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The story:
Canada ’s Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver, has become the latest politician to blame the United States
At issue is the so-called “Gateway” pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia that, if built, would allow Canada to ship Alberta tar sands products to Asia .
Canada ’s Stephen Harper Conservative government has emulated the world’s most discredited and despised right-wing dictators by blaming domestic shortcomings on U.S.
Piqued by an American deferral of the “Keystone” pipeline, which would run north from Alberta south to the Gulf of Mexico, the Harperites, as they are known in Canada , thought they’d play a little hardball with the U.S. and say that Canada would take its oil and ship it to China as a result of U.S.
What the Harper government knew, though, was that there was already plenty of opposition to a Canadian pipeline across territory that includes First Nations (Indian) land. In an effort to get out in front of any opposition, the Harper government, in the voice of hapless Joe Oliver, decided to blame environmentalist American “billionaire socialists” (warning: massive CBC advertising amplification!! http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/TV_Shows/The_National/1233408557/ID=2185209491) for any potential impediments to the east-west Canadian pipeline.
Just one part of the reason Minister Oliver could not rail against his own citizens (Natives) was because they’d already shown themselves to be fairly savvy with respect to business and resource deals, and had in fact made agreements that didn’t involve pipelines. Can’t criticize at home, better go abroad, is what Joe was counseled.
The implications:
By so doing, the Harper government has become just the latest one to blame the U.S. U.S. for just about anything, and generally the U.S. U.S.
Look at the dismaying cartoon strip that is U.S. U.S. U.S. for messing up Canada
In an interview with a Canadian radio show (http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/episode/2012/01/09/the-monday-edition-8/), barely coherent (drunk, sleep-deprived, IQ of 74?) Joe refused to (obviously couldn’t) identify the “billionaire socialists” he’d named above. He dismissed the fact that fewer than 20 of 4500 of those who signed up to comment on Gateway were American; the rest, he implied (he used the word “parrot”), were merely the equivalent of those who signed petitions (grassroots democracy is a hell of a thing, as Stockwell “Doris” Day found out early). Meanwhile, of the 250 or so intervenors—those who are allowed to ask questions and not merely offer a few words of comment—multinationals like Exxon figured remarkably prominently.
Speaking of parroting, Oliver’s contemptuous term for democracy, one could note how, in his own open letter, Oliver slavishly emulates Newt Gingrich, the man who has been, in books and speeches, indeed in marriages, standing “at a crossroads” for some decades now: “Canada is on the edge of an historic choice,” the Minister intones. For his full letter, read here: http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/media-room/news-release/2012/1/3520. It’s probably worthwhile reading since, because the Minister himself probably doesn’t have a clue what it says, it may give you a random point on a map from which you can then re-orient yourself towards whatever thoughts the Minister may have but is not likely to reveal (unless Harper tells/lets him/gets around to reading them first).
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative government, through Minister Joe Oliver, are attempting to cheapen and debase Canadian politics once again, by making outlandish claims about U.S. U.S.
A Handful of Hard Facts:
It may be that, relatively speaking, pipelines don’t present so much incredible danger. In the sense that a loaded gun pointed at your head if the trigger isn’t pulled doesn’t present danger, or a bathtub full of water won’t empty if you don’t pull the plug, surely pipelines don’t present much danger. But Americans just watched an Enbridge pipeline spill into a Michigan
As Natives point out, one massive oil spill off Kitimat could have ramifications for generations or more—this—this merits Minister Oliver’s contempt. A man who probably couldn’t find Kitimat on a map with oven mitts is now in charge of it. There is much to fear.
Get serious, Canada, you don’t even own the sludge you want to export, anyway; China sure as hell isn’t going to wait on a pipeline when it can just come over and buy pretty much anything it wants and mock Canadian energy sovereignty: http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Chinese+firm+buys+full+stake+oilsands+project/5943628/story.html Canadians might just as well live in Guangdong and murder dissidents and serve tea while they’re at it for all Minister Oliver knows or cares about his file.
Gutless Joe Oliver, in defense of the American multinationals (not those chimerical “billionaire socialists”) he wants to build Canadian pipelines, quails and wheedles and whinges that Canada Canada Canada , it would create a national energy strategy in Canada
Bottom line:
Your post raises some interesting points. I would however take it further.
