A Living, Breathing Dinosaur

Stephen Harper has always suffered from delusions of grandeur. Linda McQuaig writes:

Relatively little has been said about his grandiosity. Only months after becoming prime minister in 2006, he showed it off in an overseas speech that attracted surprisingly little attention in Canada.

Outlining his plan to turn Canada into an “energy superpower,” he told the Canada-UK Chamber of Commerce in London that developing the “ocean of oil-soaked sand” in northern Alberta would be “an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the Pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger.”

His is, indeed, an epic vision. But it is an epic vision with satanic undertones:

Harper’s struggle is epic, although not in the way he meant. It’s epic in that it pits him and a group of largely foreign investors against those willing to act to preserve the planet for human habitation — a group which now includes the U.S. government.

The simple reality is that much of the oil in the tarsands will have to remain in the ground if there is to be any hope of curbing the out-of-control growth of greenhouse gas emissions, currently on track to drive up the world’s temperature by six degrees Celsius within a few decades — a scenario considered semi-catastrophic by the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental organization created by the leading Western nations.

There is another option:

Due to the marvels of modern technology, the world now has the technical capacity to move to a post-carbon age. The International Energy Agency is clear about this. In a report last month, the agency — which is the energy equivalent of the OECD or the IMF — pointed out that it is possible for the world to “decarbonise almost all power generation by 2050.”

Sure, but we’d all be back in the Stone Age, right? Employment would be confined to shovel-ready pyramids.

Actually, no. The IEA estimated the global cost of moving to a post-carbon world at $44 trillion — which sounds like a deal-breaker until you read on and discover that this massive cost would be more than offset by $115 trillion in fuel savings, resulting in a net saving of $71 trillion.

Does that mean the transition would be costless?

Overall, yes. Huge numbers of new jobs would be created as we redesigned our entire economy for a green technology age, just as happened years ago when we moved to the age of the railway and combustion engine.

But Mr. Harper sold his soul to Big Oil long ago. He has become one of those beasts whose demise created the oil industry. He is one of the last living, breathing dinosaurs.

Shilling For Oil

Big Oil has always been behind Stephen Harper's agenda. That was made clear once again this week when the RCMP revealed details into accusations against Bruce Carson, the disbarred lawyer who used to work in Harper's PMO. Linda McQuaig writes:

In these new RCMP allegations, however, Carson was working for the Energy Policy Institute of Canada (EPIC), described in the media as a “non-profit group formed by business organizations in the energy sector.”

This rather benign description fails to convey what EPIC really is: a lobbying vehicle for dozens of extremely wealthy, powerful fossil fuel companies, including Enbridge, Imperial Oil, Shell, Suncor and Irving Oil, as well as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers — all hell-bent on developing Alberta’s tar sands.

The important story here isn’t the alleged illegal lobbying behaviour of Carson (who is banned from lobbying for five years after serving in government). The real story is the reception he receives when, now representing Big Oil, he approaches the top man in the PMO, Nigel Wright, someone he doesn’t know personally, with a document laying out what Big Oil wants.

According to emails disclosed by the RCMP, Wright promises to read the document over the weekend, and urges Carson to “feel free to give me a call at any time."

And, when Carson reported back to Doug Black, the founding president of EPIC, Carson got this response:

“Excellent. Need Nigel on side,” responded Black (who is now a Conservative senator, of all things).

And you thought Stephen Harper was working for you?  McQuaig writes:

Even as climate disasters occur with growing frequency — including the worst flooding in Serbia in a century, killing 43 people this week — the Harper government relentlessly promotes Big Oil’s development plans, guts our environmental review processes and aggressively audits environmental groups, muzzles government scientists and undermines international UN-sponsored efforts to rein in climate change.

Mr. Harper is shilling for oil.

The Road To Fascism

The Harper government has ordered the Canada Revenue Agency to carefully audit the books of organizations opposed to pipelines. Murray Dobbins correctly wonders if big oil has subverted Canadian democracy. But the government's use of the tax man to get at its enemies is not Dobbins' biggest worry. The more frightening development is Stephen Harper's use of the security establishment to monitor Canadians:

Harper's general list of assaults, as bad as they are (and columnist Lawrence Martin has compiled a pretty thorough one here), is different from our prime minister's genuinely frightening decision to enlist the country's security apparatus in the direct and immediate service of the oil industry. Nothing like this has ever happened before in Canada.

Mr. Harper is not the first prime minister to spy on Canadians. But his use of this country's security infrastructure goes far beyond anything Canadians have seen before:

Paranoid governments in the past have used the RCMP and CSIS to spy on political enemies, infiltrate activist organizations and have even sent in agent provocateurs to tarnish the image of political protest. But to arrange to have intelligence and police agencies, government representatives, a government agency supposedly responsible to Parliament and the Canadian people (the NEB) and corporate executives all sit around a table to explicitly violate not only our democratic rights but the law of the land is a grotesque step beyond.

The prime minister's use of the security establishment to pursue corporate ends confirms that he truly is a corporatist tool. He has set us on the path to fascism -- which Mussolini defined as the "merger of state and corporate power."