The final, unceremonious end to the Keystone XL pipeline is a big blow to Alberta and to our energy sector.

It means fewer Albertans will find steady, well-paying work and our recovery from the double-whammy of the pandemic and the oil downturn will be slower.

More small businesses will fail. Fewer restaurant meals will be served to seismic crews and surveyors, fewer hotel rooms rented.

Dealers will sell fewer cars and trucks to companies and tradespeople, but also to ordinary consumers who worry about the instability of their finances.

But the good news, at least the collapse of Keystone will only cost provincial taxpayers $1.3 billion!

I criticized the UCP government earlier this spring for implying Keystone’s demise would “only” cost $1.3 billion.

It’s not their money. And more money to replace the money lost is going to have to come from somewhere.

With no new oil boom in sight, where do you think that money will be found? That’s right, in higher taxes for you and me.

Environmentalists may think they have won a great victory. They may believe they’ve spared the planet millions of tonnes of carbon emissions and slowed the progress of climate change.

They have done no such thing.

Alberta’s oil will still get to market, just on trains rather than in a clean, safe, state-of-the-art, net-zero pipeline.

It won’t do as much good for Alberta’s economy going by rail. Rail means we’re trapped selling to American buyers. That means lower prices because we can’t get a bidding war started between the U.S. and other buyers.

And it means much, much higher transportation costs, which leads to lower profits.

But the oil will still get shipped, which means no fewer emissions in the long run.

NDP energy critic Kathleen Ganley called on Premier Jason Kenney to apologize to Albertans for “gambling” away so much of their money.

“Today’s loss is another example of how Jason Kenney has failed our energy sector,” Ganley said in a statement on Wednesday.

That’s fair. It was a gamble — a very expensive gamble.

But if the NDP would like an apology over wasted tax dollars, how about they go first.

The UCP lost about one billion less on Keystone than the NDP lost leasing oil-tanker cars from railroad companies during the run up to the 2019 provincial election.

After four years of working arm-in-arm with the federal Trudeau government on initiatives a blind man could see would harm Alberta’s energy sector, you may recall the Notley government agreed to give Canada’s largest rail companies about $4 billion for the use of tanker cars the railways were already using to transport oil, when the companies were already moving oil as fast as they could without a giant subsidy.