It may not be buyer’s remorse with voters just yet, but it is certainly buyer’s disappointment.

In the season of Lord Stanley, a hockey metaphor: Justin Trudeau is beginning to lose faceoffs in his own end.

In hockey, losing the draw in front of your goalie gives the other team a chance to score. In politics, it allows the opposition to split the defence — carefully contrived image-making — to reveal what actually lies behind it. When it comes to Trudeau, these days it looks like an empty net.

It may not be buyer’s remorse with voters just yet, but it is certainly buyer’s disappointment. Canadians dumped the Conservatives for a young, attractive politician who believed in all the right things: democracy, the environment, transparency, electoral reform, inclusiveness, feminism, and LGBT rights. Trudeau was the not-Harper candidate, the personification of sincerity with a great smile.

But what voters are getting is very different: a manipulative, secretive and occasionally deceitful politician who, on a bad day, could give Stephen Harper a run for his money when it comes to disingenuousness.

If, like his father, Trudeau is reduced to a minority government when he seeks a second term, his political comeuppance will boil down to two words: Kinder Morgan. This is the project that has sucked the credibility out of the prime minister, though there are certainly other issues which took the shine off before his face plant on this file.

Trudeau’s justification for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is an intellectual sand castle. He claims Canadians can have it both ways: prudent stewardship of the environment and resource exploitation. That is exactly the thinking that wiped out the northern cod on Newfoundland’s Grand Banks.

And in the event of an accident, i.e. a major oil spill, Trudeau promises Canada will have a “world-class” ocean protection plan in place. Nothing to worry about.

Try telling that to the 27,000 residents of Superior, Wisconsin who had to evacuate their homes late last week after an explosion at an oil refinery unleashed a cloud of toxic smoke. The refinery is owned by Alberta-based Husky Energy. It is not yet known if heavy crude from the Alberta tar sands, which the facility refines along with Bakken crude from North Dakota, was involved in the calamity.

If such an explosion were to take place in Kinder Morgan’s to-be-expanded tank farm in Burnaby, the local fire department is on record with two observations: the resulting fire could torch the town’s forests; and evacuating residents the way that Wisconsin did would be extremely difficult.

The prime minister has offered another reason for forcing Trans Mountain on British Columbia. He says he has to do it because he promised voters in 2015 he would deliver a pipeline from Alberta to tidewater. He is practising the virtue of keeping his word.

Really? Didn’t he also promise a new deal for First Nations, electoral reform, access to minister’s offices under freedom of information and the end of subsidies to the oil industry? Why is he set on keeping his promise on pipelines and not keep these other pledges?

Up until now, and minus the bumph, Trudeau’s climate record makes the previous prime minister look like an ambassador for the Green Party, with approvals for Woodfibre LNG, Pacific NorthWest LNG, TransCanada’s NOVA gas Transmission Ltd. and its fracked gas, and two pipelines, Trans Mountain and Line 3, carrying tar sands oil.

Though it did not approve it, the Trudeau government also supports the Keystone XL pipeline, endorsed by Donald Trump. You know, the guy who thinks global warming is a hoax.

Perhaps that’s why Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org described Trudeau as a “stunning hypocrite” — saying all the right things, while diligently exporting more tar sands products for other countries to burn.

If the tar sands are fully developed, this irony: Canada could be the country that pushes global warming above the 1.5 C target Trudeau agreed to in Paris with more fanfare than a royal wedding.

If Trudeau’s betrayal of the promise not to green light energy projects unless they passed a science-based environmental assessment was all that was on the table, some would see that as politics as usual. Broken promises are the broken record of public life.

Remember all those optimistic carbon emission targets espoused by past Liberal federal governments that were never met? Remember the serial promises about a national daycare program that never got off the ground?

But broken promises are no longer the only thing on the table over Kinder Morgan. This week, the National Observer published a disturbing story raising the stakes enormously for Trudeau.

With credible evidence, the piece alleges the approval of Kinder Morgan was “rigged” by a government that had made up its mind to approve the project while it was still involved in active consultations with First Nations. That is called bargaining in bad faith.

That is exactly what killed another bitumen-pipeline, Northern Gateway. The Federal Court of Appeal rejected the Conservative government’s approval of the project in 2014 on the grounds Ottawa had not discharged its constitutional obligation to consult with First Nations.

In addition to the serious charge federal bureaucrats were ordered to come up with a “legally sound basis” for approving Kinder Morgan a month before the formal announcement, there is another serious question raised in the Observer’s article. Does this government takes its marching orders from a U.S. energy company?

Kinder Morgan lobbied senior federal officials 36 times in 2016. An internal memo in Jim Carr’s department (referred to in the story but not quoted), revealed that the company’s Canadian president, Ian Anderson, requested a phone call to “discuss” the project.

The gist of these contacts was that the Texas-based energy company, which rose out of the ashes of the disgraced Enron Corp., wanted the government to hurry up the federal review process. Fearful Kinder Morgan might walk away from Trans Mountain, the Trudeau government apparently blinked.

The government reaction to this new information has been an emphatic shrug. The Harper mantra when faced with damning information about its decisions was to say the government didn’t respond to unauthorized leaks. The Trudeau government became an echo-chamber of that approach, saying that it didn’t respond to “unsubstantiated” claims.

That’s not how others viewed the story. The federal NDP have asked for an inquiry into the serious matters raised by the Observer. It is doubtful Trudeau will agree to releasing documents to show what really happened in the government’s internal review of the Kinder Morgan project.

But if the government can stonewall in the House of Commons, it may meet its Waterloo in court. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN) has sent a letter to the Federal Court of Appeal, using the new information to buttress its court case.

The TWN had been making the argument before the court that the Trudeau government failed in its duty to consult before approving Trans Mountain. The court will be asked to compel the federal government to release any internal documents germane to that claim.

While Trudeau waffles, Kinder Morgan has not done the federal government any favours. Faced with the TWN letter, the company responded to it the next day. It is now threatening major delays in the Trans Mountain project. Bullying seems to have worked for the company to this point, after all, so why not try it one more time?

Meanwhile, a new poll reported in the Toronto Star found British Columbians split on the issue of Trans Mountain, with a small majority favouring the project.

It also found 12 per cent of residents would engage in civil disobedience to stop or disrupt work on the project. This weekend seven more people were arrested as faith leaders protested the pipeline expansion in Burnaby.

If the Trudeau government goes beyond trying to impose the controversial project, by perhaps agreeing to use public money to finance it or offering loan guarantees, that number could grow.

After all, paying an American company to reap the lion’s share of the financial benefits from an unrefined Canadian resource, is dubious. Asking Canadians and British Columbians to shoulder all of the risk associated with a product as hazardous as diluted bitumen is plain foolish.

There is losing faceoffs in your own end. There is also scoring on your own net.

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