Justin Trudeau has told his senior lieutenants to draw up plans to make the Energy East pipeline and the Trans Mountain expansion in British Columbia a reality.

The prime minister has been convinced by his finance minister, Bill Morneau, and other influential voices around the cabinet table that the pipelines have to be built to achieve the ambitious economic growth targets his government has set.

But the problem for the Liberals is that this conviction has to be conveyed subtly to a public that has decidedly mixed views on oilsands expansion and pipelines.

October 14, 2015 - 2:19pm

VICTORIA – The Wilderness Committee is celebrating an announcement by the BC Environmental Assessment Office (EAO) late yesterday afternoon, which terminated the assessment for the proposed Raven Coal Mine in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island.

Beijing has high hopes for the new Trudeau government.

Both the Trudeau Liberals in Ottawa and the Wynne Government at Queen's Park in Toronto have been making noises of late on the subject of Basic Income. The last Ontario Budget, in fact, declared an intention to carry out a pilot project in a community still to be announced. While no clear details are yet available, it is very likely that we will soon be dealing with a practical initiative that we will have to respond to. We will have to consider how we view the possibility of the Liberals moving in the direction of a Basic Income system.

The oil sands are downsizing. Alberta's Big Oil CEOs are talking to environmentalists. And proposed oil pipelines are in serious trouble.

Those were the takeaways from a trio of experts who spoke in Vancouver Wednesday at a "Carbon Talks" event hosted by Simon Fraser University with the David Suzuki Foundation and the Centre for International Governance.

And the reasons for them have a lot less to do with vocal activist opposition or the Trudeau government's climate commitments than they do with the brute forces of the global marketplace for oil.