Prime Minister Justin Trudeau got a taste of his own medicine when on Inauguration Day, President Joe Biden dealt a body blow to the Canadian energy industry by cancelling the partly-built $8-billion Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. What Biden did to our country was hardly different from what Trudeau had inflicted on us before. And for the same fatuous and hypocritical reasons.
Trudeau’s biggest problem in trying to sell the U.S. on KXL — hypocrisy — is largely of his own making. He asked Biden to approve a pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to the U.S. even though he put the kibosh on the Northern Gateway and Energy East pipelines, which would have transported petroleum across Canada from the same reserves (and would have reduced net global emissions by substituting oil and gas for coal in Asia). Why would the U.S. president give a thought to Canadian jobs when the Liberal government’s own policies have devastated employment in our energy sector and supply chains across the country?
If an additional pipeline is socially unacceptable to Quebecers, as Premier François Legault says, why should a Canadian oil pipeline be acceptable to Americans? “Rules for thee but not for me” don’t migrate well across international borders. On the other hand, last year Canada accounted for 56 per cent of U.S. crude oil imports or 3.8 million barrels a day, so it is a bit rich for the president to suddenly go all judgmental about the oilsands.
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