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It’s now a fairly safe bet that by the October 2015 federal election, it will be fairly obvious that there has been an elaborate shell game going on involving Alberta’s oilsands, a bewildering array of pipeline megaprojects, and the post-Kyoto climate commitments Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to keep under something called the Copenhagen Accord. It should not come as a surprise if by voting day, it will have occurred to quite a few Canadians that all along, in all these matters, they have been taken for chumps.

All it’s going to take is a resort to the most straightforward kind of calculations and it will be impossible to avoid the conclusion that certain formulations of “national interest” that we have hectored about over the past several years have never really added up. People don’t like the feeling that they have been lied to.

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In his single-minded devotion to realizing the grand vision he revealed in his 2006 declaration in London, that Canada’s destiny was to become an “energy superpower” among the G8 nations, Harper is going to have an exceedingly difficult time explaining away the appearance that he has been rather less than truthful in even the general outline of things.