The government has told so many lies about the F-35 and its proposed purchase, it has had to punt the decision to buy these over-priced flying pianos beyond the next election.
If they tried to purchase the F-35 now, it would cost them the election. Every single thing former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff said about this procurement fiasco in the 2011 election turned out to be true. There was no contract, contrary to the PM’s claim on the campaign trail; the government possessed but suppressed the actual cost of the F-35; and every claim about the stealth fighter’s capabilities was premature since it is still an aircraft in development — and way, way over-budget.
When caught in the Duffy/Wright affair, the PMO told lie after lie in a botched attempt at a cover-up. It was not true, as the PM claimed, that no one in his office knew about the $90,000 secret payment to Duffy by Wright. It was not true, as Tories claimed, that Duffy had repaid the loan on his own. It was not true, as the PM told us, that Wright had resigned — a fact we know because Harper himself subsequently claimed Wright had been fired. Now that the Royal Harper Mounted Police have dropped the investigation into Nigel Wright, we may never know the true story.
So why should anyone be surprised at another striking case of government hypocrisy and deception over the Harper government’s selective use of sanctions in its ‘tough’ stand against Russia over Ukraine?
As usual, Harper marched out the most inflammatory words possible when talking about Russian President Vladimir Putin. If you are one of the 1.2 million Canadians of Ukrainian descent, you might have cheered when Harper and John Baird compared the Russian leader to Hitler. As disses go, that’s as good as they come. After all, where do you go from evil incarnate?
But did he mean it? Apparently not, though the cover story was a little better than usual this time. Harper and his foreign minister immediately hopped on Kyiv-bound planes for the 2015 photo-ops: Canada standing up for Ukraine. Baird donned a scarf in the national colours of that troubled country. Then the government sent jets, with or without armaments, to show we’re ready to rumble for Ukrainian democracy. (At home, the government was busy ramming the abusive Fair Elections Act through Parliament.)
And then there were all those sanctions against the Russians — 80 in all. An impressive number, given that the Americans had only 60 on their sanctions list. You get it … ours is bigger than theirs, so we’re more supportive of Ukraine. Or as the PM himself put it, “We will not shape our foreign policy to commercial interests.”
Then Reuters broke a story: The democracy-loving duo from Canada who made the list apparently forgot to check it twice. They managed to leave off two of Adolf Putin’s buddies with major business interests in Canada — Sergey Chemezov and Igor Sechin. Chemezov runs Rostec, Russia’s state-industrial and defence giant, and Sechin is Putin’s pal at the state oil behemoth Rosneft.
Rostec has a $3.4 billion deal brewing with Bombardier and Rosneft has a huge investment in the Canadian oilpatch. The United States has both men on their sanctions list. Why don’t we?
That’s what NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar wanted to know last week when the story broke — especially after it became known that Bombardier’s CEO had six gabfests with government officials in March, including two cabinet ministers, Transport Minister Lisa Raitt and Industry Minister James Moore. So the answer, in the case of Rostec, is pretty clear: An important Canadian company needed its business.
That leaves Igor Sechin, Putin’s former deputy chief of staff and the Kremlin’s J. R. Ewing. A bad dude. His nickname in the press? “Darth Vader”, or sometimes simply, “the scariest person on earth.” He is a leading member of the siloviki or the “powerful ones.” These guys usually come from one of two places: the military or the intelligence establishment.
In Sechin’s case, it was the latter. He’s allegedly a former member of the GRU, the former KGB’s foreign intelligence arm. He has been Putin’s right hand man since the St. Petersburg days. Case in point. Who is traveling with Putin on his trip to China this week? You guessed it — Darth. To get any closer to Putin, you’d have to be married to him.
Russia has been in talks with the Chinese to build a gas pipeline to that country, and to sell them 100 million metric tons of crude oil over the next decade worth an estimated $85 billion. According to Bloomberg, Russian trade with China could exceed $100 billion this year.
So how could Steve the Avenger fail to add Darth Vader to his sanctions list? Could it be because, like Sechin, our Steve has oil running through his veins, and ticking off the chairman of an oil concern worth $68 billion is an unattractive prospect? Could it be that a long-term deal Rosneft signed with ExxonMobil meant more to Canada than it did to the United States?
Here’s the skinny. In the spring of 2012, Rosneft and ExxonMobil signed a fifteen-year “strategic cooperation agreement” to jointly explore for oil and gas. As part of that agreement, the Russian oil giant took an equity position in major oil developments in both the U.S. and Canada.
The U.S. investment was done through an “independent, indirect subsidiary of Rosneft” called Neftegaz Holding America, which is registered in Delaware. The company took a 30 per cent equity in ExxonMobil’s share in the La Escalera Ranch project in West Texas.
Rosneft used another “independent subsidiary”, RN Cardium Oil Inc., to acquire 30 per cent of ExxonMobil’s stake in the Harmattan acreage in the Cardium formation of the Western Canada Basin, in Alberta. Like the Chinese, and with the blessing of the Harper government, the Russians now hold a serious stake in Canada’s unconventional oilpatch. What may be more important than the oil venture is Russia acquiring the technology to develop unconventional oil reserves at home.
In 2012, ExxonMobil and Rosneft also created a joint venture to explore the Black Sea. According to the New York Times, buried in the treaty of the annexation of Crimea, Article 4, Section 3 says that international law will govern the drawing of the new boundaries through the adjacent Black and Azov Seas. This gives Russia 200 nautical miles from shore.
The newly claimed Maritime Zone will add about 36,000 square miles to Russian’s holdings, in an area that used to belong to Ukraine. Oil and gas development in the Black Sea is potentially worth trillions of dollars. Some exploration experts have already asked the question: “Is the Black Sea the next North Sea?”
If Putin is Hitler, then Sechin and Chemezov, both cronies of the leader, should be on Ottawa’s sanctions list. Steve needs to tell us why they are not.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
No comments:
Post a Comment