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

The United States’ administration treated the Keystone XL pipeline as a political inconvenience. Environmental organizations painted it as the tipping point between a future based on fossil fuels and one based on green energy. The oil industry wanted it to support its growth agenda.

Now it’s Canada’s turn to decide what Keystone XL stands for. Most likely, it will be about putting Canada first. Whether that suits any of the above is secondary.

Jim Prentice, the former senior federal Cabinet minister, said Keystone XL’s regulatory review process and its ultimate deferral by U.S. President Barack Obama were a transformational moment for the country on the necessity to open new markets for its biggest export commodity, oil.

The transformation has been so deep he contends it has pushed Canadian energy policy in a new direction.

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

While the green movement naively harbours hopes it will be able to shut down unconventional oil and gas development, in Saudi Arabia they are already contemplating a time when North American fossil fuel will replace their oil.

Looking past the din of protesters, state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco is resigned to the fact that its influence will wane because of the massive unconventional fossil-fuel development underway in North America. As such, Saudi Arabia has no plans to raise its production output to 15 million barrels per day from 12 million, said Khalid Al-Falih, the powerful chief executive of Aramco.

“There is a new emphasis in the industry on unconventional liquids, and shale gas technologies are also being applied to shale oil,” Al-Falih, president and CEO of Saudi Aramco, warned a domestic audience in a speech in Riyadh Monday.

“Some are even talking about an era of ‘energy independence’ for the Americas, based on the immense conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon resources located there.

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

Two weeks ago, the United States State Department, at the behest of the White House, unexpectedly postponed until after next November’s U.S. presidential election a decision on whether to permit the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast. Their official reason?

The proposed route threatened a vital aquifer in Nebraska. A detour might be necessary and evaluating the feasibility of a new route would take 13 to 16 months, which (entirely coincidentally, we’re sure) would bury the controversy until after the 2012 presidential vote. Moreover, the State Department explained, Nebraska was opposed to the Keystone route.

Then on Wednesday, the Nebraska state legislature voted unanimously to approve a proposed new route around the underground river and pipeline-owner TransCanada mused about building the southern portion of the line (from Texas up to Nebraska), even before the White House had signed off on the Nebraska diversion. It’s unclear whether this last-breaking moment of sanity and cooperation will be enough to salvage a worthy project.

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

In 2008, the slogan was “Yes We Can.” For 2011-12, it’s “We Can’t Wait.” What happened in between? Candidate Barack Obama, the vessel into which myriad dreams were poured, met the reality of governance.

His near-$1-trillion stimulus begat a stagnant economy with 9% unemployment. His attempt at Wall Street reform left in place a still too-big-to-fail financial system as vulnerable today as when he came into office. His green energy fantasies yielded Solyndra cronyism and a cap-and-trade regime not even a Democratic Congress would pass.

And now his signature achievement, Obamacare, is headed to the Supreme Court, where it could very well be struck down, just a week after its central element was overwhelmingly repudiated (2-1) by the good burghers of Ohio.

So what do you do when you say you can, but, it turns out, you can’t? Blame the other guy. Charge the Republicans with making governing impossible. Never mind that you had control of the Congress for two-thirds of your current tenure. It’s all the fault of Republican rejectionism.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

You might think that humans have built enough oil and gas pipelines by now to get it right. And, fact is, they have. Oil and gas provide 60 per cent of the world’s primary fuel: a million tonnes of oil every hour, a quarter of a trillion cubic metres of gas every hour.

Almost all of it moves, at one time or other, in pipelines – the safest way, by far, to move it. And this is not inherently surprising. Pipelines are usually buried a metre underground. We’re not talking deep-sea drilling here.

But Canadian-made and Canadian-managed pipelines are in a class by themselves, either the safest in the world or indistinguishable from it. Canadian pipeline companies operate 100,000 kilometres of pipeline. The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association puts the average annual loss of liquid fuels from these pipelines at two litres for every million litres moved. The safety performance of these companies, in other words, can be expressed as 99.999 per cent.

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