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How has it come to pass that our climate-change government in Ottawa is now in the pipeline-building business? How can it be that the world’s No. 1-ranking Paris summit champion against “carbon pollution” is about to get into the business of laying tubes to carry the dread product of the Alberta oilsands? As the melancholy Dane once phrased it: “This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.”

It’s all Kinder Morgan’s fault. It’s those damned Texans.

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About two months ago — many eternities in political time — Kinder Morgan issued a statement that it was suspending work on the famous pipeline and that on May 31 it would declare whether or not it would stay with the project. Very many people, and they were all wrong, interpreted this as “an ultimatum.”

Photo by Darryl Dyck/CP

It was, actually, more along the lines of a medical report. K-M was in despair and exhausted. For six years it had run the obstacle course of permits and hearings and protests, the harassment and slurs of all the eco-brigades, ambivalence from the national government, and a full international campaign against its Canadian project. It needed a break.

It was a flag of despair. It had played by all the rules, the B.C. government had signed on (curious how little play this gets), the federal government had signed on, the NEB was satisfied, but every day of the fabled process there were newly invented challenges, and as soon as it began the work preliminary to construction, out came the absolutely predictable threats of greater protests, blockades, the Green leader and her allies defying a court injunction, and “all hell is going to break loose” calls along the line in B.C.