Canada’s prime minister must be quite happy these days. There is actually a world-wide glut of oil driving down the price of crude oil. The Hair has taken us to the promised land of the oil economy and Canadians are reaping the rewards. They are also watching stock markets plummet and their eyes are rising skyward and they are saying, ‘Please, this is just a market correction, we hope.’
Who knew—other than the Hair—that fracking and tar sands would save the day for Canada’s economy? It was a brave move to dismiss the manufacturing sector in Ontario and Quebec as inconsequential. At a time when the Canadian dollar is in free fall, we have little left in the way of manufactured goods to offer our American friends. Despite the Hair’s efforts, little has come of the free trade agreements he keeps ballyhooing. Not that we have much other than bitumen and pork to offer.
Just consider the prescience of the Hair. How could he have been more helpful to the tar sands economy? He has allowed the industry years of dithering over what if any environmental standards they would consider. Despite the promises, we have watched for those years as the Alberta landscape vanishes under the black cloud of carbon emissions from the heating and polluting of fresh water to drive the bitumen out of the pristine wilderness. We have watched open pit mining devastate the landscape.
We are also seeing old pipelines rededicated to the push to take bitumen to the seaports to share its pollution with the world. And when a tar sands booster talks about our going from sea to sea to sea, that third sea is the Texas Gulf ports where the Keystone XL pipeline is headed—if President Obama agrees.
We have watched as the Hair has gutted the federal government of scientists who would dare question his direction. His minions have stripped statistics Canada of the ability to analyse the Hair’s influence on the economy. In all, his government has dumped some 20,000 civil servants who might have made a difference. The Hair has stripped the federal government down to the lean and mean with the emphasis on mean. What successor, if any, would dare to take back his tax-cut incentives to vote Conservative?
What we are dealing with here is the legacy of the Hair. He might be proud of that legacy. We have all paid for it.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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