OTTAWA—When it comes to theatre of the absurd in public life, nothing tops pipeline politics.

There was Alberta Premier Danielle Smith—who has accused the Liberals of hamstringing Big Oil, crushing her province’s aspirations, and inciting Albertans to break up the country—turning to the feds to build her long-sought new pipeline.

After spending seven months trying to rustle up a private company as the proponent for an extra Alberta-to-the-British-Columbia-coast oil conduit, Smith announced last week that it would be built—wait for it—by a federally owned company, Trans Mountain Corp.

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And the so-called West Coast pipeline would be almost entirely funded—at a cost of at least $40-billion—by federal and provincial taxpayers. (Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Corp. came through with a bit of a fig leaf by agreeing to maybe take a 10-per-cent stake in the project.)

In short, it’s the socialists from Ottawa coming to the rescue in the bastion of drill-baby-drill petro-capitalism yet again.

Like most Albertans, Smith seems in recent years to have forgotten good ol’ Trans Mountain Corp. You might recall that it was acquired in 2018 by then-prime minister Justin Trudeau to build TMX, which was a twinning of Trans Mountain’s 47-year-old oil pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver. Opened two years ago at a cost of........

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