Want the skinny on the Northern Gateway pipeline? Check out this series of articles by Terry Glavin in the National Post.
Canada sells the oil sands to China. Then complains about ‘foreign interference’
China has our forests, now we’re sending our oilfields too
Ottawa’s energy policy, as ghost-written by Beijing
Scrutinizing Canada’s pipeline to Beijing
Ottawa to Beijing — take our oil, please
You won’t get the whole story, but you’ll get a big, big chunk of it—the heretofore understated Chinese connection. Lest anyone think this is a recrudescence of the hoary Yellow Peril theme, we are talking dollars and cents here, and Glavin follows the money where it leads.
Try to ignore the tone. Glavin has always been abrasive, truculent and contrarian, with an almost incandescent sense of moral superiority. That doesn’t necessarily make him wrong, though, and the trove of facts in his pipeline articles should be pondered long and hard by anyone tempted to fall in with the oily ethicist crowd.
“Foreign influences” in the pipeline debate? You bet. But not the ones Joe Oliver has been maundering on about—environmental groups getting a few bucks here and there from US sources (although US oil companies get an explicit pass from our good Minister of Natural Resources). China, with its voracious appetite for energy, is planning to insert a huge straw into the tar sands, which it is already acquiring, piece by piece. That giant sucking sound you hear is Canadian raw resources, jobs and sovereignty heading across the Pacific.
Obviously I might have wished that environmental concerns, including those of First Nations living along the path of the Northern Gateway, got fair play in Glavin’s account. He has a ready sneer or two for the environmentalists who are presently mobilizing—he thinks they’re a sideshow and we’re missing the main event.
Both are vitally important, of course, with one more immediately obvious to concerned Canadians. Glavin shines his baleful light on the other, and we’d better stay tuned for more. In the meantime, grab a coffee—or a stiff drink—and read what he’s uncovered so far. He won’t be getting a Senate seat anytime soon.
