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To my friends in Calgary and across Canada: I apologize on behalf of my fellow Americans for the United States government’s actions.

Why? Because after years of poring over the engineering, design, geology and the contents of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, President Barack Obama chose to make a political statement and vetoed a bill to allow construction to begin.

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I feel bad about this. I lived in Canada in the 1960s. You have a great country, and it’s a great place to operate in the oil and gas sector. We should have done better by you.

You may not follow the ins and outs of the U.S. Congress as much as we do, but you probably know Keystone was a bipartisan bill. Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate voted for it. That was big news, as Democrats and Republicans working together on anything over the last 10 years has been rare.

There was no good explanation for Obama’s decision to veto the bill. The U.S. Department of State reported previously the environmental effects of the pipeline would be minimal. In its January 2014 report, the department stated: “emissions (from pipeline activities) would be equivalent to greenhouse gas emissions from approximately 300,000 passenger vehicles operating for one year.”