Did Obama Lose Canada?
Derek H. Burney and Fen Osler Hampson seem to think so:
Permitting the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline should have been an easy diplomatic and economic decision for U.S. President Barack Obama. The completed project would have shipped more than 700,000 barrels a day of Albertan oil to refineries in the Gulf Coast, generated tens of thousands of jobs for U.S. workers, and met the needs of refineries in Texas that are desperately seeking oil from Canada, a more reliable supplier than Venezuela or countries in the Middle East. The project posed little risk to the landscape it traversed. But instead of acting on economic logic, the Obama administration caved to environmental activists in November 2011, postponing until 2013 the decision on whether to allow the pipeline.
Obama’s choice marked a triumph of campaign posturing over pragmatism and diplomacy, and it brought U.S.-Canadian relations to their lowest point in decades. It was hardly the first time that the administration has fumbled issues with Ottawa. Although relations have been civil, they have rarely been productive. Whether on trade, the environment, or Canada’s shared contribution in places such as Afghanistan, time and again the United States has jilted its northern neighbor. If the pattern of neglect continues, Ottawa will get less interested in cooperating with Washington. Already, Canada has reacted by turning elsewhere — namely, toward Asia — for more reliable economic partners.
If I am to understand correctly, the Obama jilting will lead to a future in which Canada buys its F-35s from Russia, and builds the Keystone pipeline through China. This is a nice entry in the fun genre of foreign policy articles characterized by the claim that some Country X, utterly dependent upon the United States in security or economic terms, will threaten to take its ball and go play with some other superpower. The most common entries involve Israel (here Caroline Glick explains how Israel should cultivate a client relationship with China), but we also see them from Georgia, Taiwan, Poland, and a few others. The articles are usually (but not always) written by Country X nationals, and aspire to generate positive attention for Country X by trying to create the illusion of domestic discord; in this case, by implying that Mitt Romney might be a better friend to Canada, and that if we’re not careful the Canadians won’t even maintain benevolent neutrality when the Asian People’s Alliance, the Central American Federation, and the Euro-Socialist Pact come for our coal and women.
As a general rule it’s best to ignore this genre, or make it the object of scorn and fun. Patrons need clients, but patrons are rarely dependent upon any specific client; dependency runs the other way, and in the international system it’s exceedingly difficult for clients to recalibrate their entire foreign and economic policy around a different patron.
Are U.S.-Canadian relations really at a lower point than they were when U.S. Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci was constantly making ludicrous threats about how it’s a nice little country the Canadians have here, and how it would be a shame if somebody broke it?
Yes, but that was decades ago, for very small values of “decades.”
Decidecades.
Plus the mohawk and the suspenders just made him look kinda crazy, not to mention waving the gun around.
U.S. Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci
Who is almost certainly less disliked in the state he once Governated than Mittens is.
Maybe I missed it, but why don’t the Canadians build their own pipelines to their ports and refineries?
I know they have ports, and I damn well know they have refineries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_refineries#Canada
So, why don’t they want to ship it across their own territory?
Oh, it’s some of the filthiest, most toxic, sludge on the planet, and they’d rather we ruin OUR land if it spills, and not THEIR OWN!
Actually, with the history of this country, that was a pretty safe bet.
Well, cautioning that I don’t necessarily know what I’m about to say to be the reason for the Canada->Gulf Coast preference, I do know (from my past experience as a refinery engineer) that not every refinery is suitable to handle every type of crude. In particular, heavy (high proportion of higher-boiling components) and/or sour (high sulfur content) crude is difficult for many refineries to run economically. The Gulf Coast does have a number of refineries capable of handling the nastier stuff. I don’t know that Canada’s can’t handle it, though, so your speculation could very well be right.
They want to ship it to China and the cost of a pipeline across the Rockies is prohibitive and there are no refineries on the west coast. The harbors there are also not suitable for the large oil tankers needed for the purpose.
Where are you getting your facts, because last I heard, it was the environmental and first Nations concerns holding up the pipeline to the West coast, not cost, and everybody seems to say it will proceed.
Keystone is all about justifying the Oil Sands.
Canadian prices are well below world prices. both pipeline proposals could co-exist.
I never said that cost prevented a pipeline, only that it was the reason they wanted to ship it to the Gulf. Environmental and First Nations objections are also an issue, but the lack of suitable facilities on the Pacific coast to refine and transport the oil are a somewhat bigger one. I cannot remember where I saw the original analysis of why the XL route was chosen, but this addresses some of the issues.
