Scrutinizing Canada’s pipeline to Beijing – by Terry Glavin (National Post – January 30, 2012)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Canada is at the brink of a radical shift in energy and foreign policy. But there has been no debate of any consequence about it — not in the House of Commons, not in the Senate, not in the proceedings of a Royal Commission. Certainly not in the news media.

Here’s what you’ve been missing.

Ostensibly, it’s about the Enbridge project, a plan to pump condensate eastward from the coast to Alberta so that Alberta bitumen can be made fluid enough to be pumped back to the coast at Kitimat — then put into oil tankers to be sent down Douglas Channel and out into the roaring North Pacific, eventually landing in California and Asia.

As recently as last fall, John Bruk, the founding president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and as fervent a booster of trade with China as you’ll meet, was cheering Stephen Harper and wishing him all the best with his trade engagements in the Forbidden City. But Bruk’s good wishes came with a caution: “Are we going to sell the ownership of our natural resources to pay for consumer goods we can ill afford and thereby speed up the indebtedness of Canada as export revenue from those resources would be lost?” Turns out that’s exactly what we’re doing.

It’s not just about the jettisoning of a national consensus that Canada’s bitumen should not be sent overseas to be processed. It’s not just the $20-billion deluge of takeovers and beachheads Beijing has established almost overnight in Alberta’s oil sands. It’s about Chinese state-owned corporations moving in. It’s about a proper review of Investment Canada Act rules the Conservatives were promising only a year ago, before quietly scrapping the promise without explanation. It’s about recommendations from the federal Competition Policy Review Panel that were ignored. It’s about the abdication of Canada’s capacity to articulate a national energy strategy, and all to the advantage of the police state in Beijing.

Until now Beijing’s strategy has been to fly under the radar by taking only pieces of oil sands ventures and to murmur occasionally about bringing in Chinese workers or pulling up stakes altogether should they hear too much backchat.

Now, everything’s changed. The very week the MacKay River deal went down — and PetroChina became the first Chinese company to be put in charge of a Canadian oil sands project — Canadians were being called to arms over a disclosure that Alberta’s eminently reputable Pembina Institute had taken $60,000 from the British government. Turns out it was merely for some sort of think-paper in which Pembina explained things the U.K. should already have known about renewable energy. Meanwhile, when it’s up and running in 2014, MacKay will be a full-court Beijing show.

The headline the Vancouver Sun published on a Pembina-smearing opinion essay written by Kathryn Marshall was: “Why is foreign money fuelling oilsands fight?” Why indeed.

Sure, Rex Murphy is quite right, as far as it goes. All along, Canada should have been fighting back against the slander campaigns waged by so-called environmental activists who have gotten away with destroying the livelihoods of Canadian sealers and fur trappers. And you could say Prime Minister Harper has a point that there is much to be annoyed about in all those rich Americans who would want Canada to be their own giant, private national park. That could be a conversation worth having. But the great Enviroperil Scare of 2012 is a pathetic distraction.

The Canadian versions of the Tea Party and Moveon.org should be allowed to get their jollies however they choose, and televised freak shows pitting self-appointed oil industry propagandists against self-appointed radical environmentalists might well boost the ratings in the time slots where the evening news used to be. But grown-ups will want to notice something else.

Over the past decade, Canadians have sunk more than $20-billion of mostly public money into port, rail and highway infrastructure on the West Coast, all to expand Canadian trade into Asian economies. The whole point was to diversify our markets and reduce our reliance on the United States. But none of it has worked out like we were told. We’ve been hooped.

Ten years and $20-billion later, it’s all China, all the time. China plays by its own trade rules and everybody’s let them get away with it. The result is that in 10 years the annual value of Canadian exports to Japan hasn’t budged, and last year, as a destination for Canadian exports, India (the largest country on Earth) was overtaken by Norway. As a Canadian trading partner, Taiwan is now down there with Algeria.

For the rest of this column, please go to the National Post website: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/01/29/terry-glavin-scrutinizing-canadas-pipeline-to-beijing/