Memo to Trudeau — we support pipelines – by Lorrie Goldstein (Toronto Sun – January 16, 2019)

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Few countries have been as willing to cut their own economic throats as Canada. We lose an estimated $15 billion annually in revenue to our economy — $40 million a day — because of our inability to get our oil to global markets, due to our lack of pipeline capacity.

That means we have to sell it at a massive discount to our only customer — the United States. The U.S., by contrast, has always acted in its own economic self-interest when it comes to oil and natural gas, regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat is in charge of the White House.

While U.S. President Barack Obama was self-righteously and hypocritically vetoing the Keystone XL pipeline to get Alberta oil to the Texas Gulf Coast, his administration approved enough new oil and gas pipelines in the U.S. to more than encircle the Earth.

It wasn’t a state secret. Obama boasted about it in a 2012 speech to pipeline workers in Cushing, Oklahoma.

While Canadian provinces were banning fracking, the Americans used it to recover so much new oil and natural gas, that the U.S. today is the world’s leading energy superpower, surpassing Saudi Arabia as the world’s No. 1 oil producer in 2013, and Russia as the world’s top producer of natural gas in 2009.

In that context, a new poll by Angus Reid Institute shows Canadians understand the enormity of the problem we face and support new pipeline construction.

For the rest of this article: https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-memo-to-trudeau-we-support-pipelines