I've talked about this before. My opinion is that Trudeau did the right thing by approving the pipeline. You can't really rule this country if the entire middle bit hates your guts because you took away their one salable product. (Well, that's an exaggeration: Sask has wheat; Alta. has pig shit; and Manitoba has Winnipeg, the Miami of the frozen tundra, for tourism. But I digress). And the upcoming election is basically Libs vs. Tories with the two hippy parties as possible spoilers. Who would you prefer on the climate file, the guys who instituted a National Carbon Tax or the guys who are taking Doug Ford's climate plan national?
But I don't think it should be built, and am pretty sure it won't be built. And this is due to the lawsuits various FN and other actors will launch, and the mass protests outside of Vancouver that will happen if the lawsuits fail. Which means that today's announcement is a sideshow at best. But I'm betting we don't even get to the "George-Clooney-chains-himself-to-a-bulldozer" stage of things. I suspect the reason "consultations" with FN groups have failed in the past is that if they were ever done property the result would be too expensive for the oil companies to proceed. I suspect that will be the case in the future. But the point is there is more than one way to skin a cat and we shouldn't expect the Trudeau government to have to skin all the cats all the time.
