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Kinder Morgan executives placed an identical call to Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, who immediately cancelled her trip to New York where she planned to attend the same Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference as Carr.

Photo by Canadian Press

Those phone calls set off a rush of activity in both Edmonton and Ottawa.

Carr and other politicians and bureaucrats rushed from investor conferences in New York and Toronto back to the capitals to prepare for what had just become a national crisis that would dominate the next eight weeks and culminate in a controversial $4.5-billion deal announced Tuesday, with Ottawa purchasing both the Trans Mountain pipeline system and expansion project.

Until that point, senior government officials were never certain a deal would be clinched before the deadline, not even when Finance Minister Bill Morneau called the Calgary Chamber of Commerce on May 24 to schedule a speech to the city’s business community less than a week later on May 29.

But, the Financial Post has found out, in the event that Ottawa didn’t clinch a deal, Alberta’s government had prepared a full contingency plan that included choking off oil shipments to British Columbia in three days and making an offer to buy the project by itself.

Concerns about the viability of building the pipeline had been steadily escalating for months at Kinder Morgan offices in both Calgary and Houston.

“We were increasingly aware of that nervousness and staying in close touch with them,” Carr said of the period leading up to the company’s deadline announcement.

Premier Horgan had no face-to-face meetings with Kinder Morgan in the last year

The company did not respond to requests for comment, but an industry source said the company had been holding meetings with British Columbia’s NDP government to better understand Premier John Horgan’s opposition to the project, especially since Kinder Morgan had previously agreed to pay the province $1 billion to satisfy former premier Christy Clark’s five conditions to approve the project.

“Premier Horgan had no face-to-face meetings with Kinder Morgan in the last year,” said Jen Holmwood, a spokesperson for Horgan. “His chief of staff met with them twice to make British Columbia’s concerns clear.”

The $1-billion agreement signed by Kinder Morgan executives remains in place after the federal government’s purchase of the Trans Mountain system, Finance Canada spokesperson Jocelyn Sweet said in an email.