When Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015, he touted his government’s climate credentials on the world stage. “Canada is back, my friends,” he told delegates at the Paris climate summit. “We’re here to help.” His government rolled out a nationwide carbon tax (or as the then environment minister Catherine McKenna called it, a “price on pollution”).

But in the years since, Canada remains the only G7 nation to emit greenhouse gases far above its 1990 levels – while now also planning to extract and export record volumes of oil.

We’ll fix the contradiction by electing a government that doesn’t even promise to help.

Indeed, just a month after opening, the Canadian government is trying to walk away from the Trans Mountain pipeline. The finance minister said there was no interest in being “a long-term owner of the project” and the government has now floated the idea of selling the pipeline to a consortium of First Nations.

That does not sit well with some members of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, a community directly across from the tanker farm that has emerged as some of the pipeline’s fiercest critics.

“They say it’s a ‘reconciliation deal’ to sell First Nations people the pipeline, so that we can share in the revenues,” said Reuben George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation. “But it’s a debt-ridden stranded asset. It would be economic smallpox to Indigenous peoples.”

I’m glad First Nations are seeing right through this charade.

What an absolutely damning article. It’s well written, and clearly illustrates how two-faced, short-sighted, and greedy our government is being. The subsidizing and later failure of the terminal project was pretty shocking as well.