Andrew Nikiforuk
By Andrew Nikiforuk
For decades, the world has thought of Canada as America’s friendly northern neighbour — a responsible, earnest, if somewhat boring, land of hockey fans and single-payer health care. On the big issues, it has long played the global Boy Scout, reliably providing moral leadership on everything from ozone protection to land-mine eradication to gay rights. The late novelist Douglas Adams once quipped that if the US often behaved like a belligerent teen-age boy, Canada was an intelligent woman in her mid-30s. Basically, Canada has been the US — not as it is, but as it should be.
But a dark secret lurks in the northern forests. Over the last decade, Canada has not so quietly become an international mining centre and a rogue petrostate. It’s no longer America’s better half, but a dystopian vision of the continent’s energy-soaked future.
That’s right: The good neighbour has banked its economy on the cursed elixir of political dysfunction — oil. Flush with visions of becoming a global energy superpower, Canada’s government has taken up with pipeline evangelists, petroleum bullies and climate change sceptics. Turns out the Boy Scout’s not just hooked on junk crude — he’s become a pusher. And that’s not even the worst of it.
With oil and gas now accounting for approximately a quarter of its export revenue, Canada has lost its famous politeness. 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.
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.
The author of this transformation is 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. Harper, who took office in 2006, increased defence spending by nearly $1bn annually in his first four years, and he has committed $2bn to prison expansion with a “tough on crime” policy that ignores the country’s falling crime rate. Meanwhile, Canada has amassed a huge federal debt — its highest in history at some $600bn and counting.
Liberal critics like to say that Harper’s political revolution caught many Canadians, generally a fat and apathetic people, by surprise — a combination of self-delusion and strategic deception.
That may be true, but though Canadians live in high latitudes, they’re not above baser human instincts — like greed.
Harper is aggressively pushing an economic gamble on oil, the world’s most volatile resource, and promising a new national wealth based on untapped riches far from where most Canadians live that will fill their pocketbooks, and those of their children, for generations.
With nearly three-quarters of Canadians supporting oil sands development in a recent poll, Harper seems to be selling them on the idea.
Unsurprisingly, Ottawa has become a master at the cynical art of greenwashing. When Harper’s ministers aren’t attacking former Nasa scientist and climate change canary James Hansen in the pages of The New York Times or lobbying against Europe’s Fuel Quality Directive (which regards bitumen as much dirtier than conventional oil), his government has spent $100m since 2009 on ads to convince Canadians that exporting this oil is “responsible resource development.”
Meanwhile, Canada has bent over backward to entice Beijing. Three state-owned Chinese oil companies (all with dismal records of corporate transparency and environmental sensitivity) have already spent more than $20bn purchasing rights to oil sands in Alberta.
The kowtowing to China, now the world’s largest oil consumer, highlights Canada’s big bitumen dilemma: How to get dirty, landlocked oil to global markets.
The US, Canada’s biggest customer, doesn’t seem to need it as much anymore; imports declined by more than 4m barrels a day between 2005 and 2011, and with pipeline projects to the US like Keystone XL stuck in the mud, Harper’s vision of being an “emerging energy superpower” appears in danger.
After the government barred a federal scientist from talking about the discovery of a large Arctic ozone hole, a 2012 editorial in the influential science journal Nature demanded that the Canadian government “set its scientists free.”
It seems Harper heard “cut them loose” instead: His government summarily closed the world-famous Experimental Lakes Area research station, a gem of Canadian environmental science that has helped spur global policy on acid rain, to save the princely sum of $2m a year (though the Ontario government is working to keep it open).
To be fair, Harper’s government does have a plan for climate change — pumping the problem to the US and/or China. Oil sands crude transported to the US by the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, for example, could over a 50-year period increase carbon emissions by as much as 935m metric tonnes relative to other crudes.
And the planned $5.5bn Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific Ocean would result in up to 100 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year, from extraction and production in Canada to combustion in China — more than British Columbia’s total emissions in 2009.
All this underscores Canada’s new reality: Just about any kind of rational evidence has now come under assault by a government that believes that markets — and only markets — hold the answers.
Any act that industry regards as an obstacle to rapid mineral extraction or pipeline building has been rewritten with a Saudi-like flourish.
One massive omnibus budget bill alone changed 70 pieces of legislation, gutting, for example, the Fisheries Act, which directly prohibited the destruction of aquatic-life habitats but stood in the way of the Northern Gateway pipeline, which must cross 1,000 waterways en route to the Pacific Ocean.
Meanwhile, funding for Canada’s iconic park system has been cut by 20 percent in what critics have called a “lobotomy.”
Furthermore, with the élan of a Middle Eastern petroprince, Harper appointed the head of his security detail to be ambassador to Jordan. And he did it all with nary a peep from your average Canadian.
More than a decade ago, American political scientist Terry Lynn Karl crudely summed up the dysfunction of petrostates: Countries that become too dependent on oil and gas riches behave like plantation economies that rely on “an unsustainable development trajectory fuelled by an exhaustible resource” whose revenue streams form “an implacable barrier to change.”
