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Former energy minister Marc Lalonde has fond memories of Ed Clark, who's now the CEO of Toronto-Dominion Bank. "The guy was brilliant. We used to call him Red Ed," he told me last year at a dinner party.

Mr. Lalonde was energy minister under Pierre Trudeau. Albertans will remember his name forever, because he was responsible for the much-hated 1980 national energy program - of which Mr. Clark, then a high-ranking civil servant, was the chief architect.

So here's the answer to those who wonder why TD commissioned two advocacy groups (the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation) to write a climate-change study. Their report recommends that Canada reduce its greenhouse emissions by limiting growth in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

It seems Mr. Clark still has Alberta on his mind, 30 years after he devised a plan that diverted to Ottawa control over the province's oil and gas resources as well as part of the profits. To this day, the NEP remains the reason why Alberta and, to a lesser degree, the other western provinces are a no-go zone for the Liberals.

Faced with a flurry of criticism, especially from the oil patch, Mr. Clark somewhat distanced himself from the climate report, saying TD only wanted to stimulate the debate over greenhouse-gas reduction. Hogwash. By paying for the study and releasing it only weeks before the Copenhagen summit, TD lent its credibility to the environmental activists.

And the fact that this complicated, figure-laden study was sponsored by a key bank - the very symbol of capitalism - also lends a great deal of respectability to a report that might otherwise have been dismissed as yet another biased, agenda-driven proposal. If TD wanted to take part in the climate-change debate, why didn't it just bring together a diverse panel of opinions?

Mr. Clark was widely commended last year for having been the only bank chief in Canada who refused to buy the toxic asset-backed securities that precipitated the collapse of so many financial institutions. He certainly showed good judgment then. But his judgment on Alberta's natural resources is as questionable now as it was 30 years ago.

The Edmonton Journal once recalled how he came to his plan. "He based much of that horrendous scheme on his doctoral thesis on government intervention in the economy of Tanzania, which he insisted had been a roaring success. He argued Canada could make itself immune from world oil and gas prices through government regulation of the markets the way Tanzania had cloistered itself away from the forces of world trade."

At the time, Quebec premier René Lévesque was sympathetic to Alberta, even though the NEP was advantageous to those Canadian consumers who happened to live in Central Canada. Mr. Lévesque was a friend of premier Peter Lougheed, but, more important, Quebec saw the NEP as a huge power grab in an area of provincial jurisdiction. Today, Quebec's reaction is different.

Since the environment has become the new religion, and Alberta's oil sands the cherished target of environmental activists, Quebec - whose main natural resource (hydroelectricity) is the cleanest source of energy - is content to play the role of the holier-than-thou province while benefiting from the success of the West's energy industry.

Ontario is playing the same kind of game - it watches the international crusade mounting against the West, but, when it came to saving its own polluting automobile industry, it sang another song.

The Harper government is right to tread carefully on this issue. Notwithstanding the fact that its electoral base is in Alberta, it was not elected to hurt Canada's economy - of which the West is the major engine - in the name of a long-term and uncertain goal. There's no reason why Canada should become the sacrificial lamb at Copenhagen while the biggest emitting countries refuse to curb their own development.

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