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You can find optimistic spins on this latest setback. They should be ignored. Finance Minister Bill Morneau sounded only positive notes Thursday — that the ruling offered “good direction on next steps” to make sure the pipeline “moves ahead in the right way.” But it is not moving ahead, it’s moving backward. Construction must stop. Trans Mountain has lost its government licence to proceed.

The government need not return to Square One, but the remedies demanded by the appeals court — a new environmental assessment on the effect of more oil tankers on killer whales and a fresh round of consultation with Aboriginals — are not the small matters some people are suggesting. They will take a year at least and likely longer. Any appeal to the Supreme Court would take even longer, should the Liberal government decide to try that long shot.

Just getting this decision took nearly a year. It was the 18th court challenge the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion faced. Regulators and Kinder Morgan, the project’s owner up until this week, had prevailed 17 times. The project could not afford to lose even once. It just did.

The pessimists have it right, again. The Trans Mountain expansion was more meticulously threaded through all of Canada’s innumerable regulatory hoops than any project before. Kinder Morgan’s Canadian president, Ian Anderson, had taken to heart the vital importance of going over and above every minimum threshold, making it his personal mission to meet with First Nations groups all over B.C. and Alberta and listen to their concerns. Regulators under both Conservative and Liberal governments had worked to get Trans Mountain approved, and yet still failed to meet standards that judges can and do change any time they wish.