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The ugly years of Quebec separatism are fading. In its place, we have B.C.’s hardline Green-NDP alliance, with its narrow agenda and dismissive approach to national interests

It sets them up as not only a thorn in the side of the federal government, which has already approved the Kinder Morgan pipeline, but also a threat to the country’s energy industry as a whole. Alberta, with its crucial oil economy, is landlocked and struggling to gain access to ports that would enable it to reduce its reliance on the U.S., where President Donald Trump’s anti-free-trade rhetoric has sparked concern across a global economy in which easy access to foreign markets has become the backbone to prosperity. The uncertainty engendered by an erratic and unpredictable Washington has particular resonance in Canada, which exported $320.1 billion in goods and services to the U.S. last year. Any serious disruption to that flow is a serious danger to Canada’s economy, and millions of jobs.

The new B.C. alliance seems blithely unconcerned. The coalition hasn’t even taken office yet, and already Weaver is busily souring relations with Alberta, where Premier Rachel Notley is Canada’s only other NDP premier and should be a natural ally.

Canada, Notley saidthis week, “can’t be a country that says one of its two functional coastlines is only going to do what the people who live right beside it want to do.” In a separate interview she notedthat giving the coalition “veto power over overall national benefits, then that’s where we take the wrong path in relation to the 21st century economy.”

Weaver fired backthat Notley should “get with the program,” disparaging warnings of the economic damage the Green-NDP plan could entail. “I think British Columbians, quite frankly, are sick and tired of being told that the 20th-century economy is the economy of tomorrow,” he said. For good measure, he added that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was a “hypocrite” for approving the $7.4 billion Kinder Morgan pipeline while promoting support for climate change initiatives.