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I keep wondering what C. D. Howe would be thinking about 21st-century Canada’s paralytic dithering about whether to convert TransCanada’s mainline west-to-east pipeline from gas to oil in the Energy East project that is now so spectacularly stalled. Clarence Decatur Howe (1886-1960), the American-born Minister of Everything in the Liberal governments of Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent, did more than anyone to bring both TransCanada Pipe Lines (TCPL) and its original west-east gas line into existence, and he did both in just four years between 1954 and 1958.

What John A. Macdonald was to the railway, Howe was to the pipeline. He helped persuade Alberta premier Ernest Manning to allow the sale of Alberta gas to Central Canada. He forced the literally overnight merger of rival companies into TCPL. (He directed two corporate delegations at separate meetings one morning in January 1954 to come see him the next day as one. After all-night negotiations, they did.) He insisted on an all-Canadian route for the pipeline and discouraged north-south alternatives via regulatory and other forms of harassment. He helped Ontario premier Leslie Frost obtain an 88-0 vote of his legislature in support of the project. He befriended and cultivated American investors and regulators. And, most famously of all, in the spring of 1956 he invoked closure in the House of Commons on the bill setting up temporary public ownership of the unprofitable Northern Ontario segment of the line so that construction could begin that June and gas could flow by 1958, as in the end it did. Partly because of the bitter taste left by the “Pipeline Debate,” however, by the time the gas did flow, Howe and the Liberals were gone, replaced by the less arrogant, though ultimately much less effective Tories of John Diefenbaker.