Another sacrifice to Trudeau’s false green gods

would compete with our resource exports, headed up by the likes of Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Four major pipelines or expansions were built between 2006 and 2015: Enbridge’s Alberta Clipper and its Line 9 reversal, Kinder Morgan’s Anchor Loop, and TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline (not to be confused with Keystone XL). That resulted in 1.73 million barrels per day of additional capacity for western Canadian oil.

Then the Liberals took office promising a better approach to energy policy. They subsequently rejected the previously approved $7.9-billion Northern Gateway pipeline. Petronas has since cancelled its $36-billion Pacific Northwest LNG project. Trans Canada called off its $12-billion Energy East pipeline proposal. And now the $7.4-billion Trans Mountain expansion is suspended. That’s a total of $63 billion in lost capital investment, tens of thousands of jobs, and hundreds of billions more in revenue Canada will now not see from producing and selling resources.

Unless it can be salvaged, this will be a national disgrace. The prime minister should accept his share of responsibility and hold his ministers to account. Carr naively believed that he could buy off anti-development militants with a debilitating carbon tax and stultifying regulations. McKenna’s focus on hammering oil and gas extraction deserves extra credit for its blind obsession. They should both be shuffled somewhere they can do less damage to the country.

Even if voters improbably forgive this colossal failure of leadership, historians will not. Our country’s well-being has been severely damaged and the injury was inflicted on us by a government that deliberately ignored the national interest in pursuit of a fantasy, fostered by a delusion and fuelled by dystopian radicals, privileged NIMBYs and conniving foreign enablers. What will puzzle future generations is why we let this government get away with it.