The kowtowing to China, now the world's largest oil consumer, highlights Canada's big bitumen dilemma: how to get dirty, landlocked oil to global markets. The United States, Canada's biggest customer, doesn't seem to need it as much anymore; imports declined by more than 4 million barrels a day between 2005 and 2011, and with pipeline projects to the United States like Keystone XL stuck in the mud, Harper's vision of being an "emerging energy superpower" appears in danger. Unsurprisingly, Harper has recently jettisoned criticism of China's human rights record. As a secret foreign-policy document leaked last fall to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) makes clear, Canada has new priorities: "To succeed we will need to pursue political relationships in tandem with economic interests even where political interests or values may not align."First, a country needs to discover a natural resource that can be exploited regardless of consequences to the environment. Then they have to find a leader who will bully his people and the rest of the world to pursue his megalomaniac ambitions.
THE SINGLE-MINDED PURSUIT of this petroproject has stunned global analysts. The Economist, no left-wing shill, characterized Harper, the son of an Imperial Oil senior accountant, as a bully "intolerant of criticism and dissent" with a determined habit of rule-breaking. Lawrence Martin, one of Canada's most influential political commentators, says that Harper's "billy-club governance" has broken "new ground in the subverting of the democratic process." Conservative pollster Allan Gregg has described Harper's agenda as an ideological assault on evidence, facts, and reason. [...]Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a right-wing policy wonk and evangelical Christian with a power base in Alberta (ground zero of Canada's oil boom), has convinced three-fourths of his people that they need to exploit the tar sands for economic reasons. It's not like Canada didn't see what happened in the U.S. with two oil men in leadership; wars for oil anyone? We must stop this megalomaniac at the border with rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline.More than a decade ago, American political scientist Terry Lynn Karl crudely summed up the dysfunction of petrostates: Countries that become too dependent on oil and gas riches behave like plantation economies that rely on"an unsustainable development trajectory fueled by an exhaustible resource" whose revenue streams from"an implacable barrier to change." And that's what happened to Canada while you weren't looking. Shackled to the hubris of a leader who dreams of building a new global energy superpower, the Boy Scout is now slave to his own greed.
