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There’s long been a view in Alberta that the Trudeau government is intentionally winding down Alberta’s oilsands, and ultimately the entire fossil fuel industry.

This belief has a basis in fact. Indeed, you could say it’s not a fake fact, but an honest-to-goodness fact fact.

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It was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself who said in January 2017: “We can’t shut down the oilsands tomorrow. We need to phase them out. We need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels.

“That is going to take time. And, in the meantime, we have to manage that transition.”

He said that to a friendly audience in Peterborough, Ont. A few days later he was in Calgary, where criticism had erupted.

Asked about his comments, he said, “um, I misspoke . . . I said something the way I shouldn’t have said it.”

But Trudeau didn’t say he’d been wrong. He just wished, it seemed, that he hadn’t made himself so obvious.