Suddenly Western money and influence are driving everything that happens in the nation’s capital
In July 2006 Stephen Harper had been Prime Minister for half a year and it was time to deliver his first speech to a foreign business audience. He picked a friendly crowd, the Canada-U.K. Chamber of Commerce in London. He told them British investors were taking notice of “Canada’s emergence as a global energy powerhouse—the emerging ‘energy superpower’ our government intends to build.”
Canada, he said, was the world’s fifth-largest energy producer, ranking third in gas production and seventh in oil production. Canada was the world’s largest supplier of hydroelectric power and uranium. “But that’s just the beginning.”
There was “an ocean of oil-soaked sand” in northern Alberta, more than in any country except Saudi Arabia. Getting it out would be “an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger.”
Fast forward to late last year. The future Harper described in London had become a reality. The oil sands were producing so much oil that the biggest challenge was simply to get the stuff to market. Then on Nov. 10, U.S. President Barack Obama said he would delay approval of the Keystone XL pipeline for at least a year.
Harper allowed that he was “disappointed” with Obama’s decision. In fact he was furious. He flew to Hawaii for the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit and chatted with Obama at an outdoor picnic table under a beach umbrella. Reporters watching the exchange wrote that the two men looked relaxed and laughed more than once. “The leaders discussed the recent announcement regarding the presidential permit process for the Keystone XL pipeline application,” a White House press release said later.
You bet they did. What Harper was doing, behind the forced bonhomie, was writing the U.S. off as Canada’s only important energy export market. A senior Conservative source says that two days after the chat with Obama, at a meeting of cabinet’s priorities and planning committee in Ottawa, Harper handed out orders to a half-dozen ministers.
Energy exports were the government’s new top strategic priority. Asia, led by China, was the export market to target. Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline to the seaport at Kitimat, B.C., must get built. Environmental assessment for that project and dozens of others must be streamlined. Reconciliation with Aboriginal groups that could block those pipelines must be fast-tracked.
Much of what the Harper government has done this year flows from that tense cabinet meeting five months ago. The accelerated opening to China. The spotlight on rookie Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver. The apocalyptic warnings about foreign money interfering with Canadian environmental decisions. The moves to weaken environmental protection for fish habitats. But Harper is not driving events so much as reacting to them, adjusting his game, seeking to draw advantage from a historic shift in the distribution of money, populations and political power in Canada.
That shift is changing everything. The extended boom in commodity prices, especially energy, has created a new cast of winners and losers in Canadian commerce. Populations have moved westward toward new opportunities. Regions with a weaker resource hand to play are paying for the shortcoming. Quebec is losing population to out-migration, yet even so, unemployment there is above the national average and climbing. And the upheaval affects politics too, strengthening both the western provinces within Confederation and the party with the strongest western base, the Conservatives, within Parliament. The Conservatives’ advantage is likely to increase.
“It really used to be that the Liberal party ruled Canada from Ottawa,” says historian Michael Bliss. “Its strength was in the belt between Montreal and Toronto and its idea factory was Queen’s University. Well, that’s pretty much gone now. The new map of Canadian politics has the Conservatives where they are and it has the new linkages stretching from Ottawa out to Calgary and Edmonton and Regina. The country has changed.”
For the rest of this article, please go to the Maclean’s Magazine website: http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/03/23/oil-power/