You tend to forget that some professional writers take pride in that someone can write a headline for them and they can write a story to support the headline. The issue is not what you believe in as much as that the client is willing to pay for the work. It is part of making a living. You just need to be careful about who signs it.
This comes to mind in relation to an op-ed by Carol Goar of the Toronto Star the other day. It was headlined Harper got it right on the Nexen deal. Writers in the Toronto Star rarely write their own headlines and, in this case, it is also hard to attribute some of the statements in the article to such an excellent and experienced writer such as Ms. Goar.
She starts the article by saying how easy it is to forget what a fine mind Stephen Harper has. She sure grabbed our attention with that line. You expect her to follow up with a discussion of his possible narcissistic traits.
But no. Ms. Goar credits the Prime Minister with every so often coming up with a smart solution to a problem. We suppose he has to—when he creates the problem in the first place, such as with the Nexen deal. Traveling around the world on his military A310 Airbus as Canada’s super salesman, Harper is probably making many promises that Canadians should know more about. They are often the kinds of deals that need to be reviewed under the Investment Canada Act which Harper finds so inconvenient.
Carol Goar seems unaware that Mr. Harper delivered a huge net benefit in capital gains to Nexen shareholders. That was the really vulgar aspect of the deal. The Chinese were so eager to buy the world-wide resources of Nexen that they paid far more than the company was worth in today’s dollars or in dollars decades from now. The Chinese have been had for $15.1 billion. And that nice Stephen Harper ran the shell game on them.
Nexen is, by the way, not a big time player in the oil sands. It gives the Chinese a foothold. If Harper actually makes good on his suggestion that it might be a “this far but no further” deal, the Chinese are going to be really unhappy customers.
Carol Goar might believe this deal is complete but the one thing Mr. Harper still has to deliver is the Enbridge pipeline across British Columbia to take oil sands’ bitumen to ocean tankers at Kitimat. That could be Emperor Harper’s Waterloo.
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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