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That edifice is now in shambles. In June of 2014, driven by a collapse in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ supply-control regime, crude began its long slide, to where it now sits at below $50 a barrel. It may soon bounce back, as Finance Minister Joe Oliver has said he expects will happen. Many industry analysts think otherwise. The truth is that none of them know – otherwise they’d have foreseen the crash.

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But even six months in these doldrums would be an eternity, politically. The oil-market slide has already caused a two-month delay in the 2015 federal budget. The Conservatives have promised us a return to balance, and a $5 billion family tax cut. What if the two are no longer compatible?

Second pillar, linked to the first: Pipelines, it was held, would erase the discount on landlocked Canadian heavy crude, which was costing the federal and Alberta treasuries billions. As recently as 18 months ago, three big projects – Enbridge’s Northern Gateway to the Pacific, TransCanada’s Keystone XL to the U.S. Gulf Coast and Energy East to the St. Lawrence – still showed promise. A fourth, Kinder Morgan’s twinning of its existing Trans Mountain line to Vancouver, seemed a slam dunk.

But U.S. President Barack Obama dithered on Keystone. As time passed and climate-change activists within the Democratic establishment got better organized, dithering became delay, then open hostility. Gateway has ground to a halt due to opposition along the route, including from aboriginal groups. Energy East is running into trouble with environmentalists in Quebec who say it threatens endangered Beluga whales in the St. Lawrence river. Even Trans Mountain is now under protest, on grounds that any increase at all in pipeline capacity is a bad idea.