Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is right to charge the federal government with being weak in their response to President Joe Biden’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline.

Considering that it will cost Canada billions of dollars and thousands of well-paying jobs across the country, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s statement  that, “we are disappointed but acknowledge the president’s decision to fulfil his election campaign promise” is pretty weak tea.

Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau was equally placid,  telling CTV News that Canada respected and understood the decision. And, of course, Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, also toed the timid party line,  saying that Ottawa was “disappointed…We have to accept that and move forward.”

The Trudeau government’s docile response to Biden’s decision, the same weak-kneed approach they took in 2015 when former President Barack Obama cancelled Keystone XL, may very well be due to the fact that Trudeau likely considers Biden’s decision as a gift. Not to Canada, of course, but to the prime minister personally.

By killing the project, Biden has absolved Trudeau of the responsibility of having to decide between alienating his climate activist friends by continuing the project, or alienating normal Canadians across the country by cancelling it. You have to wonder if Trudeau’s private response to Biden was simply ‘thank you, Joe.’

And, of course, having declared a “climate emergency” and the need to go ‘net-zero carbon’ by 2050, the federal government has itself to thank for promoting the mindset that naturally led to Biden’s decision. While climate activists are hopelessly misguided on the science and economics of climate change, they are right about one thing: building pipelines to allow the expansion of the oil sands totally contradicts the virtue signalling Trudeau and his cabinet regularly engage in when portraying themselves as ‘climate warriors.’

On Nov. 3, 2017, the Vancouver-based Wilderness Committee summed up the fatal flaw in the government’s approach when they called on supporters to dress up “in our very best superhero attire” to greet then Environment Minister Catherine McKenna saying:

“It’s time to show them who the real climate superheroes are — the people who are going to stop the Kinder Morgan and hold back tar sands expansion. Climate heroes don’t build pipelines.”

Kenney also must take responsibility for his role in indirectly encouraging the cancellation of Keystone XL.  After all, while promoting Alberta’s hydrocarbon fuels industry, the premier supports the climate scare at the same time despite the fact that the climate movement seeks to end the use of all fossil fuels.

Even in his January 20 speech deriding the federal government for their inept response to the pipeline cancellation, Kenney used politically correct language that reinforces the notion that we face dangerous human-caused global warming.

And, of course, Saskatchewan premier Scot Moe, even while opposing the so-called ‘carbon’ tax and promoting adaptation measures, also supports the climate scare. Indeed, Moe boasted  that the province’s Prairie Resilience climate plan “will reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions from the electricity sector by 40 per cent.”

So, the nonsensical climate change language federal and provincial governments have been using for years has finally come home to roost with the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline. Canada is reaping what our politicians have sowed.