But she will make one thing clear: She's no Jean Charest. The recently defeated premier, an ardent federalist who once aspired to be Canada's prime minister, created the premiers' organization that is staging this week's meeting, called the Council of the Federation.

Marois says she will remind her colleagues of where her priorities lie, while remaining polite.