The federal Liberals are starting to reveal what they really think. And they think demon oil is the perfect foil for October’s federal election.

Take this remarkable tweet from Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, who was reacting to news that Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer met privately with oil executives at an Alberta lodge to talk about election campaigns, among other things.

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“Straight from Harper’s playbook,” she wrote. “Andrew Scheer has been caught scheming behind closed doors with wealthy executives to gut environmental protection laws, silence critics, and make pollution free again.”

The zealous minister misses her own irony. “Scheming behind closed doors with wealthy executives” is an exact description of Liberal behaviour in the SNC-Lavalin case.

But never mind that. Or mind it, if you like.

The telling part is her assumption that the goal of the meeting was to “gut environmental protections law.”

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She forgets, or ignores, the fact that Alberta’s biggest energy companies support Alberta’s 100-megatonne cap on emissions, which Justin Trudeau’s government does not want incoming Alberta premier Jason Kenney to cancel

In 2016, executives of Canadian Natural Resources, Suncor Energy, Cenovus Energy and Shell Canada publicly backed the NDP’s plan for both a cap and provincial carbon tax.

The Alberta policy — and industry acceptance — was the single most radical improvement in climate action that any province, or Ottawa, has implemented.

But the industry and Alberta itself got very little credit from the rest of the country. From McKenna, the reward today is outright contempt.

Soon, the NDP climate program will be dismantled by Kenney.

The Liberals can blame themselves. Their own double standard — intense legislative and regulatory hostility even as they bought the Trans Mountain pipeline — created a backlash more furious than Alberta’s reaction to the 1980 National Energy Program.

McKenna’s talk of “wealthy executives” also ignores the real victims of these disastrous years — scores of small oil companies owned and operated by Albertans.

The big players can leave to invest money they earned in Alberta in other places. It’s already happening.

But that option does not exist for the small Alberta owners who create — or used to create — tens of thousands of jobs. We hear no empathy from McKenna for the legions of Alberta unemployed.

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McKenna also tweeted: “At the meeting, the Conservatives specifically discussed ‘deploying litigation as a tool’ to silence environmental critics …

She continued: “Scheer’s spokesperson ‘did not say whether that would include targeting environmental groups with audits or through litigation.’ We know what that means.”

Yes, we do. It means that the industry might finally start defending itself in court against the single most concerted attack on any Canadian economic sector.

Again, the federal hypocrisy is almost beyond belief.

When an opponent challenges the Trans Mountain pipeline for any reason whatever, the Liberals bow, or rather grovel, in deep respect.

They’ve delayed the pipeline for another eight months since the court rejection last Aug. 30, because of their line-by-line respect for legal challenges.

I would not say this attention to a court ruling is a bad thing.

But now, a senior minister of the Crown sees an illegitimate plot when oil and gas proponents talk about exercising their own legal rights.

That shows a profound legal and political hostility at the heart of the federal government. A minister who could even say such things should not be in cabinet.

But McKenna is. And that cabinet will decide whether to finally approve Trans Mountain construction on June 18, or wait until after the election.

After that, no matter what the result, you can expect the Liberals to make a hard pivot to their progressive bases in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

In the thick of it will be Alberta oil, the Liberal target of choice.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Calgary Herald.

Twitter: @DonBraid