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A funny thing happened on the way to the pipeline hearings. On Jan. 9, 2012, the eve of the Joint Review Panel hearings in British Columbia to review Enbridge’s proposal to build a twinned “Northern Gateway” pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the Pacific Ocean, then-natural resources minister Joe Oliver published an open letter in newspapers across the country. His endorsement of the project was clear, but he cautioned that “there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity” and that, with foreign funding, “these groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.”