Ignatieff thinking the unthinkable; saying the unsayable
Winnipeg Free Press June 18, 2008
Deputy Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff is thinking the unthinkable; saying the unsayable. He’s publicly questioning Canada’s energy policy; or more accurately, its complete lack of one. Ignatieff compared a national oil pipeline in the 21st century to the national railway in the 19th. The railway was ridiculed in its day as economic madness. “But without it, we wouldn’t have a country… I look at the east-west linkages that tie our country together,” he told Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin, “and I do wonder whether they are strong enough to offset the north-south flows that dominate our economy. The oil, the natural gas, the hydro — it all flows south. Where is the national grid to share our power, the east-west pipeline to share our oil and to guarantee our energy security as a nation?”
Where, indeed?
He hinted at other questions: Why will we soon be committing 75 to 80 per cent of our remaining supply of oil to the American market? Why are we exporting 67 per cent of our dwindling oil resource to the U.S. to guarantee security of supply to Americans, when 40 per cent of Canadians are totally reliant on oil from insecure countries such Algeria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia? Why is Canada the only oil-producing country — and the only western industrialized country — not to have a strategic petroleum reserve?
Why, indeed?
Contacted for an interview, a spokesman for Ignatieff said he will take the summer to research the issue and will have more to say in the fall. Liberal energy critic Omar Alghabra says his colleague is on the right track: Energy is just too vital an issue to be left to the market. “We have to reduce barriers that prevent Canadian oil from being used by Canadians,” Alghabra told Martin. “We need a national energy strategy.”
It’s not hard to find the answer to the wheres and whys. Nationalism in Canada is a dirty word. Reveal yourself as a Canadian nationalist or dare to criticize that most sacred of sacred cows, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and you will instantly be labelled “loony left”, “anti-business” and above all, “anti-American.”
Ignatieff is fully aware of the dangers, assuring Martin that he’s no Walter Gordon nationalist. Nor is he risking being offside with that other sacred cow, provincial rights, by bringing in a new national energy policy through the back door.
How typically Canadian it is to be so desperate to avoid giving offence to someone, somewhere, offence that we gladly suffer ourselves.
And suffer we are certainly going to do. Of all the truly “loony” concessions Canada made in NAFTA, the most outrageous is the one unique among all international trade treaties: Compulsory sharing. Canada cannot reduce its oil and gas exports to the U.S. unless it cuts its own consumption by the same amount, even in times of domestic shortage. Nor can it charge Americans more than Canadians pay. Nor can it substitute “among specific energy or basic petrochemical goods… for example, between crude oil and refined products.”
So not only can Canadians look forward to the fast-approaching day when they may freeze in the dark so that Arizona can heat its swimming pools, Alberta and Canada are exporting tens of thousands of jobs with every new giant pipeline.
Several, shipping bitumen straight from Fort McMurray, Alta., to U.S. refineries as far south as Texas, are either under construction or on the drawing boards.
American refiners are making massive investments to expand their capacity by 1.6 million barrels a day, two-thirds of it from tar sands.
Last fall, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers of Canada (CEP) hired Ottawa economist Mike McCracken to study the impact of two of these new pipelines. He found that 18,000 jobs annually would be created in Canada if the bitumen were processed here rather than the U.S. The CEP used the analysis to appeal to the National Energy Board to block the pipelines. It lost. It appealed to the federal cabinet. And lost again.
Canadians are not just losing tens of thousands of jobs. They are gaining something else: the dubious distinction as the one of the world’s dirtiest oil producers.
Today, the tar sands produce 27 million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, almost winning the national emitter sweepstakes.
But they’ve hardly just begun. By 2015, production is expected to multiply four to five times to meet American demand, ballooning emissions to 126 million tonnes. Environmentalists warn these emission rates are environmentally unsustainable. They and the mounting problems of super-toxic tailing ponds and dying rivers are creating an ecological nightmare. Ottawa plans a three-year exemption for new tar sands operations from its so-called “intensity-based targets.”
Meanwhile, the NAFTA-driven oil boom has created a Canadian petro-dollar, distorting the national economy and pummelling the nation’s industrial heartland with thousands of job losses.