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CALGARY • The leader of one of the largest union groups in North America called U.S. President Barack Obama a “hypocrite” for rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline and insisted the Alberta-to-Texas project will get built.

With oil train explosions becoming a weekly occurrence in the United States safe oil transportation should come before politics, Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, said Friday.

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“I have every confidence in the world that we are going to build that pipeline,” he said in an interview from Washington. “People will demand it and will build it, regardless of who the next Congress is and who the next president of the U.S. is. And we are going to build others.”

By siding with “radical environmentalists,” McGarvey said Obama alienated workers, a core constituency of the Democratic Party, who want jobs and reasonable environmental and energy policies.