On January 24, President Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing TransCanada to reapply for a permit to build Keystone XL By approving Keystone XL, President Donald Trump may have salvaged the $2.9-billion writedown TransCanada Corp. took after former President Barack Obama rejected the company’s application in 2015, but that doesn’t mean he fixed the system. The method by which pipelines are reviewed and regulated remains dysfunctional, subject to the same forces of environmental obstructionism and political whim that led to Keystone’s rejection in the first place, to the same forces that led Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reject Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline.