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OTTAWA — The prime minister accused opponents on Saturday of “stoking national divisions” through their reactions to TransCanada’s decision to cancel its Energy East Pipeline plans.

Justin Trudeau said in a Facebook post that critics who attribute the proposed project’s cancellation to government regulation “ignores the obvious.”

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“Aside from its being intellectually dishonest, the reflexive stoking of regional tensions is a political dead end. The Conservative party, formerly the Reform Party, trod that road in its infancy. It was a road better left abandoned,” Trudeau stated in the post.

Trudeau also pointed out that when Energy East was first proposed, the global supply of crude was relatively tight.

He ended the post with a warning that festering regional tensions bound the country in “paralyzing unity debates” from the 1970s through the 1990s.

“Let’s not go backwards, simply because speaking from anger is an easy response to disappointing news,” Trudeau said.