As the pro-bitumen export crowd notices the gathering storm clouds over their Northern Gateway and Kinder-Morgan options, and, further south, sees long shadows falling over the Keystone XL pipeline to refineries on the shores of the Texas Gulf coast, support is mobilizing for pipelines running east.

Debate has been about how best to export raw, virtually unprocessed bitumen -- as much as possible and as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, the eastern half of Canada depends on imports of foreign oil from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, and Norway. As Gordon Laxer of the Parkland Institute tried to point out to a Parliamentary committee (before the Conservative chair ordered him to stop talking and stormed out of the room), Canada has no energy security.

Have things really changed all that much for Alberta since then-energy minister Ron Liepert predicted in early 2012 that the province was on the verge of a “Bitumen Gusher” of unprecedented magnitude?

One just hates to endorse the financial predictions of any Alberta Tory cabinet minister, but it is said here they likely haven’t.

If Mr. Liepert got it basically right in February 2012, understanding that fact helpfully illuminates the re-election strategy of Premier Alison Redford and her Progressive Conservative government for 2016.

Who would have thought Alberta, of all places, would end up suffering from Dutch Disease?

Surely it was just weeks ago we Albertans, always ornery and lightning quick to take offence, were excoriating the likes of federal Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair and then-Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty for daring to suggest such a thing might even be possible.

Dutch Disease, as alert readers will recall, is the term coined by the snarky upper-class wits at the U.K.'s Economist magazine back in 1977 to describe what happens when rising revenues from natural resources pump a country's currency to the point its suddenly overpriced manufacturing and export sectors take a beating, with predictably depressing results for jobs and profits.