And that’s what happened to Canada while you weren’t looking. Shackled to the hubris of a leader who dreams of building a new global energy superpower, the Boy Scout is now slave to his own greed.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Andrew Nikiforuk
For decades, the world has thought of Canada as America’s friendly northern neighbour — a responsible, earnest, if somewhat boring, land of hockey fans and single-payer health care. On the big issues, it has long played the global Boy Scout, reliably providing moral leadership on everything from ozone protection to land-mine eradication to gay rights. The late novelist Douglas Adams once quipped that if the US often behaved like a belligerent teen-age boy, Canada was an intelligent woman in her mid-30s. Basically, Canada has been the US — not as it is, but as it should be.
But a dark secret lurks in the northern forests. Over the last decade, Canada has not so quietly become an international mining centre and a rogue petrostate. It’s no longer America’s better half, but a dystopian vision of the continent’s energy-soaked future.
That’s right: The good neighbour has banked its economy on the cursed elixir of political dysfunction — oil. Flush with visions of becoming a global energy superpower, Canada’s government has taken up with pipeline evangelists, petroleum bullies and climate change sceptics. Turns out the Boy Scout’s not just hooked on junk crude — he’s become a pusher. And that’s not even the worst of it.
With oil and gas now accounting for approximately a quarter of its export revenue, Canada has lost its famous politeness. 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.
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.
The author of this transformation is 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. Harper, who took office in 2006, increased defence spending by nearly $1bn annually in his first four years, and he has committed $2bn to prison expansion with a “tough on crime” policy that ignores the country’s falling crime rate. Meanwhile, Canada has amassed a huge federal debt — its highest in history at some $600bn and counting.
Liberal critics like to say that Harper’s political revolution caught many Canadians, generally a fat and apathetic people, by surprise — a combination of self-delusion and strategic deception.
That may be true, but though Canadians live in high latitudes, they’re not above baser human instincts — like greed.
Harper is aggressively pushing an economic gamble on oil, the world’s most volatile resource, and promising a new national wealth based on untapped riches far from where most Canadians live that will fill their pocketbooks, and those of their children, for generations.
With nearly three-quarters of Canadians supporting oil sands development in a recent poll, Harper seems to be selling them on the idea.
Unsurprisingly, Ottawa has become a master at the cynical art of greenwashing. When Harper’s ministers aren’t attacking former Nasa scientist and climate change canary James Hansen in the pages of The New York Times or lobbying against Europe’s Fuel Quality Directive (which regards bitumen as much dirtier than conventional oil), his government has spent $100m since 2009 on ads to convince Canadians that exporting this oil is “responsible resource development.”
Meanwhile, Canada has bent over backward to entice Beijing. Three state-owned Chinese oil companies (all with dismal records of corporate transparency and environmental sensitivity) have already spent more than $20bn purchasing rights to oil sands in Alberta.
The kowtowing to China, now the world’s largest oil consumer, highlights Canada’s big bitumen dilemma: How to get dirty, landlocked oil to global markets.
The US, Canada’s biggest customer, doesn’t seem to need it as much anymore; imports declined by more than 4m barrels a day between 2005 and 2011, and with pipeline projects to the US like Keystone XL stuck in the mud, Harper’s vision of being an “emerging energy superpower” appears in danger.
After the government barred a federal scientist from talking about the discovery of a large Arctic ozone hole, a 2012 editorial in the influential science journal Nature demanded that the Canadian government “set its scientists free.”
It seems Harper heard “cut them loose” instead: His government summarily closed the world-famous Experimental Lakes Area research station, a gem of Canadian environmental science that has helped spur global policy on acid rain, to save the princely sum of $2m a year (though the Ontario government is working to keep it open).
To be fair, Harper’s government does have a plan for climate change — pumping the problem to the US and/or China. Oil sands crude transported to the US by the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, for example, could over a 50-year period increase carbon emissions by as much as 935m metric tonnes relative to other crudes.
And the planned $5.5bn Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific Ocean would result in up to 100 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year, from extraction and production in Canada to combustion in China — more than British Columbia’s total emissions in 2009.
All this underscores Canada’s new reality: Just about any kind of rational evidence has now come under assault by a government that believes that markets — and only markets — hold the answers.
Any act that industry regards as an obstacle to rapid mineral extraction or pipeline building has been rewritten with a Saudi-like flourish.
One massive omnibus budget bill alone changed 70 pieces of legislation, gutting, for example, the Fisheries Act, which directly prohibited the destruction of aquatic-life habitats but stood in the way of the Northern Gateway pipeline, which must cross 1,000 waterways en route to the Pacific Ocean.
Meanwhile, funding for Canada’s iconic park system has been cut by 20 percent in what critics have called a “lobotomy.”
Furthermore, with the élan of a Middle Eastern petroprince, Harper appointed the head of his security detail to be ambassador to Jordan. And he did it all with nary a peep from your average Canadian.
More than a decade ago, American political scientist Terry Lynn Karl crudely summed up the dysfunction of petrostates: Countries that become too dependent on oil and gas riches behave like plantation economies that rely on “an unsustainable development trajectory fuelled by an exhaustible resource” whose revenue streams form “an implacable barrier to change.”
And that’s what happened to Canada while you weren’t looking. Shackled to the hubris of a leader who dreams of building a new global energy superpower, the Boy Scout is now slave to his own greed.
WP-BLOOMBERG
