A Canadian Snow Job

While Neil Young was reminding Harper and Co. that they had obligations to Canada's native peoples, John Baird was in Washington, trying to extract a promise from Barack Obama and John Kerry that the United States would build the Keystone XL pipeline.


But Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry were unmoved. They know that American opinion is turning against Keystone. And they know the real reason Baird was in Washington. Jane Kleeb, the founder of Bold Nebraska -- a network of American activists -- understands what's going on:

"Canada and TransCanada made a really bad investment in tar sands, and the only way they can make their investment back is to get their product to the export market," Kleeb said. "Canada started producing tar sands in small amounts in the 1980s then began ramping up production in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their investors want to see a profit."

Elizabeth Bader writes that Americans know that all the talk about jobs is hogwash:

By Jack Gerard's [the president of the American Petroleum Institute] count, 20,000 will be created immediately, with another 117,000 added by 2035. At other points API has claimed a larger number: 300,000. Why the change? It's anybody's guess, and Gerard did not elaborate. Later, when asked about pollution, his answer was surprisingly brief: "The risks to the environment are minimal," he said.

And, if job creation is a priority, the United States faces an infrastructure crisis. The authors of a report titled The Keystone Pipeline Debate claim that:

 "America is facing an infrastructure crisis. Unmet water and gas infrastructure capital investment and operations and maintenance needs exceed more than $32 billion along the proposed Keystone XL corridor. The failure to repair and maintain this vital infrastructure causes gas leaks and explosions, sewage overflows, water main ruptures and the loss and contamination of drinking water. The damage caused by leaking gas pipelines has cost these states more than $450 million in damage since 1984."

They estimate that in the states the pipeline would cross:

177,000 [jobs will be needed] to replace the failing water mains that carry drinking water and 106,000 [will be needed] to repair wastewater pipes to get the eroding system back on track. They then project the need for another 15,000 permanent maintenance workers to do ongoing upkeep. "Every dollar spent on gas, water and sewer infrastructure in these states generates 156 percent more employment than the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline," the report concludes.

In short, the Americans have figured out that Keystone XL is a Canadian snow job. And they will not be snowed -- the way Canadians have been.

The Gang Who Can't Shoot Straight

Canadian bitumen befouled the Kalamazoo River back in 2010. Now it slurps down the streets of Mayflower, Arkansas. And the Harper government keeps telling Americans that the Keystone XL Pipeline will be a godsend.

That sales pitch rings hollow. After all, it comes from the country which withdrew from the Kyoto Accord and is now the only country to withdraw from the UN Anti-Drought Convention. Tasha Kheiriddin writes that the Harper government has managed to sabotage its path to power:

The pipeline represents not just an economic, but a political lynchpin of their long-term national strategy: displacing the power centre of Canada westward.

If they had built a record of environmental stewardship, they might have succeeded. Certainly, Preston Manning has been saying for years that the road to power for conservatives is as green as grass. However,

This government’s greatest failing — and Achilles heel — may be squandering the opportunity to converge environmentalism and conservatism. Over the past nine years, the Tories could have taken Canadian environmental policy in a whole new direction. They could have championed market-based conservatism in areas from land preservation to fish stocks. They could have encouraged energy conservation through market pricing. They could have initiated consultation processes on projects such as Northern Gateway that were more than just “for show”, to give people the sense that their views were actually being heard.

But true to their Manichean roots -- every issue is a struggle between good and evil -- the Harperites pitted the economy against the environment, painting environmentalists as economic illiterates. Now they are reaping what they have sown -- and proving that they really are the gang who can't shoot straight

The Second Coming

The word on the street is the Harper government has informed Washington that, if it doesn't approve the Keystone XL Pipeline, there will be a catastrophic rupture in Canadian-American relations -- "the biggest deep freeze in Canada-U.S. relations ever."

Now, there's a threat which must have caused panic in Washington. Iran is going nuclear, North Korea is going ballistic, and Canada is going -- blue. If the U.S. doesn't want our sticky oil, what are we to do? It's looking more and more like the pipeline to Kitimat is a non-starter. Perhaps the Harperites will have to settle for a pipeline to New Brunswick. Lawrence Martin writes:

The days of Canada having the handy U.S. market to take care of almost all of its energy exports are over. As observers like our former American ambassador Frank McKenna have been pointing out for a long time, market diversification is now the paramount priority. Though a Keystone rejection certainly would be unwelcome, it would help stir a move in that direction. It would hasten pressures to build the infrastructure to transport energy resources to our east coast.

Wouldn't that be the National Energy Program with a new name? Call it Canada's Economic Action Plan. Consider the irony. It's of Greek proportions. A prime minister is pathologicically committed to destroying the Liberal Party of Canada. In his manical quest, he manages to re-institute the very program which the man he reviled first conceived. And, then, the son of that man is elected leader of the Liberal Party.

What a legacy!  It would be the Second Coming -- times two.

True North

In today's Globe and Mail, Robert Redford -- who lately has spent a lot of time in Vancouver -- offers another take on the Canadian-American partnership, which Stephen Harper trumpets so loudly:

I want to be very clear that I’m not pointing a finger at the people of Canada; neither is any American I know. We’re all in this together, and that’s the only way we’ll turn it around. We need to stand up, Canadians and Americans as one, to draw the line at tar sands.

The Harperites have never believed that we are all in this together. They believe that the basic principle which guides the inhabitants of this planet is, it's every man and woman for him or herself.   When that principle was applied to oil production in Alberta, the results became devastatingly clear:

In Alberta’s great boreal forest, one of the last truly wild places on Earth, tar-sands producers have turned an area the size of Chicago into an industrial wasteland and international disgrace.

Where spruce and fir and birch trees once rose and waters ran fresh and clean, tar-sands production has left a lifeless scar visible from outer space, a vast repository of enduring pollution that threatens fish, birds, animals, public health and an entire way of life for native people.

And for every single barrel of oil produced, at least two tons of tar sands are excavated and tapped, a processing nightmare that generates three times more carbon pollution than is released to produce conventional North American domestic crude.

Redford writes that he has always been inspired by the Canadian concept of  "True North." When two members of Canada's official opposition visited Washington recently to voice their opposition to the Keystone Pipeline, the Minister of the Environment called their trip "treachery." Redford understands the meaning of True North. Canada's present government doesn't.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Limited Intelligence

When Megan Leslie and Claude Grevelle went to Washington this past week, Environment Minister Peter Kent was furious. The two NDP members of the House, he said, were taking  "the treacherous course of leaving the domestic debate and heading abroad to attack a legitimate Canadian resource which is being responsibly developed and regulated."

But, as Tim Harper wrote in The Toronto Star:

They went to Washington to provide a different point of view on the Keystone XL pipeline project and to tell American legislators that, contrary to the cheerleading of Stephen Harper and his cabinet, not every Canadian was a proponent of Alberta’s tar sands.

None of the Conservatives mentioned, of course, Stephen Harper's trip to New York after Jean Chretien choose not to join the "coalition of the willing."  Harper told Americans that he spoke for "the silent majority" of Canadians who supported the American invasion of Iraq. Nor did they mention Mr. Harper's speech to the Council for National Policy, an American Think Tank, where he proclaimed:

"[Y]our country [the USA], and particularly your conservative movement, is a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world."

The irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife. But Mr. Harper, Mr Kent and the rest of their party have no appreciation for irony. I've always believed that an inability to detect irony is a sign of limited intelligence.