Enbridge's fitful attempts to build a pipeline from Alberta's oil fields to the British Columbia coast is providing plenty of entertainment value on the business and political fronts these days. But a bigger, arguably more interesting story is emerging in China's state-controlled Cnooc's friendly takeover bid for Canadian energy giant Nexen .

Enbridge can't seem to get a break in its attempts to build its C$6 billion Northern Gateway pipeline. Last month it's performance was likened to the "Keystone Kops" by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board for its belated response to a Michigan oil spill last year. Then, last week, came another burst Enbridge pipeline, this one in Wisconsin. As cleanup crews scrambled, news emerged that U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood won't let Enbridge restart the pipeline until it can prove it's safe, whatever that means.

With Enbridge being slapped around by the American government, the constant heat it's been taking from Canadian opponents of Northern Gateway seems almost mild by comparison, although political opposition is growing.

Meanwhile, in happier Canadian oil news — so far, anyway — the Nexen board has approved Cnooc's C$15.1 billion offer for the Alberta-based international oil producer, with China's third-largest oil company promising to establish its first overseas headquarters in Calgary to coordinate Nexen's far-flung operations in North and South America; retain Nexen's entire management team; and, it promises to list the new company on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

It sounds like a pretty sweet deal for Canada, where the final decision to OK the takeover now rests with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who must decide whether the friendly takeover provides a "net benefit" to Canada under the umbrella-like Canada Investment Act. And the Cnooc takeover deal does seem to be loaded with net benefits to Canada, including the above and, oil field job creation in a down economy.

Harper, an Albertan and longtime oil-sands backer, seems very likely to give Cnooc a thumbs-up. Statistics Canada says that the booming Alberta oil sands are estimated to have provided a third of Canada's economic growth in 2010 and 2011. Largely because of energy, Canada's economy remains among the world's strongest.

Most Canadian analysts are forecasting that this latest Cnooc deal won't end in the fiasco its aborted $18.5 billion takeover deal of Unocal did seven years ago, when political pressure and public resistance killed it.

Harper, most analysts agree, when he does approve the big Cnooc deal — China's largest overseas takeover to date — won't have to "make up stuff," as one financial commentator put it, like he did two years ago when he nixed mining giant BHP Billiton's  attempted C$40 billion takeover of Saskatchewan's Potash Corp.  , for domestic political reasons.

Saskatchewan's Premier vehemently opposed that takeover, but even Canada's leftist national opposition party, the NDP, hasn't opposed this Cnooc deal.

Soon after his veto, Harper and his government put out the word that, despite the Potash rejection, Canada was still "open for business" to increasingly nervous foreign investors. That was underlined last month when Harper's government said it was OK — under the Investment Canada act — for U.S.-based Target to sell Canadian cultural products in its soon-to-be-opened Canadian outlets. ( Read an earlier column about Target and Canadian cultural products .)

The key thing here is that, as CIBC vice-chair Jim Prentice put it so well recently in an op-ed piece urging Harper's approval of the Nexen deal, Canada is a "small country with a big resource base," and it needs foreign capital to realize its economic potential. And China, of course, is a growing country that needs the mother's milk of oil (if I may mangle a metaphor).

Prentice noted that on an asset basis, Canadians are "the wealthiest people in the world" — barely one-half of one percent of the world's population occupying more than 15 percent of the world's land mass and owning "a disproportionate proportion of almost any commodity that matters."

But access to Canada's huge resources, some are saying, should be a major bargaining chip for Canada in these deals.

Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto's School of Management, says Harper should skip the "net benefit charade" and bargain hard with China: Canada, he says, should demand China sign a net investment treaty specifying that if a Canadian company attempts to take over a Chinese company of similar size to Nexen, China will automatically approve it. Reciprocity, he and other Canadians are arguing, should be the guiding principle here. Canada, as noted above, has been dealt a strong hand.

In other words, Canada shouldn't just give away the store.

But will Harper prove to be a hard bargainer with China while at the same time openly wooing its investments? Only time will tell.

Which brings us back to the embattled Enbridge, whose Northern Gateway is encountering such fierce opposition here in B.C. that it seems it could cost waffling/posturing Premier Christy Clark her job in next May's elections. Clark hasn't said if she supports Northern Gateway, but if she eventually does, she insists, it'll be with strong environmental and economic strings attached.

So, what happens if Northern Gateway isn't approved or ever built? What if Canadian oil can't reach more lucrative Asian and world markets? I suspect it will be built after the current smoke clears.

But if not, analysts are saying, Canada already has a huge, well-established market just to its south. Canada, with the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world, now provides 30% of U.S. oil imports.

And even if Canadian oil is sharply discounted in the U.S.— most estimates peg the "Canadian discount" at around $20 a barrel — oil, like water, still flows downward. So the Chinese and Cnooc have a built-in hedge — the huge U.S.market.

Nexen's China-owned Alberta crude may go south to the U.S., but the profits will still end up in China.