Why don’t the Liberals just declare the Trans Mountain charade over? – by Rex Murphy (National Post – September 7, 2019)

https://nationalpost.com/

Stop this pantomime that must be driving every Albertan wild with frustration and way past anger

Were you to suppose that the purpose of current national energy policy was to chase Alberta out of Confederation (with a big knotty stick), you would have hit up a dismayingly plausible, perhaps the only plausible, explanation for the remorseless stream of blunders, stumbles, harassments, blockades, protests and court rulings that have constituted said “policy” over recent years.

Certainly more plausible than anything that has escaped the lips of Justin Trudeau recently, anything to be found in the endless tweets of climate crusader Catherine McKenna over the past four years, or in the vapid pronunciamentos, post-Trans Mountain appeals case, of Minister Sohi in the past four days.

We have a government that gets passionate about “single-use” plastics, but is comatose on the cardinal industry of a First-World democracy. The government has scotched every pipeline, proposed or considered, East or West, with the dispatch and efficiency of the better assassins (i.e., unlike the “hitchhiker” would-be assassin someone took to India).

It has super-glued the one pipeline it has vaguely signalled it favours to a trial by combat against triumphalist environmentalism, a labyrinth of judicial reviews, hearings, morbid consultation-itis, jimmied-up protests, useless carbon taxes, the Fata Morgana of social licence, and endless water-torture excruciations of the famed “review process.”

And where are we now? The Trans Mountain pipeline — which is merely a twin or extension of one in the ground for 70 full years without British Columbia being blasted into the Pacific, Canada exploding, or the whole world hyper-heating into global-warming oblivion — that innocuous pipeline, which has been on regulatory death row for over seven years, has been stalled, yet again. There are nuclear programs in rogue states that get less attention and oversight, certainly less vetting, than this one Canadian pipeline.

For the rest of this article: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-why-dont-the-liberals-just-declare-the-trans-mountain-charade-over