Prime Minister Stephen Harper has interesting friends. As the Prime Minister said in New York the other day, neither he nor his friends take ‘No’ for an answer. It was bad enough when we were ridiculing him and Jim Flaherty for lionizing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. It is less than funny when you learn who Harper has lobbying in Congress for approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to send Alberta bitumen to the Texas Gulf seaports. Harper’s best friend selling the tar sands pipeline is none other than Texas Senator Ted Cruz. This is the guy who recently provided a 21-hour speaking marathon in the American Senate in his Tea-Party inspired effort to destroy the American economy.
But he at least stands foursquare with Harper and TransCanada Pipelines. He seems to think that the Texas refineries want that highly polluting tar sands bitumen to refine because they will do a cleaner job of refining it than the Chinese. He also thinks that the pipeline will create lots of jobs. Just how a pipeline creates jobs, he does not know.
Senator Cruz’s message to President Obama is that the Keystone XL pipeline is not a hard decision. He told a Washington news conference the other day that “There are a lot of decisions facing this country and there are hard decisions and easy decisions. This is a no brainer. This is not a hard decision.”
Obviously the Senator does not understand the concerns. And in his ongoing role as spokesman for the Texas Tea Party, he continues to prove that he has a somewhat warped view. Canadians would also be the most surprised at his comments about the new American healthcare program now getting underway. Cruz does not like what he calls ‘Obamacare.’ Since it has already been passed into law in America, the Alberta born Senator from Texas is trying to stop the government from funding it. His strategy is to force his country into bankruptcy and let it dissolve into anarchy.
Both he and his friend Prime Minister Stephen Harper are political ideologues. They are fixated on their own agendas. Lucky for Canadians, Mr. Harper is a bit smarter than Mr. Cruz. Stephen Harper is a more up tight kind of guy. Even in a private speech, Stephen Harper would not make some of the remarks that Ted Cruz made in his recent filibuster. Even in a filibuster, you do not refer to your fellow Republicans as being like Nazi-appeasers in 1930’s Germany.
By the way, did we mention that Stephen Harper’s friend Ted Cruz hopes to run for President of the United States of America in the upcoming presidential election?
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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