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In early 2008, Harper positioned Canada as a new confident nation that could throw its weight around, especially with the United States. With the vast Alberta oilsands in its hip pocket, Harper said Canada was in a position to become a world energy leader. Harper even took this new swagger into the trade arena with talk of a NAFTA renegotiation.

“PM Plays Energy Card,” said a National Post headline in April 2008. The story reported that Harper had “issued a direct warning” to the U.S. over the prospect of reopening NAFTA. If NAFTA were reopened, he boasted, “we would be in an even stronger position now than we were 20 years ago. And we will be in a stronger position in the future.”

Sounds very Trumpish, although, bizarrely, Harper was talking tough to ward off liberal populists Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who were then sparring with anti-NAFTA rhetoric in their battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. No such bravado would be on display from Harper at the White House. But Harper cannot dodge Canada’s past arrogance, and neither can he nor anyone else really blame Trudeau and leftist craziness for Canada’s energy meltdown.

Within weeks of Harper’s 2008 declarations of energy arrogance, the underlying weakness of that position should have been apparent. While Harper’s energy superpower claim rested on the oilsands, America’s future as the real global energy superpower had been clearly defined.

On May 21, 2008, John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil, appeared before a U.S. Senate committee to urge Washington to acknowledge that America was then sitting on vast stores of shale oil and gas, the likes of which the world had never seen. In one Midwest region alone, he said, the shale oil resources are “more than triple the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.”