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Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are about to undertake their first significant piece of energy nationalization in three decades, and it’s going to be ugly. Their imminent $4.5-billion takeover of the Trans Mountain pipeline and its $7-billion-plus expansion proposal, has its nearest historical counterpart in the acquisitions made by Pierre Trudeau’s state oil company, Petro-Canada, in the 1970s and 1980s.

But the attitude of the second Trudeau regime to nationalization could not be more different from the first. The good news is that the acquisition of Trans Mountain is attached to no grand xenophobic industrial strategies (in fact it goes in the opposite direction to Ottawa’s commitment to a low-carbon “transition.”) The bad news is that it is an act of sheer desperation by a government that finds itself up a climate-policy creek in a barbed-wire canoe.

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In fact, the lessons of Petrocan appear entirely forgotten, if indeed they were ever widely known. Petrocan was taken over by Suncor almost 10 years ago and is now known by most people merely as a gas station brand that sponsors sports on the CBC. Suncor runs Petro-Canada now as a respectable business, but given its history, it is remarkable that the brand exists at all. Anybody who kept “Titanic,” “Edsel” or “Enron” as a brand name might be thought deranged, but it’s in the same category that Petrocan belongs.