After more than a decade of jurisdictional squabbling, political grandstanding, activist obstructionism, legal wrangling and bureaucratic delays, the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion gained final approval earlier this week and began shipping oil on Wednesday.

Despite coming in years behind schedule and nearly $27 billion over budget, the pipeline is being hailed by some Liberals as a triumph of Big Government, with the “golden” or “final” weld on April 11 drawing parallels to the Last Spike driven into John A. Macdonald’s Canadian Pacific Railway on Nov. 7, 1885.