Canada is at the brink of a radical shift in energy and foreign policy. But there has been no debate of any consequence about it - not in the House of Commons, not in the Senate, not in the proceedings of a Royal Commission. Certainly not in the news media.
Here's what you've been missing.
Ostensibly, it's about the Enbridge project, a plan to pump condensate eastward from the coast to Alberta so that Alberta bitumen can be made fluid enough to be pumped back to the coast at Kitimat - then put into oil tankers to be sent down Douglas Channel and out into the roaring North Pacific, eventually landing in California and Asia.
As recently as last fall, John Bruk, the founding president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and as fervent a booster of trade with China as you'll meet, was cheering Stephen Harper and wishing him all the best with his trade engagements in the Forbidden City. But Bruk's good wishes came with a caution: "Are we going to sell the ownership of our natural resources to pay for consumer goods we can ill afford and thereby speed up the indebtedness of Canada as export revenue from those resources would be lost?" Turns out that's exactly what we're doing.
It's not just about the jettisoning of a national consensus that Canada's bitumen should not be sent overseas to be processed. It's not just the $20-billion deluge of takeovers and beachheads Beijing has established almost overnight in Alberta's oil sands. It's about Chinese state-owned corporations moving in. It's about a proper review of Investment Canada Act rules the Conservatives were promising only a year ago, before quietly scrapping the promise without explanation. It's about recommendations from the federal Competition Policy Review Panel that were ignored. It's about the abdication of Canada's capacity to articulate a national energy strategy, and all to the advantage of the police state in Beijing.
Until now Beijing's strategy has been to fly under the radar by taking only pieces of oil sands ventures and to murmur occasionally about bringing in Chinese workers or pulling up stakes altogether should they hear too much backchat.
Now, everything's changed. The very week the MacKay River deal went down - and PetroChina became the first Chinese company to be put in charge of a Canadian oil sands project - Canadians were being called to arms over a disclosure that Alberta's eminently reputable Pembina Institute had taken $60,000 from the British government. Turns out it was merely for some sort of think-paper in which Pembina explained things the U.K. should already have known about renewable energy. Meanwhile, when it's up and running in 2014, MacKay will be a fullcourt Beijing show.
The headline the Vancouver Sun published on a Pembinasmearing opinion essay written by Kathryn Marshall was: "Why is foreign money fuelling oilsands fight?" Why indeed.
Sure, Rex Murphy is quite right, as far as it goes. All along, Canada should have been fighting back against the slander campaigns waged by so-called environmental activists who have gotten away with destroying the livelihoods of Canadian sealers and fur trappers. And you could say Prime Minister Harper has a point that there is much to be annoyed about in all those rich Americans who would want Canada to be their own giant, private national park. That could be a conversation worth having. But the great Enviroperil Scare of 2012 is a pathetic distraction.
The Canadian versions of the Tea Party and Moveon.org should be allowed to get their jollies however they choose, and televised freak shows pitting self-appointed oil industry propagandists against self-appointed radical environmentalists might well boost the ratings in the time slots where the evening news used to be. But grown-ups will want to notice something else.
Over the past decade, Canadians have sunk more than $20-billion of mostly public money into port, rail and highway infrastructure on the West Coast, all to expand Canadian trade into Asian economies. The whole point was to diversify our markets and reduce our reliance on the United States. But none of it has worked out like we were told. We've been hooped.
Ten years and $20-billion later, it's all China, all the time. China plays by its own trade rules and everybody's let them get away with it. The result is that in 10 years the annual value of Canadian exports to Japan hasn't budged, and last year, as a destination for Canadian exports, India (the largest country on Earth) was overtaken by Norway. As a Canadian trading partner, Taiwan is now down there with Algeria.
Canada's collective $20-billion Pacific "gateway" investments have ended up transforming Canada's West Coast transportation infrastructure into the portal that has enabled Beijing to flood North American markets with goods manufactured in sweatshops where they'll chuck you in prison if you even wonder aloud what it might be like to belong to an independent labour union. As for free elections or political parties, don't you dare even think about it.
