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Until now, that had presented lawful authority with the challenge of ensuring construction can proceed in the face of widely advertised attempts by opponents to stop it by physical force. Now the pipeline may also have to overcome the opposition of the provincial government.

To be perfectly clear, the province’s approval is not legally required: pipelines are unambiguously federal jurisdiction. Still, there are plenty of ways a determined provincial government could make trouble, for example by denying permits for supporting infrastructure like roads.

So the first faint rumblings are being heard in Ottawa of an unfamiliar sound: the federal declaratory power being wheeled out of the garage. Under Sect. 92 (10 c) of the Constitution, Parliament has the power to declare any “work” to be “for the general Advantage of Canada,” acquiring in the process whatever legislative authority it needs to get it built — and overriding the provinces’.

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This is being painted as some sort of nuclear option, but it is and was intended to be simply another part of the federal government’s constitutional toolkit; since Confederation it has been deployed 470 times. It has not been used, however, since 1961. At the very least, therefore, it would be controversial, leading some to fret at the consequences for national unity, on the theory that we have any.

What almost no one is talking about, at least outside Alberta, are the consequences of not invoking it — and therefore of allowing the pipeline to be blocked. It may be time to start. For the province to be told, even in its present misery, that it cannot bring its product to market because its fellow provinces to the west and east — the proposed Energy East pipeline to the East coast faces similar obstacles in Quebec, though economics may kill it first — have effectively blockaded it would be incendiary enough.