If you need proof that Canadian environmentalists are working for the interests of our OPEC oil competitors, the fake outrage over the Line 9 pipeline reversal is Exhibit A.

Line 9 was a pipeline built in the 1970s, to take Alberta oil east to Ontario and Quebec. But over time the market changed, and imported oil became significantly cheaper. So the flow of the pipeline was reversed, to pump imported oil from the east to the west.

A pipeline built for Canadian ethical oil was soon full of foreign, conflict oil. There were no environmental protests when that switch was made.

Last week, the National Energy Board approved the re-reversal of the pipeline. Once again, western Canadian oil is cheaper than OPEC oil – up to $25/barrel cheaper. So the pipeline company wants to do what the pipeline used to do, what it was originally built and approved to do.

Only now are the environmental activists complaining.

It’s what scientists call a controlled experiment. Same pipeline. Same route. Same standards for what oil can go through it. The only thing that’s different is where the oil comes from.

That’s the variable. And that’s why a safe, underground pipeline that has been studiously ignored by environmentalists for 38 years became their great obsession in 2013.

There were protests, petitions, lawn signs, music concerts, petitions, and endless complaints to the National Energy Board. That’s fine – that’s democracy. It’s one of the differences between Canada and an oil dictatorship like Saudi Arabia.

But the lobbyists went far beyond just debate. Last year, a gang of 20 protesters broke into a pumping station along Line 9, ordered the employees there to leave, and went on a six-day crime spree, occupying the site, Oka-style. The chief organizer at the illegal protest was Elysia Petrone, who was an employee of Environmental Defence, a $3.8 million a year lobby firm that bizarrely has CRA charitable status. Environmental Defence’s corporate logo was actually plastered all over the crime scene. (The first criminal, Trish Mills, was sentenced last fall; Petrone was never charged.)

I interviewed those Line 9 protesters. They knew nothing about it. Some of them thought the 36-year-old pipeline was being built from scratch. None of them knew it was operating with OPEC oil in it. One protester told me she preferred Saudi oil to Canadian oil, because Saudi oil was “sweet." None of them could explain why they had never protested against Saudi oil.

Even though Canada is a net exporter of oil, for historical and logistical reasons, we still import about half of the oil that we consume. In Quebec, it’s about 90%. The province that is so worried about a secular charter, burns sharia oil in its cars.

And that sharia oil is brought to Canada by tanker ships – disgorging their oil in Maine to be piped up to Montreal. Or even sailing right up the Saint Lawrence River.

That’s another curiosity, isn’t it? Anti-oilsands lobbyists attack the oilsands themselves. They attack oilsands pipelines. And they attack tanker ships that would take the oilsands oil to Asian markets – calling them an intolerable risk of an oil spill.

But every day, 54% of Canada’s oil is imported by tanker ship. Funny enough, Environmental Defence has never protested that.

Lemme guess: It's because those OPEC tankers are “sweet”?