This is what has become of Vancouver's boast to being 58 hours closer than Los Angeles to the big Chinese ports, and to being uniquely linked to three transcontinental railways that run straight into the United States' former industrial heartland. And now Canadians are being expected to provide Beijing with a steady supply of bitumen in a closed loop from Beijing's own oil sands properties in Alberta, through Beijing's own pipeline, to oil tankers, to its own refineries back in China, so that the black comedy of "world trade" can keep unfolding the way Beijing wants. Not only that, we're all supposed to be grateful for it.
If you think Albertans need to have the Riot Act read to them whenever someone says "National Energy Program" out loud you should hear the way British Columbians talk about raw log exports. Usually about a tenth of the cut gets shipped out of the province unprocessed, taking jobs with it, and that's rage-making enough. Well, wake up: Last year, nearly half of all the trees felled on the B.C. coast were shipped out raw. Over the past five years, raw log exports to China have gone through the roof, exploding 12-fold from 94,000 cubic metres to about 1.2 million cubic metres.
This is why more than 70 B.C. wood mills have been shuttered. Meanwhile, you're being asked to boycott bananas because Chiquita has said unflattering things about the oil sands.
The next time some Conservative MP tells you that we should all get down on our hands and knees and thank Enbridge for the $100-million behind its pitch to the National Energy Board for the chance to pour all that Alberta bitumen into China-bound oil-tankers, here's a question you might ask: Just who's paying for this? Put another way: "Why is foreign money fueling the oil sands fight?"
Six years have passed since Enbridge first announced it had obtained $100-million to fund its planning, lobbying, studies and surveys for a twinned pipeline through the Rocky Mountains and across British Columbia to saltwater at Kitimat. First it was all PetroChina's money, then we were told PetroChina got spooked, and then it was somebody else's money, but we're not allowed to know whose money it is. Do the Conservatives even know whose money is behind the Enbridge plan? If not, why not? If so, why aren't they telling us?
Stop and think about it for a second. After all these years, and after all the recent uproars about sinister American environmentalists, it took filings with the National Energy Board that were turned up only this month to reveal that Beijing's very own Sinopec is accompanied by Suncor, Cenovus, Nexen and MEG among the Enbridge project's big-money backers. That still leaves at least $40million in boost-and-plan cash that's coming from an unknown source.
But before we even start asking questions about who came up with Enbridge's final $40-million, a closer look at the $60-million stake we already know about reveals Sinopec is not the only Chinese government outfit that's paying Enbridge's bills. MEG is already partly owned by the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation. CNOOC also owns a third of Nexen's Long Lake oil sands project, and CNOOC and Nexen recently formed a joint venture on several deepwater exploration wells in the Gulf of Mexico. The Enbridge-backer Suncor is a part-owner, with Sinopec and Nexen, of the huge oil sands Syncrude conglomerate.
I recently pointed out something very odd about the Prime Minister's recent slavishness in his posture toward Beijing. I took pains to notice it's not just Stephen Harper, and neither has the fashion for kowtowing afflicted only Conservatives: It's gotten to the point that not a single politician in Ottawa will muster the impudence to wonder aloud whether this charade has gone on long enough.
Right after Mr. Harper declared in his ritual year-end interview, "I am very serious about selling our oil off this continent, selling our energy products to China," Beijing's PetroChina spent $1.9-billion on a complete takeover of the MacKay River oil sands project. And right after that, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver allowed himself to be cajoled into making certain intemperate remarks about radical foreign "billionaire socialists," by which he did not mean the unelected billionaires who run the Chinese People's Congress in Beijing, but rather American matinee idols who enjoy heliskiing vacations in the Kootenay Mountains.
"The servility of Canada's political leaders (municipal, provincial and federal) to the obvious manipulations of Chinese strategists who flaunt world trade and financial market principles and jail democracy-promoting authors for 10-year terms is a national disgrace." I'll say. It wasn't some dweebish umbrage-taker from the Kitsilano Civil Liberties Union who wrote those words. It was Tony Campbell, the former head of the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat for the Privy Council Office.
Remember the Richard Fadden controversy? Seems like only yesterday that everybody was screaming at the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, demanding that he shut up. Fadden almost lost his job. Why? Among other revelations, Fadden reported that cabinet ministers in two provinces were under the control of a certain foreign government that Fadden thought it too indelicate to name, but he did go on to say that Chinese diplomatic missions are funding and organizing political activism in Canada.
And I haven't even got my boots on yet.
