"Ninety-three spills and counting from this fossil of the fossil-fuel age. Did Trudeau vastly over-pay Kinder Morgan for what is not a white elephant, but an albino woolly mammoth?" ---

So PM Justin Trudeau bought the Bricklin after all.

A few days ago in this space, I said that it would be an act of “misguided megalomania” if Trudeau ponied up for Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline.

A different descriptor is now in order. This deal is also Canada’s biggest political mystery.

Ever since Bill Morneau announced the purchase of the star-crossed pipeline, the Liberals have been getting the stuffing kicked out of them. To Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer, Trudeau is now the Nationalizer-in-Chief; NDP leader Jagmeet Singh essentially called Trudeau the visionless stooge of the oil industry; the Queen of Green, Elizabeth May, cut to the chase — the Liberals have simply lost their minds.

Who would pay $4.5 billion for a 65-year-old facility that could start leaking like a sieve at any moment? Ninety-three spills and counting from this fossil of the fossil-fuel age. Did Trudeau vastly over-pay Kinder Morgan for what is not a white elephant, but an albino woolly mammoth? And if so, why?

And what sort of a finance minister would come to a press conference to announce this dud of a deal without being able to answer the fundamental question? Since the $4.5 billion was for the old pipeline, how much more would it cost to construct the expansion?

Morneau blew the question off, just as he initially blew off having a blind trust of his assets as finance minister. Like it was chicken-shit stuff. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now.

Even if tripling the capacity of Trans Mountain were to cost $7.4 billion as is now claimed, that would mean Canadians are on the hook for at least $12 billion. No wonder Morneau didn’t want to talk about it. He will want to talk about it even less when the construction costs inflate, as they already have by 35 per cent since 2015.

What kind of prime minister would put out fake job numbers, 15,000, for the Trans Mountain project, and fake losses if the expansion didn’t take place, $15 billion?

It took journalists a few phone calls to find out that the losses would be less than half of what Trudeau claimed.

As for the job numbers, even Kinder Morgan told the National Energy Board that the project would create approximately 4,500 jobs, not 15,000. Jagmeet Singh says the number is closer to 3,000 jobs.

Trudeau was cherry-picking absurdly optimistic numbers to apply lipstick to a pig, exactly as former PM Stephen Harper did when trying to flog the vastly over-priced F-35 fighter jet.

And what happened to Justin the Planet Saviour? Even his staunchest supporters have to be shuddering at the drop-dead hypocrisy at play here.

In Paris, Trudeau talked about fighting climate change with everything Canada had, shoulder-to-shoulder with other responsible state players. Now he’s put Canadians in the dirty oil business. Writing in the Financial Post, Former Finance Minister Joe Oliver captured the ethical whiplash involved in Trudeau’s about-face:

“It has to be excruciating for him to nationalize a pipeline transporting diluted bitumen from the oil sands across British Columbia to Vancouver where workers will be confronted by irate protesters decrying his stunning betrayal.”

I would add that poor Navdeep Bains, Canada’s minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development, didn’t help the government’s credibility with Wednesday’s announcement that Ottawa was going to pour “millions” into clean sustainable technologies.

Millions for clean, sustainable technologies, billions to flog dirty oil and perpetuate the fossil economy. What Bains had to say was so pathetic it didn’t even rise to the level of tokenism.

And then there are the political consequences for Trudeau. May, the Green Party leader, thinks the Liberals will lose all their BC seats over nationalizing the Trans Mountain project. Even if that is only partly true, it means Trudeau’s chances of forming another majority government have been greatly diminished by changing his spots in such spectacular fashion.

Finally, the First Nations, who helped bring Trudeau to power, now say that the Kinder Morgan deal is a “declaration of war” by Ottawa against the environment and them. The people in the file that Trudeau once said meant the most to him, now see him as a belligerent enemy.

And so back to the mystery. Justin Trudeau is not stupid, nor is he surrounded by stupid people.They may all have overestimated the political potency of his charm and likability, they may have more than their fair share of hubris, but dumb they are not.

So since the project doesn’t make sense economically, the payment to Kinder Morgan doesn’t make sense financially; the expansion represents a clear and present danger to the environment; First Nations have been alienated; and the Liberals face a trip to the woodshed in BC during the next election, why did they do it?

Is it a dark political strategy to keep Rachel Notley in power in Alberta, and to keep Jason Kenney on the sidelines?

Does someone in the Trudeau braintrust actually think they will pick up seats in Alberta, offsetting certain losses in British Columbia? A gratitude vote?

If so, it is the most cynical, despicable, and expensive political stratagem Canadians have ever seen. And the least probable.

Did Trudeau buy Kinder Morgan rather than face them in a Chapter 11 claim under NAFTA for an even greater amount of money, and even longer delays in building the pipeline? Possibly.

Did PM Trudeau learn something on his otherwise fruitless trip to China that led him to believe that Chinese investment in the tar sands, which has flagged badly since the ruinous Nexen deal, would only be made if there was an expanded pipeline to tidewater? Again, possibly.

After all, under the Canada/China Foreign Investment and Promotion Agreement (FIPPA), signed personally by then PM Harper in 2012, China got a big stick. It was granted the right to sue Canada for unlimited damages if domestic laws by any level of government harm the value of Chinese investment. Under that arrangement, Trudeau might have to pay for Premier Horgan’s opposition to Trans Mountain.

There are just two things we know for sure. To this point, Canadians don’t really know the reason Trudeau has risked so much on such an ostensibly wormy deal on multiple levels.

This is even stranger from a government that promised fact-based policy and transparency. Whatever the reason, it is time to fess up.

The second thing we know is that the same forces that slowed and then stalled the Kinder Morgan project are still there.

Protesters have the added energy of believing that Justin Trudeau has betrayed them. And the courts are still there to deal with First Nations’ legal arguments to stop the Trans Mountain project for a variety of reasons, including the possibility that approval for the project was rigged by the Trudeau government.

The only way Trudeau can clear the track and get Trans Mountain built in a hurry is to bring the political hammer down. No one thought the PM would buy out Kinder Morgan and take over Trans Mountain.

If push comes to shove, should anyone be surprised if Trudeau uses the notwithstanding clause to get it built?

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