A dozen years ago, Justin Trudeau’s first speech as an official Liberal leadership candidate in Calgary seemed to extend an olive branch to Alberta’s oil and gas sector.

“It is wrong to use our natural wealth to divide Canadians against one another, it was the wrong way to govern in Canada in the past,” the son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau told the crowd at the Dashmesh Culture Centre in October 2012.

“There’s not a country in the world that would find 170 billion barrels of oil under the ground and leave them there.”

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And after he became Liberal leader, a follow-up speech the next year at the Calgary Petroleum Club reinforced that view.

“That speech was full of olive branches, and he acknowledged the irony of a Trudeau asking for support in the Petroleum Club in Calgary. And he was going to be different,” Tim McMillan, then the CEO of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, recalled Monday.

“But shortly after forming government, the narrative changed quite deliberately.”

During more than nine years in office, the olive branch was to become a stick, used to prod and poke the oil and gas sector and, at times, to pound it.

On Monday, Trudeau confirmed he will........

© Calgary Herald