OTTAWA

Megan Leslie slipped back north of the 49th parallel under the cover of darkness Wednesday night.

The country was still functioning.

No one slapped cuffs on her at the Ottawa airport.

But to hear the noise from the Conservative side of the House of Commons this week, one would think that the Halifax NDP MP and her colleague from Nickel Belt, Claude Gravelle, were treasonous subversives who should be drawn and quartered at dawn.

Their crime?

They went to Washington to provide a different point of view on the Keystone XL pipeline project and to tell American legislators that, contrary to the cheerleading of Stephen Harper and his cabinet, not every Canadian was a proponent of Alberta’s tar sands.

The absurd reaction from the perpetually angry Conservatives immediately raised the profile of the traitorous duo that otherwise might have flown into Washington and back without anyone noticing.

Environment Minister Peter Kent accused them of taking “the treacherous course of leaving the domestic debate and heading abroad to attack a legitimate Canadian resource which is being responsibly developed and regulated.’’

Joe Oliver, the natural resources minister, called it “a bizarre anti-trade mission.

“The NDP are totally out of touch with ordinary Canadians and economic reality. Send in the clowns,” he thundered to raucous applause and desk-thumping on the government side.

“Are the NDP members so star struck by jet-setting Hollywood stars that they are blind to the needs of Canadian workers and their families?”

And Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself: “This government does not go to another country to argue against job creation in Canada, but that is what the NDP did, a party that is totally unfit to govern or even comment on the creation of jobs.”

It’s a wonder Leslie had the gall to skulk back into the capital after trying to destroy the Canadian economy.

What the New Democrats were doing, in fact, was promoting the Opposition position to American legislators — one that would be backed by their core — on an issue of major cross-border interest and huge significance with our largest trading partner.

Leslie said her 28-hour mission was not to lobby to kill Keystone, but to propose a sustainable jobs strategy under a long term green energy future and to let her American interlocutors know there are Canadians who want tougher regulation of the tar sands.

To follow the Conservative line of logic, it is only okay for the government line to be espoused in Washington.

Surely they wouldn’t sit down with a Republican in this country, certainly not one that has been flown to northern Alberta in a bid to sell the pipeline project.

It’s okay for Harper to tell Bloomberg Television that approval of the Keystone project was a “no-brainer,” and just fine for Kent to predict its approval by the White House.

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The debate here was crystallized by the NDP visit just as it had been crystallized south of the border — an inflated claim of jobs created versus the environmental danger of such a project.

To think that American legislators should be exposed to both points of view in this country is hardly heresy.

The message need not be homogenized just because it is the government view.

But there are other issues at play here.

As the NDP reminded the Commons this week, Harper’s complaints ring a tad hollow considering he used the Fox News pulpit in 2003 to accuse then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien of hypocrisy for keeping Canada out of the George W. Bush-led invasion of Iraq.

Then the opposition leader, he told Americans he backed the war and was speaking for “the silent majority” of Canadians.

In 1997, as vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition, Harper at least stayed in the country when he told the U.S. Council for National Policy that Canada was “a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.”

In his tutorial on Canadian politics, Harper told the right-wing audience the NDP had an agenda to “disintegrate our society.

“The NDP is kind of proof that the devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.’

Just kidding, Harper has maintained.

There was no mirth in his over-the-top demonization of the Opposition this week.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

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