The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Tom Mulcair got himself elected leader of the federal New Democratic Party on a promise he would bring hard-headed realism and a centrist political ethic to the job. He was to be, it was murmured at the time, the NDP’s Tony Blair.

As it turns out, there’s little indeed of Blair’s famous economic pragmatism in Mulcair. He talks the talk but, when push comes to shove, quacks like a duck. Currently, the NDP leader is tromping with big, gnarled feet all over the delicate buds of the Keystone XL pipeline. Criticism of his criticisms, while on a recent Washington D.C. trip, he dismisses as Conservative hypocrisy. All opposition leaders attack the governing party’s positions when travelling overseas!

Except, that Keystone and the issues tied to it are not just political baubles to be toyed with. These are fundamental, shared economic problems – the greatest Canadians now face. The Obama administration’s pending approval or rejection will affect us all from coast to coast to coast, for many years to come. And much of Mulcair’s rhetoric about Keystone is either poorly researched, half-true or spun-up by ideological assumptions that do not hold up for a second in the cold light of day.

First let’s address the idea that Alberta’s nefarious Big Oil oligarchs are foisting oilsands development on a reluctant Eastern Canada, whose citizens will only suffer as the resultant global warming turns James Bay into a gigantic hot tub. This is the putative value proposition: Albertans benefit economically from the oilsands, but the rest of us are harmed. Why should their interests subsume ours?

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

VANCOUVER – An inky-blue dawn breaks across Burrard Inlet as the oil tanker British Beech glides into view.

On the bridge of the tugboat Raven, captain Don Westmoreland, 59, peers at a video monitor that registers the vessel’s bearing and speed. “That’s our ship right there,” he says. Two 2,500-horsepower engines barely gurgle as the Raven tethers to the tanker’s stern for the trip under Second Narrows Bridge.

The 230-metres long British Beech has arrived from Cherry Point, Wash. this morning. In 24 hours, it will slip silently back out past Stanley Park and downtown Vancouver loaded with 350,000 barrels of Alberta crude oil, bound for Long Beach, Calif.

The journey is as much a fixture of port traffic today as a sign of things to come. Roughly five tankers berth every month at Kinder Morgan Canada Inc.’s Westridge marine terminal in Burnaby, B.C., the terminus of the Trans Mountain pipeline. That number could climb to 30 per month, or 400 per year, if plans to more than double capacity on the Edmonton-to-Vancouver pipeline are approved, providing a potentially lucrative outlet for Alberta’s oil sands and raising concerns about Canada’s ability to handle a coastal oil spill.

“They’ve been shipping oil out of here for 50 years with not one incident,” said Mr. Westmoreland, whose employer, Seaspan Marine Corp., provides escort services to the vessels.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

BURNABY, B.C. – Two suburban roads lay bare the promise and peril of a proposed $5.4-billion expansion to Kinder Morgan Canada Inc.’s Trans Mountain pipeline through the densely populated Lower Mainland.

At the corner of Schooner Street and United Boulevard in the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam, a 24-inch pipeline cuts under the road, past a Starbucks and a Triple O’s burger franchise, before diving under the Fraser River.

In 2002, Kinder Morgan threaded a 1,300-metre section of the pipeline under the road after seismic tests revealed soil along the river bank, where the pipeline had earlier been moved to accommodate a Home Depot, was subject to “liquefaction,” which made it unstable.

It’s an example, said Greg Toth, senior director with the Trans Mountain expansion, of modern pipeline construction techniques in action. “You can thread [a length of pipeline] down a street, put a stake in the ground and come up within a metre of that stake,” he said in an interview at the company’s Calgary office.

A rupture five years later of a transfer line on the Trans Mountain system pierced by a contractor’s excavator — that sprayed 11 houses with a geyser of crude oil along Inlet Drive in nearby Burnaby — underscores the flipside of such precision.

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