Terry Glavin on Oil Sands, the Pipeline and China's stealth control of Canada's oil

Our friend Terry Glavin has a very interesting take on the Oil Sands controversy and the largely unspoken aspect of the vast Chinese investment in Canada's natural resources:

.. if we’re seriously supposed to be going all villagers-with-torches about foreign outfits with weird ideologies undermining Canada’s national economic interests, let’s review what’s really going on, shall we?

The $5.5-billion Enbridge pipeline project is all about sending Alberta bitumen in huge oil tankers to China. Beijing’s own state enterprises are among the project’s major backers, and Beijing has been buying up Alberta’s oilpatch at such a dizzying pace lately it’s hard to keep up. In the spring of 2010, China’s state-owned Sinopec Corp. took a $4.65-billion piece of Syncrude. Then the China Investment Corporation, which is run by the Chinese Communist Party, took possession of a $1.25-billon share of Penn West Petroleum. Last summer, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation gobbled up Opti Canada for $2.34 billion. And so on.

Then, last month, Sinopec spent $2.2-billion to take over Daylight Energy Ltd., and last week, Petro-China, with the final push of $1.9 billion, became the owner and manager of the MacKay River oilsands project. This is what Ottawa doesn’t want you noticing.

Full article at the National Post

Chiquita's Epic Marketing Fail

By trying to suck up to environmentalists and paid protesters of a small group called Forest Ethics by saying they'd avoid Canadian tar sands oil, Chiqita has managed to alienate virtually all of Canada. Forest Ethics' campaign managed to get less than 650 YouTube views in over three months.  Now, because of the Chiqita's overreaction to it,  there are nation wide calls for Canadians to boycott all Chiqita products. This could go down in history as one of the all time bad marketing moves.






h/t that fine blogging husband and wife duo Blazing Cat Fur and Five Feet of Fury

Harper: "Canada has no friends among America's enemies"

For obvious political reasons, the Obama administration has stalled the Keystone pipeline bringing Canadian oil across the U.S. to Texas. This might mollify some in the leftist quadrant of the Democrat's base through the election when, oh look, the pipeline decision will come right after November, 2012. Quelle coincidence!

It will be hard for Obama, if he's still around politically, to kill the pipeline then, so interested doth he claim to be, in enhancing secure petroleum resources.

More at Investors.com

The Globe and Mail's Patrick Martin is a failure at understanding world events

The Saudi leadership was humiliated at the news of a woman being sentenced to lashing for the "crime" of driving a car earlier this week. That story made headlines all over the world and was being used as another stick to castigate the Gulf monarchy's medieval rule.

King Abdullah reversed the sentence for an obvious reason. Because it being publicized was an embarrassment. Not because of some trend towards liberalization going on in the Wahhabi kingdom.

But you wouldn't know that from reading Patrick Martin in the Globe and Mail. Martin seems to view his role as a columnist as being a press agent for terrorists and tyrants. Prosecuting and beating a woman for driving is a gross violation of human rights, and a minor act of clemency for an infraction that the civilized world was mocking is described by Martin as an indication of  "just how serious the Saudi ruler is about enhancing the civil rights of women in the Kingdom."  Or it could be an indication of how serious the Saudi ruler is about trying not to look bad in the international press, and it's a good thing he has boosters like Patrick Martin to help spread that message.

This comes in the wake of the Saudi leadership giving women minor enfranchisement privileges. Yet the Globe and Mail didn`t seem to have much to say about how that move came only a couple of weeks after Saudi embarrassment over the exposure of how they tried to suppress `Ethical Oil` ads which highlighted the abusive, unfair treatment of women in Saudi Arabia.

The one thing that keeps the Saudi rulers in place is the wealth they derive from oil, and Canada illustrating how their product is the equivalent of `fair trade`` petroleum was bad for Saudi business.

That`s what is going on in Saudi Arabia right now - not a blossoming of a women`s rights movement but some press releases by one of the world`s largest oil producers.

This is not the first time Martin has acted as an apologist for the worst elements in the world. In a`radio interview in which he discussed a Globe and Mail series on Gaza a few months ago, Martin dismissed Hamas rocket attacks on Israel as being `firecrackers.` This vapid, hypocritical comment shows the level of analysis Canada`s``national newspaper` is giving its readers. Or if I`m wrong, Martin might be willing to demonstrate it by standing in a room while a few of those `firecrackers`that can level a house are lobbed in his direction. I wouldn`t bet on him volunteering for that any time soon.

Dear Saudi Arabia, go f#&k yourself

The ad Saudi Arabia really, really doesn't want you to see

Shallow Canadian polemicist is really, really mad about the term "ethical oil"

Naomi Klein is outraged that proponents of Canadian Tar Sands oil, which finances social programs and provides employment to indigenous peoples in one of the freest countries in the world, describe the product as "ethical oil."

You know she's outraged because she proudly announced it at a rally comprised of middle aged, middle-class white socialists in Washington D.C. last week where she advocated against Canada's economic interests while demonstrating her tenuous comprehension of economics and environmental science.  Klein also likes to use the word "ravages" a lot when describing the effects of Canada's Tar Sands oil. She repeats it so frequently, it makes one wonder what sort of fixations she has.

Ms Klein, who appears at so many protests as to give the impression of a camp follower of such things, doesn't seem to understand the use of "ethical oil"  refers not to its debatable environmental impact, but to the social and political outcomes of purchasing oil from a democracy that uses revenues to fund social programs. That is as opposed to purchasing it from tyrannical monarchies or dictatorships, which use revenues to finance terrorism or further enrich oligarchs.

Klein never really addresses that ethical component in her supposed "debunking"  of the term "ethical oil." In fact, she doesn't really address much of anything, except express her fury, sputtering out marginally coherent nonsense that rivals the Alec Baldwin marionette's speech at the end of Team America.

According to the author of The Shock Doctrine,  Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn't represent what Canadians want. That's amusing coming from someone who has never held any elected office in her life suggesting that is it she who represents what Canadians really want.

Actually, that sort of puts things into perspective. It's no wonder Klein has so much trouble differentiating "ethical" oil from the other kind. Her instincts seem to indicate she has a lot in common with the unelected dictators and tyrants that produce foreign oil who, without virtue of being chosen by a democratic process, also claim to represent the 'true interests of the people.'