Stephen Harper is now long gone from office, but there may not be a damn thing the new government can do about most of the damage he’s done to Canada. By handcuffing the new government’s ability to implement its agenda of change, Harper continues to exert his influence despite being massacred at the polls.
Towards the end of Harper’s reign of error, it was painfully obvious that his political pedigree was Northern Tea Party through and through. The mantra was identical at the ideological level — deregulate, privatize and bust the unions.
He also brought in police-state security legislation that the current government must not so much amend as expunge.
Just like the National Security Agency in the U.S., our electronic spy agency, the Canadian Security Establishment, was spying and continues to spy illegally on Canadians — whatever euphemism they come up with to describe their clandestine and unconstitutional activities.
As for CSIS, it will remain beyond parliamentary oversight and, as such, above the Charter of Rights and the rule of law — until Bill C-51 and the rest of its corrupted mandate is overhauled.
Harper purposely conflated patriotism with belligerence. Like Donald Trump to the south, Harper carried wedge politics very close to the politics of hate. The country moved from championing disarmament to selling vastly increased quantities of weapons to oppressive civil rights-abusing regimes like that of Saudi Arabia.
The Conservative party under his leadership became the anything-for-a buck/yuan/euro party. They even tried to keep selling asbestos abroad long after it was taken off the domestic market as a known carcinogen. Canada became a shabby huckster led by the huckster-in-chief, Stephen Harper.
But the damage goes much deeper than a tattered global reputation.
Harper’s Republican credentials were most clearly on display on the energy file. Throughout his entire term as PM he promised to regulate emissions in the oilpatch — but never did.
Remember, this is the guy who didn’t even think the environment was an issue in the 2015 election after essentially gutting environmental safeguards with the omnibus Bill C-38. This is the guy who gutted Fisheries and Oceans and put the National Energy Board in charge of any endangered fish species that have the misfortune to exist too close to a proposed pipeline route.
Just 11 months before the last federal election, Harper finally came clean about the fact that he had no intention of reducing Canada’s carbon footprint. In fact, he said it would be “crazy economic policy” to impose climate change regulations on the oil and gas sector. Lesser corporate minds would say it would be crazy not to — and they did just that in Paris.
His government even cancelled support for a climate change art show by renowned Canadian artist Franke James because of her “controversial” views on the tar sands. ‘Controversial’ in the context meant at odds with Harper’s position as cheerleader-in-chief for the oil and gas industry.
Then came the final tawdry move, as reported over the past month by Elizabeth Thompson in iPolitics. In the final weeks of his regime, Harper and his cabinet, including current interim leader Rona Ambrose, “stacked” Crown corporations and agencies with 49 “future appointments.” One of those agencies just happened to be the National Energy Board, the outfit that regulates the construction of pipelines and the import of oil and natural gas.
One of the people appointed to the NEB was Steven Kelly, a Calgary oil executive. Kelly was a former consultant on contract to Kinder Morgan. According to Mychaylo Prystupa writing in the National Observer, Kelly authored Kinder Morgan’s report to the NEB justifying the $5.4 billion Trans-Mountain pipeline expansion.
Unless Kelly voluntarily steps down from this misbegotten appointment, he will be advising the Trudeau government on the very project he was paid to promote. Thanks to Harper’s devious and unethical appointments, the NEB is now fossil-fuelled for years to come. Harper has appointed all but one of the Board’s members.
Unless the new PM takes Penny Collenette’s advice and disbands the NEB, it will be run by Harper appointees for years before Trudeau gets to make an appointment of his own. That’s far from what the public probably had in mind when it voted decisively to turf the Conservatives and elect a new government.
At the time, the former head of BC Hydro told the National Observer that Harper’s appointment was outrageous.
“It’s utterly incredible the Government of Canada would appoint such an industry consultant to a regulatory agency that presumably is interested in the public interest, and not in the interest of multinational oil corporations … The NEB have totally become a captured industry regulator,” Marc Eliesen said.
Canadians can get a pretty good idea of what can happen when the energy sector gets to regulate itself from what is unfolding right now in California. Governor Jerry Brown has belatedly declared a state of emergency in response to a massive methane leak from a storage facility located in Aliso Canyon, close the community of Porter Ranch. The leak has led to the evacuation of thousands of people and could trigger a full-fledged disaster if the methane were to explode.
According to LA Weekly, Well SS-25, which was first drilled in 1953, originally had a sub-surface safety valve that ought to have been able to deal with the methane leak. The problem was that the well’s owner, the Southern California Gas Company (SCGC) removed the decrepit safety valve in 1979 because they were under no legal obligation to keep a safety valve installed. New parts to repair the old valve were hard to find.
Technically speaking, SCGC was playing by the book. But as the LA Weekly observed “Having a reputation for doing things by the book doesn’t count for much, it turns out, when the book is written by the industry and the regulations are mostly toothless.”
Now you know yet another reason why Green Party leader Elizabeth May was barred from the consortium televised debates in recent federal elections. She would have raised hell over the fact that the NEB’s reviews of the two pipelines seeking regulatory approval, Energy East and Kinder Morgan, are seriously flawed. She would have denounced the NEB and its often bizarre hearing process and she would have declared in plain English that the reviews as they now stand are worthless from an environmental point of view.
So here is Trudeau’s dilemma. His preoccupation these days seems to be avoiding costly lawsuits. He is refusing to cancel the $15 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, which I am certain offends every bone in his body. There was a contract involved and cancellation certainly would have led to a major court battle.
So far, he has not moved precipitously on Harper’s conniving and reprehensible “future appointments” because that too almost certainly would lead to major lawsuits. He is hoping at least the honourable ones might step aside without having to be forced out. But let’s face it — the Harper Conservatives and honourable behaviour are not often found in the same area code.
Which brings us back to the case of former Kinder Morgan consultant Steven Kelly’s appointment to the NEB. The PM’s principal secretary, Gerald Butts, has repeatedly pointed out that order-in-council appointments have the status of contracts. The only way Kelly could be forced out would be by order of the Governor General after approving votes in both the House of Commons and the Senate — an unlikely outcome when the Conservatives have a majority in the Red Chamber.
There are also the two NEB reviews themselves. At one point, Trudeau was promising to halt all ongoing pipeline reviews until he could overhaul the regulatory agency. Now he has decided to continue with the reviews that were started by Harper with his handpicked board. Again, the legal consequences of stopping or canceling the reviews could be huge.
And when you throw in all those free trade deals that allowed corporations and trading partners to bypass both Canadian courts and Parliament with corporate-controlled dispute resolution mechanisms, it makes you start to wonder.
In a perverse way, it almost seems like Harper’s leadership in Ottawa is still large and in charge — only this time with even less public scrutiny.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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