Article content

For the past year Justin Trudeau has been at pains to demonstrate his capacity to listen, to conciliate, to empathize: qualities he is widely supposed to have inherited from his mother. In the months ahead he will have to show more of his father’s steel.

At stake in the coming battle over the Trans Mountain pipeline is not just the fate of the project, or his own political fortunes, but how Canada is to be governed. It is a conflict we have been avoiding until now, but now it is upon us, inescapably.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Andrew Coyne: Trudeau caught in pipeline blues of his own making Back to video

That is to say: Are decisions on resource use to be made by democratically elected governments, informed by impartial tribunals on the basis of scientific evidence and within a framework of law defined by independent courts? Or are we to be ruled, in effect, from the streets, in defiance of both law and democracy, under the ragged banner of “social licence”?

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

The merits or demerits of Trans Mountain — economic, environmental, or other — are of course open to debate, notwithstanding the National Energy Board’s ruling in its favour or its endorsement by the federal government. Opponents are within their rights to try to block it in the courts, as they are to demonstrate, to try to turn public opinion against it and to organize against the federal Liberals politically.