OTTAWA—First a prediction: Justin Trudeau’s widely expected decision to relaunch the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion after a 10-month hiatus will not necessarily move the electoral needle in a big way.

When it comes to this file the ruling Liberals paid the political cost up front, when they salvaged the project by taking the pipeline off the hands of its private sector owner.

As of that point, many of the climate change activists who had high hopes that the prime minister was serious about addressing the issue decided he was all talk and no walk.

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Based on the fast-and-furious reaction from many environmental and Indigenous quarters to Tuesday’s announcement, Trudeau’s promise to dedicate all revenues from the pipeline on greening the economy will not change their minds.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, just as many pipeline proponents — especially in Alberta — are and will remain convinced the prime minister is using the Trans Mountain file as a cover for an otherwise deliberately detrimental environmental policy.

Looking at the upcoming campaign, the Liberals are banking that a silent plurality of voters still believes there is both environmental and economic merit to their leader’s grand bargain.

Prudence would dictate to not presume the electoral verdict will be negative.

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But first a reminder of some of the facts that have been early casualties of the pipeline war of words.

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That starts with the dubious contention that the Trans Mountain saga would have played out very differently had Stephen Harper been re-elected to government in the last election.

That notion is hard to reconcile with the two seminal events that have most altered the course of the project. Neither was under the control of the federal government.

The first was the election, in British Columbia, of a government hostile to the pipeline expansion.

Not only would the re-election of the federal Conservatives not have prevented the NDP victory. With Harper pushing not one but two unpopular pipeline projects to the Pacific coast, it would more likely have contributed to premier John Horgan’s electoral success.

The second big milestone was the ruling of the Federal Court of Appeal that stopped the construction in its tracks last August.

Lost in the subsequent political rhetoric is the fact that it was essentially the regulatory process put in place under Harper that the court found wanting.

To ensure the Trans Mountain expansion proceed in a timely manner, Trudeau’s cabinet had largely based its acceptance of the project on evidence collected on the Conservative watch.

The court also found the government had failed to properly consult the Indigenous communities affected by the expansion. Would Harper — had he been in Trudeau’s place — really have been more diligent?

It is also hard to imagine that the courts would not — on the same basis — have found fault with the processes that led or would have led to the approval of the defunct Northern Gateway and Energy East projects. Both were more contentious and more elaborate than the Trans Mountain expansion.

There is no constitutional mechanism that allows a federal government — be it Liberal or Conservative — to simply shrug off its environmental or Indigenous obligations on the way to building pipelines.

That’s why any promise to do better than Trudeau on the pipeline front must be taken with a big grain of salt.

Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives have vouched, if victorious, to turn the clock back from a more stringent approval process. That sounds like the opposite of a recipe to place pipelines on a fast lane.

On the day Trudeau gave Trans Mountain the green light, a poll showed Quebec’s Coalition Avenir Québec government riding well above its election score in voting intentions. Two years into its minority term, B.C.’s NDP government has built a healthy lead on the competition.

The two could not be more ideologically different but their approach to balancing energy development and mitigating climate change have much in common.

Both provinces are home to electorates that favour activist climate-change policies.

Both put carbon-pricing policies in place about a decade ago, at a time when the federal Conservatives were vocally vilifying the measure and predicting it would wreak havoc on the economy. Neither province has been the worse for ignoring that advice.

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Both have tried or are trying to parlay their opposition to some pipeline developments into a public opinion pass for massive liquified natural gas projects.

And while premiers Horgan and François Legault’s attempts to navigate a middle course have not pleased the most-entrenched proponents and opponents of fossil-fuel developments, the balance they are seeking to achieve seems — for now — to suit a plurality of their respective provinces’ voters.

Their approach is not all that different from the balancing act the prime minister has been attempting.

It is too early to say Trudeau has fallen on his face. It also takes a leap of faith to assume that Scheer if he became prime minister after the Oct. 21 vote would do better on either the climate change or the pipeline front.