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Oil.

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

As we say in Newfoundland, that’s a different quintal of fish. Alberta oil hasn’t been under the hint of a threat. It’s been on the rack of dozens of real ones.

For reasons everybody knows Alberta has been in a savage downturn: layoffs by the thousands, capital flight, the locust onslaught of green apocalyptics, world prices, Fort Mac nearly burned down, the pre-emption of nearly every pipeline project, prime ministerial sit downs with vaporous, ferociously anti-Fort Mac Bill Nye, Neil Young wailings, the Lamentations of Leonardo Chinook DiCaprio, B.C.’s pledges to kill Trans Mountain whatever it takes, and foreign anti-oil money (see, please see, Vivian Krause’s reporting on this). Canada’s oil industry has tasted every plague and nuisance a careless world and fitful nature can command.

Pounded then from every quarter as it has been, have we had a prime ministerial tour, an “I have your back” message for oil? The answer is so obvious the question itself is lunatic.

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Michael Bell

Should we in fastidious fairness point out that, well, there are no Trump threats of tariffs on Canadian oil? There’s a reason for that. Mainly because it’s housebound in Alberta. Trump can’t threaten a tariff on a product that doesn’t have the means of export. (Would there were an oil industry in Quebec and Ontario. How the lyrics to this song would change.)

However, what Trump can’t do, Trudeau did. He imposed an ever-escalating internal tariff, his and Minister McKenna’s fabulous carbon (dioxide) tax. As good as a tariff in blocking a resurgence or growth of the industry was his retooling of the National Energy Board to incorporate always popular gender analysis, upstream and downstream emission inventories, and every other bureaucratic torment that the busy minds of climate warriors can invent and inflict.