Terry Glavin is the Harvey Stevenson Southam lecturer in journalism at the University of Victoria. His most recent book is Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle For Peace in Afghanistan.
Here's what you've been missing.
Ostensibly, it's about the Enbridge project, a plan to pump condensate eastward from the coast to Alberta so that Alberta bitumen can be made fluid enough to be pumped back to the coast at Kitimat - then put into oil tankers to be sent down Douglas Channel and out into the roaring North Pacific, eventually landing in California and Asia.
As recently as last fall, John Bruk, the founding president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and as fervent a booster of trade with China as you'll meet, was cheering Stephen Harper and wishing him all the best with his trade engagements in the Forbidden City. But Bruk's good wishes came with a caution: "Are we going to sell the ownership of our natural resources to pay for consumer goods we can ill afford and thereby speed up the indebtedness of Canada as export revenue from those resources would be lost?" Turns out that's exactly what we're doing.
It's not just about the jettisoning of a national consensus that Canada's bitumen should not be sent overseas to be processed. It's not just the $20-billion deluge of takeovers and beachheads Beijing has established almost overnight in Alberta's oil sands. It's about Chinese state-owned corporations moving in. It's about a proper review of Investment Canada Act rules the Conservatives were promising only a year ago, before quietly scrapping the promise without explanation. It's about recommendations from the federal Competition Policy Review Panel that were ignored. It's about the abdication of Canada's capacity to articulate a national energy strategy, and all to the advantage of the police state in Beijing.
Until now Beijing's strategy has been to fly under the radar by taking only pieces of oil sands ventures and to murmur occasionally about bringing in Chinese workers or pulling up stakes altogether should they hear too much backchat.
Now, everything's changed. The very week the MacKay River deal went down - and PetroChina became the first Chinese company to be put in charge of a Canadian oil sands project - Canadians were being called to arms over a disclosure that Alberta's eminently reputable Pembina Institute had taken $60,000 from the British government. Turns out it was merely for some sort of think-paper in which Pembina explained things the U.K. should already have known about renewable energy. Meanwhile, when it's up and running in 2014, MacKay will be a fullcourt Beijing show.
The headline the Vancouver Sun published on a Pembinasmearing opinion essay written by Kathryn Marshall was: "Why is foreign money fuelling oilsands fight?" Why indeed.
Sure, Rex Murphy is quite right, as far as it goes. All along, Canada should have been fighting back against the slander campaigns waged by so-called environmental activists who have gotten away with destroying the livelihoods of Canadian sealers and fur trappers. And you could say Prime Minister Harper has a point that there is much to be annoyed about in all those rich Americans who would want Canada to be their own giant, private national park. That could be a conversation worth having. But the great Enviroperil Scare of 2012 is a pathetic distraction.
The Canadian versions of the Tea Party and Moveon.org should be allowed to get their jollies however they choose, and televised freak shows pitting self-appointed oil industry propagandists against self-appointed radical environmentalists might well boost the ratings in the time slots where the evening news used to be. But grown-ups will want to notice something else.
Over the past decade, Canadians have sunk more than $20-billion of mostly public money into port, rail and highway infrastructure on the West Coast, all to expand Canadian trade into Asian economies. The whole point was to diversify our markets and reduce our reliance on the United States. But none of it has worked out like we were told. We've been hooped.
Ten years and $20-billion later, it's all China, all the time. China plays by its own trade rules and everybody's let them get away with it. The result is that in 10 years the annual value of Canadian exports to Japan hasn't budged, and last year, as a destination for Canadian exports, India (the largest country on Earth) was overtaken by Norway. As a Canadian trading partner, Taiwan is now down there with Algeria.
Canada's collective $20-billion Pacific "gateway" investments have ended up transforming Canada's West Coast transportation infrastructure into the portal that has enabled Beijing to flood North American markets with goods manufactured in sweatshops where they'll chuck you in prison if you even wonder aloud what it might be like to belong to an independent labour union. As for free elections or political parties, don't you dare even think about it.
This is what has become of Vancouver's boast to being 58 hours closer than Los Angeles to the big Chinese ports, and to being uniquely linked to three transcontinental railways that run straight into the United States' former industrial heartland. And now Canadians are being expected to provide Beijing with a steady supply of bitumen in a closed loop from Beijing's own oil sands properties in Alberta, through Beijing's own pipeline, to oil tankers, to its own refineries back in China, so that the black comedy of "world trade" can keep unfolding the way Beijing wants. Not only that, we're all supposed to be grateful for it.
