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To answer my question: Fonda was not there. Perhaps exhaustion from her toils in Fort McMurray limited her energy reserves. Floating over Fort McMurray’s miracles of technology and engineering in a rented helicopter is something even a lifetime of Step Master routines cannot prepare you for.

Regardless, I’m sure the Fonda presence was felt. The real question remains, what did her visit to enlighten Alberta accomplish? How did it compare with earlier high-minded interventions? Did it, for example, measure up to the impact of Neil Young’s glum, grim and surly stopover a year or so ago? Or that of Leonardo DiCaprio, the famed grizzly-wrestler, who came to Alberta and put the finishing touches on the Theory of Global Warming with his discovery of the Chinook? Following seminars on his yacht it can now be reported whole flocks of supermodels are looking askance at all those “oils” in the shampoo. And they say change is hard.

Compared to Young and DiCaprio maybe she didn’t really make a difference. However, it’s quite possible that Trump moved up the announcement in favour of Keystone XL, gave it earlier than he normally would have, purely to show that he doesn’t vibrate with the same frequency as Obama when the Hollywood set or the Broadway bunch presumes to set the moral bar on anything.

Leaving Fonda, it was quite a thing Trump pulled off here. For eight years Obama stalled on the “No” he knew he was going to give Keystone. Trump gave a go-ahead on his fourth day in office. He accompanied it with a pledge to purge the institutionalized procrastination that have become the essence of all such “assessment reviews.”