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Cutting off B.C.’s gasoline supply is now a nonpartisan issue in Alberta. Opposition leader Jason Kenney has been threatening it for months. And now, the province’s ruling NDP just made it a key plank of their latest speech from the throne.

Last month, a National Post report concluded that Vancouver could probably weather a pipeline shutdown relatively easily. However, in the weeks since its publication, plenty of smart people have emerged from the woodwork to fervently disagree.

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Below, a rundown of how Alberta may indeed have British Columbia by the short hairs if it needs to.

Vancouver consumes a heck of a lot of Alberta petroleum

From the Seabus to the B-Line to that Delorean that’s always parked near West Broadway, chances are good that if it has an engine and it’s in Vancouver, it’s burning Alberta oil. According to Natural Resource Canada, roughly 50 to 60 per cent of Vancouver’s petroleum originates in an Edmonton refinery. Meanwhile, even Vancouver’s locally refined fuels have some Alberta lineage. Metro Vancouver’s only refinery, a Parkland Fuel Corp.-owned facility in Burnaby, is supplied primarily with Alberta petroleum from the Trans Mountain pipeline. That pipeline also sends 54 per cent of its annual shipments to refineries in Washington State, which then ship gas and diesel to Metro Vancouver on fuel barges. It’s for this reason that among oil industry types, it’s commonly said that between 80 and 90 per cent of all the fuel consumed in the Lower Mainland spent at least part of its life inside the Trans Mountain pipeline.