Canada’s Keystone Kops turn easy win on pipeline into monumental bust

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The White House may not have known it, but when President Barack Obama visited a North Carolina plant owned by Canada's Linamar last month, he was making a case for the Keystone XL pipeline.

The Linamar plant near Asheville, N.C., makes axle parts for Caterpillar's massive mining trucks, the type of vehicle that has come to symbolize the superhuman scale of Alberta's oil sands. Linamar opened the plant last year and Mr. Obama toured it to tout a recent resurgence in U.S. manufacturing.

"They could have gone any place in the world, they saw this incredible potential right here in Asheville," Mr. Obama said of Guelph-based Linamar. "They saw the most promise in this workforce, so they chose to invest in Asheville, in North Carolina, in the United States of America."

There was a time when the Canadian government and other backers of Keystone would have trumpeted Mr. Obama's visit at every turn. It plays into their argument that the pipeline aimed at carrying oil sands crude to refineries on the U.S. Gulf of Mexico coast is an economic win-win for both countries.

Indeed, that was the main argument advanced by Canadian ambassador Gary Doer as he toured the United States to sell Keystone in 2010 and 2011. The Canadian embassy and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers drew up a list of the hundreds of U.S. companies that benefited from the oil sands.

If Keystone's backers have since dropped that sales pitch – Mr. Obama's Linamar visit was ignored by the pro-pipeline crowd – it's probably because it has been a monumental bust. And it underscores just how the pro-Keystone side has been outmanoeuvred in the U.S. public relations war.

What should have been an easy win – in 2010, Hillary Clinton said the State Department was "inclined" to approve the pipeline – has turned into a nail-biter for Canada. Regardless of the final outcome, the strategy used by the Canadian side to win over U.S. policy makers has already proven to be a failure.

Keystone's backers relied on American Petroleum Institute head Jack Gerard and top Republicans to do their bidding in public for them in the United States. But instead of building U.S. support for Keystone, they may have undermined it. Their public association with the pipeline only fired up its opponents.

Besides, there are plenty of Republicans who would be just as happy to see Mr. Obama kill the pipeline. It would energize the party's base going into next year's mid-term elections, feeding GOP depictions of the president as an anti-business extremist. In the U.S., politics always comes first.

Only belatedly has the Harper government come to realize that Canada needed a more compelling narrative to bolster Keystone's chances. The new refrain from Canadian politicians (Tom Mulcair excepted) visiting the U.S. capital is this: Any green you can do, we can do better.

It may not be too late for Keystone's backers to win the war. But they have looked like Keystone Kops getting there. They can't even garner favourable coverage in the business press, unless it's owned by Rupert Murdoch. Recent articles in Bloomberg Businessweek – whose owner Mike Bloomberg has admittedly lobbied hard for climate change legislation – have been devastating toward the pipeline.

The current issue has a glowing portrait of anti-Keystone activist Bill McKibben. Read it and cringe.

Konrad Yakabuski covers policy for The Globe and Mail from Toronto.