The last time Canada and the United States went to war on some pretext, our British troops went to Washington and set fire to the White House. That was 200 years ago. The current campaign against the American capitol is being run by the Ottawa office of a communications company called Fleishman-Hilliard. In a time of false austerity in Ottawa, this company has a pot of Canadian gold to win the hearts and minds of U.S. law-makers to the side of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Why Canadian taxpayers are funding this campaign is a question for another time. The Harper Conservatives have been pouring Canadian money into the Keystone XL money pit for quite some time. And everything tells us that the TransCanada Pipelines project will lose. The intense pressure from U.S. environmental lobby groups has been unabated. The attempts by Stephen Harper to cajole, threaten, convince and plead with President Obama have been a wasted effort.
Obama has identified the Canadian Prime Minister for what he is. And Obama does not like what he sees. Harper is a stuffed-shirt, right-wing ideologue and Obama has met and fought with that type of people during all his adult years. He is surrounded by generations of right-wing Republicans and loony-tunes Tea Party activists in his nation’s capitol and he knows how they think, how they react and just how useless they are to humanity.
President Obama must have been appalled at that G7 minus Russia meeting in The Hague recently. Here was the Canadian Prime Minister with his war sabre at the ready leading the charge of the light-minded brigade against Vladimir Putin across the Eurasian Steppe.
It could not have been more pointed in Obama’s speech to the European Community after the meeting in The Hague that he did not agree with the Canadian Prime Minister. During the, as usual, eloquent speech, he talked about America and the EU—he never once mentioned Canada.
Obama could do that because he knows Harper’s Achilles heel. Harper does not have Canadians onside. As much as Harper postures and pretends, he has built an animosity to his energy plan for Canada. Canadians distrust his pipeline plans to the East and West coasts. They are coming to understand his destruction of the manufacturing economy of the eastern half of the country. They are seeing what he is allowing to happen to the environment. Obama knows that Harper is in trouble.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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