NP: Is it just coincidence that relations with western Canada become so badly frayed when people named Trudeau happen to be prime minister, or is it possible there’s more to it than that?
You’d have a hard time convincing many Albertans that Justin Trudeau is any sort of improvement over his deeply disliked father. The Trudeau Liberals’ epic mishandling of the pipeline crisis — which wasn’t really a crisis until they turned it into one — already had backs up across the province when Albertans discovered they’d been hoodwinked by a surprise federal move to cement the widely-disliked equalization program in place for another five years.
What’s notable about the situation is how comprehensively the Liberals have created the problems for themselves. If Trudeau and his top honchos had deliberately set out to create a pipeline problem, they couldn’t have done any better. Trudeau claimed to support the Keystone XL project in the U.S. but paid little beyond lip service. When President Barack Obama killed it, he offered barely a murmur of complaint, noting he was “disappointed … but respect(s) the right of the United States to make the decision.” The Liberals blocked Northern Gateway, introduced a regulatory regime certain to confound future projects, watched Energy East die, and all but issued a veto to anti-oil activists by jabbering blithely about the importance of “social licence,” a term you don’t often hear from the embattled prime minister any more. Ottawa only got serious about Kinder Morgan when the company forced the issue; now Canadians are stuck with the costs, and a B.C. government that’s just as adamant as ever about ensuring it never gets built.
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