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VICTORIA — Premier John Horgan and the New Democrats expressed disappointment this week when the Supreme Court of Canada threw out their last legal challenge to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

They cannot have been surprised.

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The New Democrats promised in their 2017 election platform to use “every tool in our tool box to stop the project from going ahead.”

They translated that vow into the power-sharing agreement with the Green party: “Immediately employ every tool available to the new government to stop the expansion of the pipeline.”

But Horgan knew from the day he took office that any provincial effort to stop the project would be illegal and unconstitutional.

Photo by Francis Georgian / Postmedia News

NDP Environment Minister George Heyman says Horgan told him so in appointing him to cabinet in July 2017.

“He was very clear that as part of transition, he had been given the legal advice that stopping the project was beyond the jurisdiction of B.C.,” Heyman told the house in an extraordinary confessional during the NDP’s first year in office.