Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

The ‘petro dictators’ are among us

British Columbia Premier Christy Clark’s belated but necessary assertion of B.C.’s bottom lines on the preposterously irresponsible $5.6 billion Enbridge Inc. pipeline-and-tanker scheme has caused a great deal of windy indignation to erupt from Ottawa. Clark is hijacking the prospects for a national energy strategy, we’re told. Even worse, what’s at stake is the delicate balance of Confederation itself.

The thing to notice is that what the federal Conservatives share with the Opposition New Democrats and Liberals is a comical inability to open their mouths on these subjects without insulting the intelligence of nine out of 10 Canadians. That’s the proportion of us who showed up in a February Harris Decima survey to affirm the obvious, which is that encouraging Beijing’s police-state racketeers to take over Canadian oilsands corporations — this is the core of the “national energy strategy” on offer, by the way — is unpardonably stupid and reckless.

Beijing’s blood money is the only reason why the Enbridge pipeline idiocy is a serious prospect in the first place, but we’re expected to believe that’s beside the point.

The NDP leadership is afraid that mounting a robust critique of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s $15.1-billion, way-above-market bid for Calgary’s Nexen Inc. might diminish the ability of the party’s doofus faction to throw “Sinophobia” mud pies at people.

The Liberal party remains beholden to party financiers who have been up Beijing’s backside for so long that Liberal windbags have become practised in the magical art of droning on for hours about the Chinese mess Canada has found itself in and everyone forgets everything they said the second they shut up.

Meanwhile, as a Forum Research poll found in April, there are now fewer than one in five of us who believe that Prime Minister Stephen Harper puts Canada’s interests ahead of the interests of oil company shareholders. So Conservatives prefer to keep mum, too, saying only that the CNOOC proposition will be subjected to a “net benefit” test which everybody knows is completely bogus. Former industry minister Jim Prentice helpfully admitted as much the other day. The test is useless precisely because it was “intended to be,” he said.

Applying the Investment Canada Act’s “national security” test to the CNOOC bid will set off a similar charade because that’s what it’s intended to be, too. When the Act was amended in 2009, the federal cabinet ruled out any definition of “national security” and explicitly rejected recommendations to conduct national security reviews according to “concrete,” “objective” and “transparent” criteria. Just trust us, we know what’s best.

“This deal prompts great concern about the Chinese government’s continued attempts to use its state-owned enterprises to acquire global energy resources.” Who said that about CNOOC’s Nexen bid? Was it Industry Minister Christian Paradis? NDP boss Tom Mulcair? Liberal helmsman Bob Rae? No. It was Drew Hamill, spokesman for U.S. Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi, which just goes to show that Canada has already become so enfeebled by China’s dirty money that American politicians are now more candid about the implications of Beijing’s entrenchment in Alberta’s energy sector than Canadian politicians are.

Here’s how laughable it’s become.

Only two weeks ago Gary Doer, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, was hectoring the Yanks for continuing to buy oil from “petro-dictators” instead of loading up on Alberta’s ethical, shade-grown, fair-traded, organic, non-genetically-modified variety. What we’re all supposed to be too stupid to notice is that it’s increasingly Beijing’s “petro-dictators” that Ottawa expects Americans to buy Canadian oil from. And we aren’t even buying much of it ourselves anyway. Ontarians, Quebecers, Newfoundlanders and Maritimers still get half their oil from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Algeria and places like that.

CNOOC’s bid for Nexen marks Beijing’s biggest-ever offshore energy acquisition attempt. It would roughly double Beijing’s holdings in Alberta’s oilpatch, which have grown 14-fold in recent years. CNOOC has hired the public-relations giant Hill & Knowlton to handle its lobbying and to plant greasy commentary in the newspapers to the effect that, heck, CNOOC acts and smells just like any other multinational corporation, so what’s the big deal?

For starters, the big deal is CNOOC’s unlimited access to Beijing’s capital reserves, its mandate to lose money if that serves the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, its strategic function as a state entity directly answerable to the party itself, and its role as Beijing’s overseas oil acquisitions arm. When CNOOC sets up shop beyond mainland China a company asset is to be considered “sovereign territory” and a “strategic weapon.” That’s how CNOOC chairman Wang Yilin puts it, anyway.

Already, CNOOC’s sister behemoth Sinopec is refusing to appear in Alberta’s courts on dozens of health and safety charges for a haywire show outside Fort McMurray that resulted in the deaths of two workers. Sinopec is claiming “sovereign immunity.” We’re supposed to believe that CNOOC will be subject to Canadian law like any Canadian company? In the real world, if CNOOC were a Canadian company, Chairman Wang and all of CNOOC’s directors would already be in jail.

CNOOC is currently in the middle of a multi-year $16-billion deal with the ayatollahs in Tehran to develop Iran’s North Pars gas fields — an arrangement that would otherwise be in direct violation of Canada’s Iran sanctions laws under the Special Economic Measures Act.

But here’s how Beijing-friendly Ottawa has become: Chinese state-owned entities are allowed to dodge our sanctions laws by running subsidiaries in Canada while assigning separate subsidies to do their filthy business in Iran, Syria, and Sudan, any place they like, any time they like.

It’s true that CNOOC resembles ordinary multinational corporations, at least in one way. Its dealings are prone to the same depths of corruption as the sleaziest Wall Street trader. Within a week of CNOOC’s grotesquely inflated Nexen bid the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating CNOOC’s corporate bedmates in a $13-million insider-trading ripoff directly connected to the Nexen deal.

One should not be overly uncharitable to CNOOC’s executives, though. They are only doing what they have been instructed to do under the terms of Beijing’s zouchuqu (“going out”) strategy, adopted 12 years ago at the fifth plenary session of the 15th gathering of the party’s central committee.

It’s harder to be forgiving of all the Canadian politicians, mandarins, corporate executives and pundits who continue to hold Canadians in such contempt as to expect us all to be stupidly oblivious to the implications of offering up Canada’s energy sector to a decrepit and avaricious neo-Maoist despotism that persists in enslaving a fifth of humanity.

Terry Glavin is an award-winning author and journalist. His most recent book is Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan.

Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Terry Glavin

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