After market close Tuesday, Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd. will announce what it intends to do with all that dough heading its way due to the sale of the Trans Mountain Pipeline and the Trans Mountain Expansion Project to the Canadian government.

In previous filings, Houston-based parent company Kinder Morgan Inc. said it intended to direct its share of after-tax proceeds, an estimated $2 billion (U.S.), to pay down debt. It’s important to note here that KMI, as it refers to itself, has been promising shareholders across an extended period of time that it would work at “de-levering” its balance sheet. So, really, it was very nice of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to assist in that regard in such a munificent way.

As for Kinder Morgan Canada, Steve Kean, chief executive of both the U.S. parent and the Canadian affiliate, said on an analysts call in July that it just wasn’t the company’s style to “sit on a big pile of cash while management hunts around for a transaction to use it on.” All options were being considered around the use of proceeds received by the Canadian arm. “This is a significant amount of money,” he told analysts.

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You can see why there have been no tears shed in Texas. “We are having a very good year,” Kean noted.

All of which makes me think: our prime minister would not make a very good CEO. I wonder if he is any good at cards.

Predictably, the pro-business lobby frets that the decision by the Federal Court of Appeal to halt construction of the pipeline expansion project sends a dreadful signal, casting Canada as an uncertain destination for global investment capital. Why look to Canada as a place to do business when the firmament under its rules and regulations feels like quicksand?

Forces in opposition to the pipeline are merry with the news that the National Energy Board erred magnificently in granting project approval in the absence of significant Indigenous dialogue and bypassing key environmental considerations.

The prime minister suggests that this latest turn of events is some sort of gift horse as it gives all players the opportunity to get the pipeline done “in the right way” and deliver that goopy diluted bitumen to tidewater.

Operating in the “right” way was part of the Trudeau election pitch, as we all recall. Environmental stewardship. Indigenous rights. Sustainability. Gender parity. The new government would set a new standard, the ripple effects of which would reinforce or, best case, infuse business with a more progressive ethos.

This would be in contrast to, say, a company like Kinder Morgan, which just this past spring rejected a shareholder proposal to produce annual sustainability reports in accordance with guidelines established by the Global Reporting Initiative, whose sustainability work has set the international standard. The resolution had been submitted by the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the third largest public pension plan in the U.S., and drew the support of a majority of shareholders. Kinder Morgan’s view: such reporting was too expensive and unnecessary given its existing disclosure on environmental, social and governance issues.

In looking to best practices, Trudeau set his sites on the Harper government’s Bill C-38, that 400-plus-page omnibus bill that swept across jobs and wages and fisheries and some tax stuff and, right, the environment, including the National Energy Board.

It wasn’t all that long ago.

In the early summer of 2015, news reports placed an electioneering Trudeau at Vancouver’s postcard pretty Jericho Beach, launching a raft of environmental promises, including an unequivocal commitment to “put some teeth” into the National Energy Board. When asked later that summer if the overhaul included Kinder Morgan, Trudeau was clear: “Yes, yes, it applies to existing projects, existing pipelines ... That process needs to be redone.”

The Liberals in power would have a distinctly progressive operational mandate, Trudeau insisted. “This government,” he said of Harper and his crew, “has chosen to be a cheerleader instead of a referee on issues such as this.”

Trudeau certainly sounded more the former a scant year after assuming power when he announced government approval of the expansion. “Ultimately, this is about leaving a better country for our kids than the one we inherited from our parents,” he announced at the time, promising jobs, jobs, jobs. “This is a decision based on rigorous debate, on science and on evidence ... We have made this decision because we are convinced it is safe for BC, and it is the right one for Canada.”

I think Kinder Morgan had the PM wrapped around its little finger.

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Jobs? Please. Pipeline construction jobs are obviously fleeting — high value, long-term jobs that would come from, say, upgrading and refineries were not on offer. The plan was always to simply twin a new pipeline to an old legacy asset that dates back 60 years and get the dilbit to the coast.

On Friday the NEB called for construction to “safely cease” — construction that was funded via a $1-billion credit facility put in place by the federal government in June.

The announcement was coincident with Kinder Morgan’s own release that the Trans Mountain sale to the federal government had been finalized. Perhaps Steve Kean will have spent the past weekend still scrutinizing options for what to do with all that dough. As he told analysts: “This is a great problem to have.”

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