Is Canada a petro-state?

Calgary-based author and journalist Andrew Nikiforuk says Canada has become a “rogue petrostate” under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, and he’s taken to the pages of an influential American magazine to make his case.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Nikiforuk says Canada has shed its polite, boy-scout ethic and now pursues a reckless domestic and foreign policy platform, fuelled by “the cursed elixir of political dysfunction — oil.”

“Since the Conservative Party won a majority in Parliament in 2011, the federal government has eviscerated conservationists, indigenous nations, European commissioners, and just about anyone opposing unfettered oil production as unpatriotic radicals,” writes Nikiforuk for the July/August issue of Foreign Policy. “It has muzzled climate change scientists, killed funding for environmental science of every stripe, and in a recent pair of unprecedented omnibus bills, systematically dismantled the country’s most significant long-cherished environmental laws.”

He places much of the blame, as it were, at the feet of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, “a right-wing policy wonk and evangelical Christian with a power base in Alberta, ground zero of Canada’s oil boom.”

“Just as Margaret Thatcher funded her political makeover of Britain on revenue from North Sea oil, Harper intends to methodically rewire the entire Canadian experience with petrodollars sucked from the ground. In the process he has concentrated power in the prime minister’s office and reoriented Canada’s foreign priorities.”

Nikiforuk’s harsh appraisal of Canada in the international press comes only months after University of Waterloo professor Thomas Homer-Dixon made similar complaints in the pages of the New York Times. In a March op-ed, Homer-Dixon wrote that “Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state.”

Although both writers point out the more resource-intensive process required to produce Alberta’s oil sands bitumen, their main concerns are that Canada’s economic and political systems are being warped by the influence of the oil industry and the government’s focus on becoming an energy exporting superpower.

Criticism of oil sands development has been muted in Canada in recent years and a majority of Canadians seem OK with further resource development, as long as some environmental safeguards are in place. It’s not exactly a settled debate in Canada, but for people to pay attention the criticism increasingly needs to come from sources abroad.

Oil and gas account for almost eight per cent of GDP and 18.5 per cent of exports, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

So what are the characteristics of a petro-state? It is one where the economy is dominated by oil and the government highly dependent on its revenues — so much that it distorts the rest of the economy as well as the political system. Petro-states typically have weak institutions, a high-concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few, and deep economic and political inequality.

Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Ishmael N. Daro