ReplyDeleteHarper's goal with the Gateway pipeline is to take Canadian bitumen, pipe it to Kitimat, put it on tankers and send it to China for processing into fuels. Obtensively, then China would be sending tankers full of upgraded gasoline and diesel back to Canada and somehow the exported jobs and imported fuels would benefit Canadians.
The problem with this though, is that China is hungry for fuel, it isnt about to send anything back. The result is that Canadian gas and diesel prices will remain high because there will still be North American shortages.
The whole "globalization" movement whereby jobs are exported and finished products are imported is entirely counter to Canadian interests. Canadian employers must pay taxes, which funds health care. Canadian taxpayers must pay for education, social services. Canadian businesses must pay a decent minimum wage and provide safe and humane working conditions. All of these things cost money.
China, however, is known for warehousing tens of thousands of workers in construction internment camps, making them work for 14 hours per day seven days per week, for the awesome renumeration of a hundred dollars per month; which they dutifully deduct thirty percent from in order to pay for the squalid and unsafe accommodations they were forced to live in because they werent allowed to permanently move into the cities where the work is. When the project is finished, they send them back to the middle of nowhere where there is no work.
While I am all for "free" trade, this is an unsustainable equation. Sure we get great prices at Wal Mart on Chinese goods, but we watch as our manufacturing base is hollowed out, and the race is on to take raw resources out of the ground as fast as possible so we can ship them to low cost, low regulation jurisdictions along with all the jobs.
A tarriff based on a countries average minimum wage and the estimated number of man-hours required to produce something to introduce some equilibrium is neccesary to protect our economy. This is because in the globalized world, the only thing that advanced economies can produce is financial services; and, well, fast food.
The folly of this policy was made crystal clear to me ten months ago. My friend lives in a rural area where logging trucks go by his house every day filled with logs. He contacted the company, and wanted to order a TRUCKFULL of raw logs that they could just dump on his property, he wanted to build a log cabin on his acreage.
His request was DENIED. Apparently the logs going right by his house were all destined for raw log export to China, and the company was not allowed to sell logs to Canadian companies due to some contractual obligation.
So in BC, we cut down pristine timber and export it to China. China mills the wood, builds tables and cheap crap out of it, and ships it back. The only Canadians employed in this fiasco is a few loggers, a truck driver, and tow-boat crew. Then they are loaded onto a Chinese log barge and shipped away. Oh yes, I forgot the Wal-Mart employees and the Wal-Mart greeter.
Back to the pipeline - why the race for the Harperites to ship the bitumen to China? Why not incentivize building petroleum upgrading facilities right there in Alberta? Surely if we are good enough with petrochemicals to figure out how to dilute raw bitumen and push it down a pipeline (bitumen is a sandy substance) we can simply upgrade the bitumen to oil, gasoline, diesel, and other fuels right here in Canada.
With gas at $1.40 per litre couldn't the average Canadian use a bit more SUPPLY on the supply and demand side of the equation?
--just on the logging anecdote, it makes me think of how, in Alberta, a few 100 km away, we can't have fresh BC produce. All that has to go overseas. Over - seas. Meantime, we get US, South American, South African, European, Antipodean produce. How, really, is it that we get New Zealand apples in our supermarkets, but not BC apples, that one could almost walk to if one had the week off? Alot of countries just don't permit this. In Canada, we could have east-west running pipelines, but that would take patriotism and vision, patriotism and vision of the kind someone like Peter Lougheed could never, ever imagine.
ReplyDeleteIn Canada, if we invested in secondary industry, we could have gas for Venezuelan or Iranian prices, but we would rather be hewers of wood and drawers of water. It was recently suggested that Canada could actually do some of its own upgrading around Kitimat, but that idea was almost instantly shot down by business, industry, media, government--they all had much to gain by keeping Canada as a first-world country with third-world skills. How is it that Norwegians are per capita worth 100s of times more than Albertans? Well, because there _are_ Norwegians. There's really no such thing as an Albertan. He is Chinese, American, and so on. Better, we are told, that we just ship off the raw materials we'll have to buy back. We'll make more money that way. Yes, sure, we might get a few bucks more that way, now. But ultimately, we will lose. We *could* create a knowledge economy. We *could* be creating jobs for scientists and engineers and so on into the future--we could be *hiring* Chinese, not beholden to them. But no. The Harper Conservative plan is for a tiny, tiny Canada with a huge, huge inferiority complex that can never, ever compete with world economic powers. A tiny, insular country only interested in selling off whatever it has as fast as it can is what Harper advocates.