Maybe 2019 will be a better year than 2018, politically and economically.

When our editors asked me to write a column about the biggest stories of the year just past and predict the ones that will be big in the year ahead, I came up with two.

Distroscale

In Alberta, of course, pipelines dominated most people’s lives in 2018 and will do so again in 2019. That’s Story No. 1.

Whether or not we can get our oil to ports (and from there to overseas markets) is huge for the entire province and especially for the hundreds of thousands of working people and their families who depend on the energy industry – rig workers, engineers, geologists, surveyors, truck drivers, lawyers, accountants, investment specialists, refinery technicians, oilfield service suppliers, welders, plumbers, electricians and on and on and on.

And it’s not just in the West. Manufacturers, suppliers and service companies in other provinces employ tens of thousands of people because of the oil in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

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In fancy terms, for us in the West pipelines are an existential issue. We don’t get pipelines, we don’t exist, at least not as we have for more than 50 years.

That’s why the nation has seen thousands of people in places such as Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, Calgary, Nisku (just south of Edmonton) and Slave Lake organize peaceful rallies and giant truck convoys to protest both Ottawa’s and our own NDP’s anti-oil policies. Our livelihoods and lives are at stake.

The double frustration is that no other country’s national government seems actively to be shutting down its resource sector the way Justin Trudeau and his Liberals are. They are True Believers in the farcical fantasy that Canada can transition to a carbon-free economy painlessly, seamlessly and speedily, and that we will all end up tomorrow with well-paying, environmentalist-approved careers.

Just before Christmas, Statistics Canada released the results of a decade-long study of “green” industry and technology. Despite federal and provincial governments having thrown tens of billions of dollars at alternative energy and eco-friendly technologies (especially the Liberals in Ontario), just 3.1 per cent of the country’s GDP and just 1.6 per cent of its jobs come from the “green” sector.

And the truly revealing fact is that those percentages have changed almost not at all in the past decade. The federal Liberals seem to think it makes perfect sense to beggar the energy sector, which directly provides about 12 per cent of our GDP and jobs (and indirectly much more) in favour of the unicorns and rainbows of the “green” dreamers.

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The second big story of 2018 is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s clown-show tour of India. The fallout from that tour might turn out to have as profound an impact on Canadian politics as any other story this year. Millions of Canadians who admired Trudeau and his “sunny ways” saw him, finally, as the lightweight Mr. Dressup he is.

The India trip shook Trudeau’s credibility to a depth no other faux pas or policy failing has.

A lot of opposition attention has been focused on the cost of the trip (nearly $2 million) and the fact Canadian officials included a convicted Indian terrorist on their invite list for an official reception.

But what voters remember and care about is how ridiculously embarrassing Diva Trudeau’s constant costume changes were.

From that point on (February 2018), Trudeau has struggled to remain popular, so much so that the latest Angus Reid poll gives him a net negative rating of 23 per cent. Trump’s net negative is just 10 per cent.