On one hand, I stand corrected on the cash paid. On the other hand, you're wrong, its actual market value may be negative, so the strongest criticism is that I pulled the -2.5B real valuation out of my butt.
And yeah, they're tied up in court because their attempt to steamroll the first nations and skirt environmental regulations is probably illegal, but we'll see what the courts say.
And no, the world doesn't need more oil. Nor does the world need oldgrowth lumber, nor does the world need unsustainably caught fish. We need to stop tapping new wells, leave that shit in the ground, to prevent climate disasters. We need to transition to managed forest products. There's no easy solutions on fish. We probably just need to eat less of it (and yeah, that's going to be difficult for me too)
This doesn't remotely represent what actually happened with the Keystone XL.
First of all, the government paid $4.5B for it, which makes it literally impossible for them to have overpaid by $7B.
They also haven't bypassed anything in the process. They were deemed to have not done due diligence in consulting native tribes and re-opened consultations which took about a year to resolve before they could start building.
Canada is a huge landmass with a relatively tiny population. We cannot compete on the global scale in terms of population productivity. Our economic edge is our natural resources. How else do you suggest we make money to pay for our healthcare and all of the other social services we've come to expect?
We have what the world needs. IMO we can either dig it up and export it or expect wars to be fought here for control of it.