Dimpee Brar is the Fellow for Religious Freedom at the Democracy Fund. She is a writer and commentator whose work can be found in the Daily Wire, The Federalist, American Spectator, and the Washington Examiner.A few hours before the midnight deadline, President Trump announced a three-day reprieve from the impending 50% tariffs against Canada. By all accounts, both nations are finalizing the details of what is an otherwise “done deal.” However, the most interesting part had nothing to do with tariff schedules. “The great Keystone XL Pipeline,” the President wrote, “long ago killed by Sleepy Joe Biden, may be awoken from the grave!”Should this occur, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will emerge as this episode’s greatest victor. Her victory would reach beyond a particular policy, pipeline, or province. It would demonstrate that the virtue of prudence still lives in a time when public life is increasingly dominated by theatrics.The distinction between the politician and the statesman has become obscure because we have come to admire the politician’s gifts. The politician knows how to identify a mood. He studies resentments, discovers whom the public wishes to blame, and then converts these passions into a temporary appearance of leadership. Such a man flatters the people because he first flatters himself. He believes he can manipulate the crowd without becoming its slave. This is one of the most ancient illusions in politics.The statesman begins from a more difficult premise: public passion is real, but it does not therefore supply a reliable guide to action. This is why the chief mark of a statesman is prudence. Prudence means seeing the world as it is and not how one wishes it to be, and acting accordingly. It demands the capacity to endure unjust abuse when easier applause is available.Danielle Smith showed that capacity..When it became fashionable in Canada to exploit anti-Americanism, when premiers and members of Parliament alike discovered that insulting a friend of over two centuries was the cheapest applause line available, when the elbows went up, and the boos rained down at hockey games, and the boycott lists circulated, Danielle Smith declined the invitation. She went to Washington. She talked to people while others were busy denouncing. She was called a collaborator, a sellout, a traitor: what small men always call those who refuse to join them in a tantrum. She understood something her critics did not: that a nation of forty million sharing a continent with a nation of three hundred and forty million had better cultivate the art of friendship because the alternative is considerably more expensive.The material stakes were never in doubt. Keystone XL was designed to move roughly 830,000 barrels a day from Hardisty, Alberta, to refining centers on the American Gulf Coast. Those refineries are especially equipped to process the heavy crude Alberta produces. The project promised a more direct and efficient route for Alberta’s resources while supplying American industry with energy from a freedom-loving friend. And the Canadian public knows it. Polling on the prospect of Keystone XL proceeding found 46% of Canadians calling it a good thing: a plurality in a nation whose media has spent 15 years insisting the pipeline is a moral obscenity. In Alberta, the figure reaches nearly 67%. That figure matters because it reveals a simple truth: the public recognizes that economic prosperity trumps partisan politics.Yet Smith’s greatest achievement may arise within Alberta. .The Alberta independence movement has fed on true grievances. Ottawa did not take Alberta seriously. Ottawa treated Alberta’s prosperity like a national piggy bank while condemning its people. One can argue whether advocates for independence are wrong about the remedy, but they were never wrong about the injury. And the strongest arrow in their quiver was always the third claim: that nothing would ever change.If this pipeline is built, that arrow is broken. The injustice is answered, not by independence, but by a premier who worked the problem with patience while her detractors worked the crowd. Danielle Smith may have delivered the death knell to Alberta independence by the only method that ever works: by making the Confederation deliver.The wider consequence runs further still. An integrated continental energy corridor binds two nations against tyrannies that would prefer them estranged. No one in Beijing is celebrating a return to this Washington-Ottawa friendship. A continent that supplies its own energy is a continent that cannot be squeezed.Credit is owed as well to James Carpenter, Alberta’s senior representative in Ottawa and Agent General, who did the unglamorous work that statesmanship requires and rarely advertises.Danielle Smith chose the more difficult course. She refused the pleasures of fashionable hostility. She treated Canada’s friendship with the United States as a national inheritance worth preserving and strengthening. If Keystone XL rises again, it will be a monument to her prudence, and as proof that statesmanship can still prevail.Dimpee Brar is the Fellow for Religious Freedom at the Democracy Fund. She is a writer and commentator whose work can be found in the Daily Wire, The Federalist, American Spectator, and the Washington Examiner. You can follow her on X: @isthisdimpeeb
