EDMONTON — It was page-one news out here over the weekend: ‘Obama Rejects Keystone XL’. Not really “news” as such. More like closure.

Leaks had been circulating for months that the project was already doomed. The project proponent, TransCanada, made a ‘Hail Mary’ pitch to the Obama administration to delay a final decision until a new route could be considered; it was turned down.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered a predictable expression of disappointment. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers offered a predictable expression of outrage. In Hardisty, Alberta, where the pipeline would start, locals watched a hoped-for economic boon fade from view. Across Alberta, hundreds of industrial contractors and thousands of recently unemployed welders and fitters found one more door closed to employment.

Critics of the decision — and there are many — argue that the decision was based entirely on politics, not economic or environmental facts. They’re right, of course. President Barack Obama pointed out that the project was neither the economic panacea its proponents promised, nor the environmental apocalypse its opponents predicted — also true. The project would have created economic wealth, however — thousands of construction jobs on both sides of the border — and would have posed some environmental risks.

So Keystone XL was neither black nor white — and almost all important political decisions fall into that grey area. President Obama is in the last 400 days of his presidency, a presidency which has failed to live up to the lofty expectations of his 2008 election. He desperately needs a legacy. On the eve of the Paris Climate Change Conference, Obama could not afford to undermine his own legacy.

“America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious actions to fight climate change and, frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership,” he said.

By not doing more to develop a robust environmental strategy and repair their lousy international reputations as environmental laggards, Canada and Alberta together conceded the debate to the environmental lobby. By not doing more to develop a robust environmental strategy and repair their lousy international reputations as environmental laggards, Canada and Alberta together conceded the debate to the environmental lobby.

Had the decision been based solely on the project’s economic, energy security and environmental merits, I suspect the outcome would have been different. Keystone would have created 9,000 construction jobs in the U.S. Out of all the countries from which the U.S. imports oil (Mexico, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Venezuela) Canada is the only one with any greenhouse gas regulations.

On the project’s merits, TransCanada made its case — but domestic politics carried the day. That should surprise no one. Canadians will recall a federal government decision several years ago preventing Australia’s BHB Billiton from taking over the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. There was no evidence that potash was a “strategic resource” — a term not even defined in the Investment Canada Act. There was, however, overwhelming opposition to the sale in Saskatchewan. So the Harper government quashed it, citing the contrived strategic resource argument. Domestic politics rules.

That said, Canada didn’t have to make it so easy for the Obama administration to do what it wanted to do with Keystone. Sec. of State John Kerry bluntly called Alberta bitumen “one of the dirtiest sources of fuel on the planet” — a dubious statement, but one that can be buttressed by selected evidence to justify a political decision. Perception is reality — and Canada has earned most of its reputation as an environmental slacker.

We need to do a better job of extracting and processing oilsands reserves — and we need to be seen doing it. Separating oil from oilsand creates between 10 and 20 per cent more emissions than oil harvested from conventional wells — but less than oil from reserves in Venezuela and parts of California. The oilsands industry is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada — but burning coal to make electricity is still the largest source of worldwide GHG emissions.

The Harper government promised oil and gas emission regulations in 2006 — but never got past the stage of consulting with industry. That failure — and the government’s decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol — made it far too easy for opponents of the “tarsands” to ignore the environmental costs of coal and Venezuelan oil and set their sights firmly on northern Alberta.

For all its loud support for the energy industry, for all of its bold talk of making Canada an energy “superpower”, the Harper government failed to build a single pipeline. By not doing more to develop a robust environmental strategy and repair their lousy international reputations as environmental laggards, Canada and Alberta together conceded the debate to the environmental lobby.

This year saw new governments elected in both Alberta and at the federal level. It’s a chance at a re-start — a fresh opportunity to develop new and purposeful climate change strategies. Success means clearing the way for a new pipeline; failure means forcing Canada’s energy industry to carry on as a price-taker in the world market.

If we fail next time, let’s at least remember that we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

Brent Rathgeber was the Conservative MP for the riding of Edmonton—St. Albert from 2008 to 2013, when he resigned from the Conservative caucus to protest the Harper government’s lack of commitment to transparency and open government. He ran and lost in the 2015 federal election to a Conservative candidate. He is the author of Irresponsible Government: The Decline of Parliamentary Democracy in Canada.

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