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He came. He saw. He got an earful.

Peter Watson’s 34-stop “national engagement” tour that took him to nearly the four corners of the Canadian landscape over six months in his first year as chairman of the National Energy Board concluded this week at the NEB’s 2015 pipeline safety forum in Calgary.

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Meetings with stakeholder groups in some cities — including Halifax, Winnipeg and Vancouver — led to noisy protests by pipeline opponents as the national debate over oilsands development, greenhouse gas emissions and the environment focused on the NEB’s role in public policy.

“There were a number of places where there was a lot of concern, a lot of debate around the politics of energy and the dynamics of energy,” Watson acknowledged in an interview at the NEB’s offices in Calgary’s Beltline area across the railway tracks from the towers that are home to Canada’s oil and gas industry.

There have been repeated demands — including from two high-profile interveners who quit the review for Kinder Morgan Canada’s Trans Mountain Expansion — for the federal regulator to consider climate change when determining if a crude oil pipeline is in the public good.