The last time Canada had a real leader, it was Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The least understood and the most vilified of the actions he took on behalf of Canadians was the National Energy Program (NEP) of 1980. It was an attempt to ensure Canadian control, self-sufficiency and sharing of oil resources. It was never an attack on Alberta’s wild ride on oil revenues but a reasoned proposal to protect those resources for all Canadians. The problem today is that when the bitumen bubble bursts it is going to take down Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau from their political pedestals.
Prime Minister Harper has led the parade in supporting bitumen exploitation and bitumen pipelines east, west and south. It is the hypocrisy of New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau that worries environmentalists among their political parties. Nobody really gives a damn about Stephen Harper but the spatter of the billions in bitumen losses will smear Mulcair and Trudeau as well.
The first thing that is going to happen is that a harried, lame duck President Barack Obama is going to go along with the environmental pressure and kill TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline. While Mulcair thinks he is safe on the issue, his limited support for Keystone and general bafflegab on the bitumen issue has annoyed many of his supporters. Trudeau’s unequivocal support for the pipeline to take bitumen to the Texas Gulf oil ports has won him no friends among environmentalists.
The second shoe in the pipeline fiasco will be the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline across British Columbia to Kitimat. Since Harper’s lapdog National Energy Board has already rubberstamped this foolhardy plan, it will take the determination of our native Canadians and the Supreme Court to end it. And it will be ended. It might even set a record for the speed of a decision from the Supreme Court judges. Mulcair and Trudeau will be lucky to be sidelined on this as they both turned thumbs down on it.
The opposition leaders will meet their most serious test when the fight boils down to the twinning of the B.C. Kinder Morgan pipeline to Surrey and the pipeline plans of Enbridge and TransCanada to send bitumen to the east coast. The recent vote of East Portland, Maine citizens to tell the pipeline company what to do with its bitumen was a fine example of democracy at work. Nobody wants to ask the Saint John, New Brunswick citizens if Irving Oil should build a tanker loading dock for bitumen. The good news is that Irving Oil is making no moves to refine the highly polluting bitumen at its refinery.
But before the first litre of bitumen can be heated and forced through one of those east coast bound pipelines, the Canadian economy will already be in the tank. The collapse of the bitumen bubble in Alberta will ricochet around this country and around the world. The Chinese hardly need more pollution for their cities caused by bitumen refining. The European Union does not want bitumen. The Americans have lots of their own. And unless we start to build things in this country that cannot be easily moved to low wage areas in the U.S. and Mexico, the Harper Conservatives will have won.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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