Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Harper's pipe dream (click to view)
Date: November 22, 2011
Canada and the United States are, in many ways, perhaps best akin to an old, loveless married couple. Though we provide endlessly for each other, and help each other enjoy the comfortable standard of living to which we’ve become accustomed, very rarely are we forward enough to ask for anything that would require much individual effort. The status quo is usually good enough. But on those rare occasions when we do ask, the potential for drama can be very high.
The current source of drama? Oil.
The Canadian province of Alberta is home to the world’s largest deposits of what are known as either “oil sands” or “tar sands,” depending how euphemistic you want to be. In any case, the product in question is a sort of mushy, clumpy, crumbly mixture of dirt and petrol that we’ve recently learned how to process in such a way as to extract the precious liquid from the useless solid. Digging up this composite has become a huge business in Northern Alberta, and provided something of a renaissance to the province’s energy industry at a time when traditional petroleum reserves have been steadily declining. Visiting the province for the first time last year, I, like many tourists, came away amazed at how many young men were suddenly able to afford their own homes, cars, and families after only a few short years of working in “Fort Mac” — the casual term for the northern town of Fort MacMurray, the province’s open-pit Mecca (town slogan: “We have the energy”).
Trouble is, this boom can only last so long as there are other countries willing to buy all the oil the Albertans are digging up. And thus America enters the picture.
The United States is hungry for oil, as you may have heard. So a company known as TransCanada (motto: “in business to deliver”) has proposed building an
enormous pipeline, codenamed “Keystone,” that would snake some 2,700 km from the reserves of Alberta to the refineries of Texas. The line would pump some 800,000 barrels of crude a day into the US market, and according to some estimates, satisfy American energy needs for at least a century, allowing the country to greatly lessen its reliance on Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in the process.
But of course nothing with oil is ever easy or uncontroversial. Though the Canadian political and business establishments have been near-unanimous in their support of Keystone, the country's environmentalist lobby has long rallied against the oil sands, portraying it as the most disgraceful ecological scourge of our time. And to be fair, their criticisms do have some merit; for a small community, Fort McMurray already holds the dubious honor of being one of the planet’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, and there are no shortage of
horrific photo galleries floating around depicting just what a hideous mess the oil sands extraction process has made of the once-pristine Albertan countryside.
In the United States, similarly, there are significant concerns that Canada is serving as a kind of “pusher,” encouraging America to deepen its addiction to dirty oil at a time when the country should be actively exploring clean, renewable alternatives to fossil fuels. Old-fashioned NIMBYism has also proven to be a powerful force of opposition in some of the six states Keystone is supposed to pass through. Despite being under Republican rule, Nebraska in particular has been extremely vocal in its (perhaps understandable) desire to not have thousands of gallons of oil bubbling past the aquifer that provides much of the Midwest with its drinking water, as the original blueprints called for. As I write this, the Nebraska legislature has
just unanimously passed a resolution demanding TransCanada either reroute or get out.
Since the Keystone project transcends the boundaries of numerous states and two countries, ultimate authority for the project’s survival rests with the White House, and for his part, President Obama has hardly made his own views clear. Already a declining brand in the eyes of many liberals and progressives, the environmental file is one of the few remaining policy realms where the President hasn’t actively done anything to enrage the left. Vetoing keystone, as over 10,000 protesters at the White House gates
recently demanded he do, seemed like a fairly reasonable bone to throw at a time when Obama has had precious few opportunities to embark upon big, principled gestures designed to delight his base.
On November 10, Obama’s State Department announced that it would not make any definitive decision regarding Keystone until at least late 2013, rather conveniently moving the issue off the burner until after next year’s presidential elections. Prime Minister Harper did not take the news well.
“This underscores the necessity of Canada making sure that we are able to access Asian markets for our energy products,” the PM
said snippily, noting that he had already begun chatting up the Chinese president on the topic. Other Canadians politicians have since expressed a desire to fast track another proposed pipeline project, an Alberta to Asia one, in the aftermath, describing the US market, in so many words, as a bit too “uncertain” and “politicized” at the moment.
The idea that Canada would ever be able to make the same kind of money shipping oil across the Pacific Ocean as it could pumping it directly into the United States is an obvious fantasy, but it’s still a fantasy that holds a fair bit of currency in a nation whose economic dependence on America breeds powerful anxiety at the best of times. Canada is a nation, after all, that waited over 120 years to even propose free trade with its next-door neighbour. Embarking upon spitefully ill-conceived economic policies is not unknown to us.
In particularly dark moments of foreign policy isolation, US diplomats have been known to quip "at least the Canadians are on our side." As Obama's Republican opponents continue to hurl slurs about alienating allies and damaging US interests, the President's Canada policy may prove to be a far less savvy political move than he originally thought. What president, after all, wants to go down in history as the man who gave America's faithful spouse a wandering eye?
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