The Man Who Would Be PM

The Official Leader of the Opposition in Canada's Parliament appears to be on a mission. That it represents a mission to join forces with environmental groups whose focus is on damning Alberta's oilsands project as a threat to the environment in the United States is rather convoluted by his argument that the oil and gas that Canada produces should remain in Canada, for home consumption.

He has taken a page out of former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's efforts in that direction, imposed in the detested National Energy Program.That was a brilliant idea that brought Alberta to the cusp of separation with Canada, with the most favourite curse among Albertans being to "let those Eastern bastards freeze in the dark".

No one was going to take away their right to manage, as rightful custodians, their own province's natural resources. Eventually the program was dismantled and no subsequent government has ever looked longingly at re-visiting it. Except, that is, for this NDP leader-and-PM-wannabe, foisting his ideas abroad.

He has warned the United States that Canada cannot be trusted on the environment file, for it as good as abandoned its (previous Liberal government's) sign-on to the Kyoto environmental agreement. That would most certainly have horrified his American audience. And one wonders, simply idly thinking, whether any among that audience ventured to nudge Mr. Mulcair's memory that the United States itself never bothered to sign on to Kyoto.

In yet another speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center's Canada Institute no doubt feeling honoured at the presence of such a brilliant Canadian policy-and-economy strategist aspiring to the prime ministership of the country, Mr. Mulcair raised the dread issue of Chinese state involvement in Canada's energy sector. Given a number of investments by Chinese energy conglomerates, including those run by the state, in Alberta oilsands operations.

Perhaps it slipped Mr. Mulcair's memory that when the Conservative-led government gave the final and reluctant green light to allow CNOOC's $15.1-billion takeover of Calgary-based oilsands giant Nexen Inc., the U.S. was already involved through its U.S.-based interests. And that the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States rendered its approval on the sale, thus implicating the U.S. as well as Canada in surrendering full sovereignty to that portion of extraction operations.

"China will be Canada's second-largest investor, largely in oil and gas", Mr. Mulcair chillingly warned his American audience. Putting this kind of thing in another type of perspective, Canada, unlike the United States, is not gigantically in debt to China.  The foreign country that holds the largest share of of the U.S. debt totalling $14.3-trillion, is China, owning over $1.2-trillion in bills, notes and bonds, according to U.S. Treasury figures.



And Mr. Mulcair has more, much more to say about the China-Canada relationship; by 2020 "China will be Canada's second-largest investor, largely in oil and gas." If this disturbs Mr. Mulcair so greatly, why not encourage the U.S. to continue investing in Canadian petroleum reserves, and look favourably upon the Keystone XL pipeline? To claim so ingenuously as Mr. Mulcair is wont to do, that the U.S. should avoid the polluting effects of Canadian bitumen, is to overlook that it will be used in any event.

Unsurprisingly, Canada's International Trade Minister Ed Fast has reacted to Mr. Mulcair's injudicious comments, claiming them to be out of whack with reality, that his trip to the United States to slag Canada and the Alberta oil resources was a "shocking" event for a high-level parliamentarian, in an effort to "undermine our government's efforts to promote economic growth, investment and job creation in Canada."

Unsurprisingly, the leaders of the NDP parties in Saskatchewan and British Columbia have made haste to divorce themselves and their provincial parties from any association with their federal leader's stance. They appear to agree with Minister Fast when he stated that Mulcair was busy "spreading falsehoods about our government's commitment to protecting Canadian investments with China through a bilateral investment treaty."