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EDMONTON — When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was taking part in a gender equality panel at the G20 in Argentina, spoke about the “gender impacts when you bring construction workers into a rural area,” he struck a nerve among many in a province that’s bracing for potential layoffs in the oil industry and worrying over the future of the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Alberta politicians slammed Trudeau on social media for impugning the good name of oil workers. But, despite the furor, it’s not clear what exactly Trudeau meant — or whether what people think he said has any basis in fact. Here’s a look at how the controversy unfolded.

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Here’s exactly what Trudeau said:

“So, there’s all sorts of shifts we’re making because we know that you cannot succeed as a society if you are holding back half of your population. And looking at all the different barriers and moving forward on reducing them, on eliminating them as well as, as a government body, looking at how every different decision can have an impact on women in a positive or a negative way. Even big infrastructure projects, you know, might now say, well, what does a gender lens have to do with building this new highway or this new pipeline or something? Well, you know, there are gender impacts when you bring construction workers into a rural area. There are social impacts because they’re mostly male construction workers. How are you adjusting and adapting to those? That’s what the gender lens in GBA-plus budgeting is all about. These are all things that we’ve been doing, not to be nice or to be better or to be moral, but to be smart about getting the very best out of all of our citizens and making the very best out of our economy, because women entrepreneurs tend to make better choices than others — we’ve seen it study after study. So, this is all something that I see the world moving on in many ways. Leaders are moving on. But the business community needs to wake up and move on as well….”