THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS.

There's a low-level insurrection going on in Canada.

Canadian National says a shutdown of significant parts of its Canadian network is imminent “unless the blockades on its rail lines are removed.”

The blockades, which Feb. 6 near Belleville, Ontario, have spread to other locations throughout Canada. They are in response to and support of an indigenous group’s protest over construction of a pipeline through the territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in British Columbia.

CN is dealing with blockades at Belleville — the only eastern link between Eastern Canada and Western Canada, and between Eastern Canada and the U.S. Midwest, the railroad notes — as well as its line in British Columbia between Prince George and Prince Rupert. The Belleville blockade has also disrupted VIA Rail Canada service between Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa.

Canada might be the local exemplar of Eurostyle policies that self-styled progressives in the United States point to, but the country has trimmed its Passenger Rail network in a way that Amtrak's most active detractors can only gape at.  That north shore of Lake Ontario corridor from Toronto to Ottawa or Montreal (the lines divide near the Quebec border) is the most thickly settled part of the country, and it comes nowhere near close to Acela Corridor levels of frequency or speed.

At the moment, the blockades are making Alberta's oil interests suffer, perhaps even more so than cheap fracked oil does.

Alberta’s crude oil is predominantly bitumen, a thick, low-grade crude that must be diluted with extremely volatile petroleum gases for transportation by rail or pipeline. Projects to increase pipeline capacity have been frustrated by popular and government opposition across Canada and in the U.S., where the Keystone XL pipeline has been mired in climate-change controversy for years.

Meanwhile, oil prices are plummeting due to oversupply and weak demand. Immediate prospects for more CBR out of Alberta have never looked worse.

I thought Kurt Schlichter's People's Republic series was fiction, but perhaps it's prescient in a way he didn't anticipate.

Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said the national government is “very concerned” about the railway shutdown, but added that responsibility for enforcing court orders falls to provincial governments. British Columbia’s government is an avowed opponent of expansion of both pipeline and tank train transportation of Alberta petroleum products to Pacific ports.

Alberta’s desperation to export its gas and oil via unwilling provinces is visibly tearing at the country’s social cohesion, and now its economic well-being as well. CN’s [president J. J.] Ruest advised that the blockades are “being felt beyond Canada’s borders, and is harming the country’s reputation as a stable and viable supply chain partner.”

So far, Donald Trump has not proposed to add a new state, North Montana.