If you think Albertans need to have the Riot Act read to them whenever someone says "National Energy Program" out loud you should hear the way British Columbians talk about raw log exports. Usually about a tenth of the cut gets shipped out of the province unprocessed, taking jobs with it, and that's rage-making enough. Well, wake up: Last year, nearly half of all the trees felled on the B.C. coast were shipped out raw. Over the past five years, raw log exports to China have gone through the roof, exploding 12-fold from 94,000 cubic metres to about 1.2 million cubic metres.
This is why more than 70 B.C. wood mills have been shuttered. Meanwhile, you're being asked to boycott bananas because Chiquita has said unflattering things about the oil sands.
The next time some Conservative MP tells you that we should all get down on our hands and knees and thank Enbridge for the $100-million behind its pitch to the National Energy Board for the chance to pour all that Alberta bitumen into China-bound oil-tankers, here's a question you might ask: Just who's paying for this? Put another way: "Why is foreign money fueling the oil sands fight?"
Six years have passed since Enbridge first announced it had obtained $100-million to fund its planning, lobbying, studies and surveys for a twinned pipeline through the Rocky Mountains and across British Columbia to saltwater at Kitimat. First it was all PetroChina's money, then we were told PetroChina got spooked, and then it was somebody else's money, but we're not allowed to know whose money it is. Do the Conservatives even know whose money is behind the Enbridge plan? If not, why not? If so, why aren't they telling us?
Stop and think about it for a second. After all these years, and after all the recent uproars about sinister American environmentalists, it took filings with the National Energy Board that were turned up only this month to reveal that Beijing's very own Sinopec is accompanied by Suncor, Cenovus, Nexen and MEG among the Enbridge project's big-money backers. That still leaves at least $40million in boost-and-plan cash that's coming from an unknown source.
But before we even start asking questions about who came up with Enbridge's final $40-million, a closer look at the $60-million stake we already know about reveals Sinopec is not the only Chinese government outfit that's paying Enbridge's bills. MEG is already partly owned by the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation. CNOOC also owns a third of Nexen's Long Lake oil sands project, and CNOOC and Nexen recently formed a joint venture on several deepwater exploration wells in the Gulf of Mexico. The Enbridge-backer Suncor is a part-owner, with Sinopec and Nexen, of the huge oil sands Syncrude conglomerate.
I recently pointed out something very odd about the Prime Minister's recent slavishness in his posture toward Beijing. I took pains to notice it's not just Stephen Harper, and neither has the fashion for kowtowing afflicted only Conservatives: It's gotten to the point that not a single politician in Ottawa will muster the impudence to wonder aloud whether this charade has gone on long enough.
Right after Mr. Harper declared in his ritual year-end interview, "I am very serious about selling our oil off this continent, selling our energy products to China," Beijing's PetroChina spent $1.9-billion on a complete takeover of the MacKay River oil sands project. And right after that, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver allowed himself to be cajoled into making certain intemperate remarks about radical foreign "billionaire socialists," by which he did not mean the unelected billionaires who run the Chinese People's Congress in Beijing, but rather American matinee idols who enjoy heliskiing vacations in the Kootenay Mountains.
"The servility of Canada's political leaders (municipal, provincial and federal) to the obvious manipulations of Chinese strategists who flaunt world trade and financial market principles and jail democracy-promoting authors for 10-year terms is a national disgrace." I'll say. It wasn't some dweebish umbrage-taker from the Kitsilano Civil Liberties Union who wrote those words. It was Tony Campbell, the former head of the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat for the Privy Council Office.
Remember the Richard Fadden controversy? Seems like only yesterday that everybody was screaming at the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, demanding that he shut up. Fadden almost lost his job. Why? Among other revelations, Fadden reported that cabinet ministers in two provinces were under the control of a certain foreign government that Fadden thought it too indelicate to name, but he did go on to say that Chinese diplomatic missions are funding and organizing political activism in Canada.
And I haven't even got my boots on yet.
Terry Glavin is the Harvey Stevenson Southam lecturer in journalism at the University of Victoria. His most recent book is Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle For Peace in Afghanistan.
Original Article
Source: National Post
Author: Terry Glavin
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