Let's say you want to convince an entire province that the pipeline you're planning to run through some of its most treasured natural areas is a great idea. Probably the last thing you'd want to do is suggest that you didn't know what those treasured natural areas look like. And, the chances are, if you did, you'd probably hope not many people heard about it or, say, spread it around on Facebook. Unfortunately for Enbridge, the company that hopes to run the Northern Gateway pipeline from northern Alberta to the Pacific coast of British Columbia, all of those things have happened. But it's just the latest misstep in the increasingly complicated domestic debate over Canada's oil sands.

The 17 hours it took for someone to notice oil gushing from Enbridge's pipeline in Michigan last year was, along with everything else, a ticking PR time bomb. Now the company's due a geography lesson, as Facebookers in Canada will tell you, given the way its newest cock-up is trending. Everyone's sharing the corporate drawing of the Douglas Channel leading from the Pacific ocean to Kitimat, BC. A waterway packed with 1,000 sq km of pointy islands was shown in an Enbridge presentation to be open water. Enbridge says it was only for "illustrative purposes". Illustrative indeed. Five thousand people shared it from LeadNow. Another couple thousand from activist David Suzuki. Even before this, one cabinet minister was already wary of Enbridge. Now? Who knows. But that oil still needs to go somewhere.

It was never supposed to be this way for the Conservatives, the jobs-and-growth crew from out west – the team that's never been afraid to extol the benefits of Alberta's oil, or encourage their political foes to go and see for themselves the progress being made up there. And why shouldn't they? That's their bag. The natural resources minister even went so far as to claim that soon you might just be able to drink from tailings ponds. We'll have to see about that. For now, there are pressing matters beyond just the fact that the oil sands are an eyesore, and beyond the charges about greenhouse gases, and allegations of increased disease floating downriver. A government can handle that, out-manoeuvering environmental concerns with political rhetoric. Now, though?

It started with Keystone XL, that gigantic artery TransCanada plans to graft onto the landscape from Alberta to Texas. The one, we might remember, President Obama delayed to make himself look like a job killer or a Marxist or whatever. Well, that's his problem. But we have our own. The government still wants to mine jobs that are, like the bitumen itself, potentially untapped, but that's only if they can move the product. At least we have the Chinese. Maybe. Prime minister Stephen Harper jetted over to pick up some pandas and whatever guarantees he could gather that the Chinese would take that oil – just as soon as we could get it to the west coast on the cheap.

That's not going to be easy. The Northern Gateway pipeline, still at assessment stage, is now also the subject of a battle between British Columbia and Alberta over who will get the most money out of the whole thing. The royalty rules are clear, as far as Alberta knows, but BC premier Christy Clark is looking for a bump in the pre-election polls, so she's scrambling around for some turf to steal from the New Democrats, who would stop it altogether. So Clark will ride the pipeline – conceivably, right into the ground. Or out of it, if it comes to that.

Which brings us back to Enbridge, whose past keeps coming back to haunt it and, in turn, anyone interested in expanding overseas markets.

And don't forget the Europeans, those socialists, who can't recapitalise their banks as quickly as we want them to. But never mind. Onward to the free trade agreement that we're told will bring more jobs and growth and prosperity for both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps it will, and all the better for it. And yet, there will still be that northern Alberta oil, subject to fuel quality directives the Europeans will need met before they hand over their cash. They are unfairly stigmatising, we say. Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel danced around a question on it at a press conference Thursday. Yes, she and Harper talked about the fuel directives and the oil sands, she said. The Germans are familiar with the problems that exist.

Yeah? Tell us about it.