Neighbourly Relations

"Unfortunately, of modern presidents, Barack Obama appears to have the least appreciation of the strategic importance of Canada to the U.S. He has not put the necessary effort into the neighbourhood, including Mexico, that it deserves."
Former Canadian diplomat

A 2012 photo shows U.S. President Barack Obama arriving at the TransCanada Stillwater Pipe Yard in Cushing, Okla. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press)

In six years of administering the executive affairs of the United States, President Obama has visited Saudi Arabia more often than he has gone next door to Canada. Still-influential former Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. Allan Gotlieb who helped negotiate the original Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the U.S. spoke of a "striking lack of sensitivity" by President Obama to "the impact of their (Keystone XL) position on our historic joint energy relationship, our joint economic security interests and the uniquely integrated economic ties with the country with which they share a continent."

As the world's second-largest producer of oil and natural gas and with the fourth-largest proved gas reserves located directly within the United States, Canada is right behind, rating as the fifth-largest energy producer controlling the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world. Mexico as well  stands as the tenth-largest oil producer on the globe. Which means that North America is fairly well energy-sufficient.

It would make sense for the three countries to coalesce their natural resources, to ensure all three are free of the need to obtain energy from problematical sources. Tracing Saudi Arabia's transition from a dustily arid kingdom to one awash with oil riches enabling it to establish Wahhabist madrassas worldwide which spawned a vibrantly vicious Salafist brand of Islam now challenging the world order with its terrorist jihadi agenda, it makes sense to leave that source adrift.

Yet Barack Obama, whose reign has been arguably a surprisingly large disappointment in inept management and alienation of America's allies resulting from poor decision making in the face of world events that required cool reasoning and decisions to match, has decided, since he has failed in all other indices, to make the environment his legacy project. He has the support of environmentalists to spurn with contempt Canada's oil, labelling it "dirty".

Yet there are many unknowns related to the fracking that the U.S. is fully engaged with to extract gas and oil, and the long-term effects. The waste of water used in the fracking process when there are water shortages worldwide, let alone in the U.S., the pumping deep into the earth of chemicals, some of which surge back to the surface with unhappy results, the fracking that causes small earthquakes, all of distinctly environmentally unfriendly.

American use of low-grade coal alone produces far more carbon emissions blighting the environment than all of Canada's energy expenditure on freeing up Alberta oilsands. But a truly troubling dilemma is that of the growing incidence of hospital superbugs and the disabling of once-effective antibiotics, placing peoples' lives at real peril, forcing medical science to scramble in the search for more effective antibiotics; a seemingly scarce-success field of endeavour.

The United States uses more antibiotics in animal feed to force upward-scale production of mature ready-to-slaughter animals than it does for human medical use. That antibiotic swell on the medical environment is responsible in huge part for the dilemma facing medicine today; the inability to cope with increasingly potent threats to human health. So much for sanctimonious assertions that the environment and nature are top of the agenda of the Obama administration.