Canadian Officials frustration with Obama Grows over the Keystone Pipeline

When President Obama heads to Mexico on Wednesday for talks with fellow heads of state at the North American Leadership Summit, he will almost certainly get pressured once again by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. 

The Canadians — along with a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers — are pressing hard on Obama to approve the controversial pipeline just weeks after the State Department issued a report finding the pipeline will have a negligible impact on climate because expanded development of carbon-heavy tar sands of northwest Canada is inevitable, with or without the pipeline.

Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

But in the midst of all the lobbying on the pipeline, which would bring oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, there's a growing sense among Canadian officials that there won't be a final resolution on the issue until after Obama leaves office in 2017. 

"We must set our priorities, tailor our agenda and make our preparations with that small window of opportunity in mind. The next one will arrive in 2017," Jim Prentice, a former Canadian Conservative Party official who has been touted as a potential successor to Harper, said in a speech in Ottawa last week.

The comments by Prentice echo sentiments expressed by Harper, who before last month's State Department report had begun to show impatience with the Obama administration over Keystone, which was first proposed when George W. Bush was in the White House. 

Harper has criticized Obama for repeatedly "punting" on permitting the pipeline but has expressed confidence that approval to build the final 800 miles of the pipeline (the southern segment has already been completed) is inevitable, whether by Obama or the next U.S. president.

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