The US is probably going to have significant excess refining capacity for decades. We can refine over twice as much oil as we produce domestically. Canada will likely have an excess of oil – above both refining capacity and domestic consumption. Nobody wants to build new refineries in N. America. Many of the ones we have will likely be retired while they are still useful as it is.
I haven’t been paying the closest attention, but I do listen to the CBC As It Happens podcast, and I’m pretty sure there is a second pipeline from the tar sands to the BC coast, with a lot of disputes regarding First Nations peoples whose land it traverses or nearly does.
Ah, Fortress America. Inferior in almost every way to Axis & Allies but still loads of fun. Do people still play those old table-top games or have computers et al destroyed the genre?
Thursday night is Board Game Night around here, although there’s no Fortress America to be seen (I did however own it in the 1980s at some point).
There are still plenty of tabletop gamers, if the action at my local gaming store is any indication; in fact, most of the time when I’m there for my Tuesday night game, there’s someone industrially painting miniatures at a table. I think that most of the computerized real-time strategy (RTS) games, exemplified by Blizzard’s Warcraft and Starcraft franchises, have been superseded by MMORPGs (World of Warcraft being the most obvious example), although they still have their fans.
I preferred to play Axis & Allies on my computer. Though I would often get caught cheating against the AI (Some of the code was in plain text – could just change the cost of all your units to “1″).
Yeah, the original Colonization was like that, too! I loved having my scouts with 99 attack power destroy the invading red coats.
Can’t do tabletop anymore. Not when games like War in the East make big, comprehensive games so easy to manage.
I still do tabletop. It’s pretty much a golden age for wargames these days. Also, unrelatedly, Fortress America has been re-released!
I haven’t played a tabletop game more complicated than “History of the World” in this century. Nobody seems to have time for a quick (12 hour) game of AH’s Civilization any more.
Things will get even more interesting when Canadians finally get fed up with Harper and put Thomas Mulcair in the driving seat.
Sometimes I wonder if the popularity of certain science fiction subgenres reflects the social concerns of the previous decade. In the sixties, you had growing awareness of the possibility of global nuclear war, population explosion, and ecological disasters; in the seventies, you had Damnation Alley, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, even Stephen King’s The Stand. The seventies saw Watergate, the energy crisis, double-digit inflation, and the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, plus the sudden rise of personal computing and urban crime rates; the eighties pondered the possibility of the decline of the American empire specifically (usually in favor of the Soviet Union, whose health was drastically overestimated, if not deliberately exaggerated by Reaganistas), as well as cyberpunk, which featured cool computerized gadgets in a crapsack world.
For the last decade, the neocons have been whipping up the fears of the fall of the American empire again, so I’m not surprised that we’re getting Red Dawn redux (the Homefront* game, which I understand didn’t do too well commercially, was written in part by John Milius of Red Dawn).
*As if to confirm that maybe this time the empire is falling for real, the original antagonists of the game were the Chinese, but that got switched out in favor of the North Koreans due to fear of a Chinese backlash.
I believe that phenomenon is pretty much accepted. The Sci-Fi of the 50s and early 60s was very much inspired by the cold war. The classic example of anti-communist hysteria being “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.
I wonder what we’re fermenting now in the minds of budding sci-fi authors. We’ve got widespread economic insecurity. Even those doing well have nagging fears that it could all go to hell. We’ve got frustration with politics – energized populist movements on the left and right seem to achieve nothing. We have huge and growing wealth disparity.
I think the sci-fi of the near future will be featuring more villainous cabals of powerful individuals rather than aliens or governments. We’ll see classism reflected in things like a genetically engineered upper class. We’ll see more mind control of the masses plots. Then again, that might be the coming reality.
There’s a Canadian miniseries about continental merger & a Machiavelian Canadian candidate for president. The pretext is access to the tar sands.
It;s not as good as its precursor, H29, which is about the US need for Canadian water.
Pretty please can the Israelis fuck off?
Seconded.
From the linked article:
So, when some pro-Israel whore mentions that Israel is the only bastion of democracy in the Middle East, can I show this quote down their throat?
However, China and Israel share the distinction of being the two oldest, continuous civilizations.
WTF? Seriously? SERIOUSLY?
I mean I suppose that’s a true statement for some seriously beat up values of either the word “continuous” or “civilization”. But the statement “I like to eat garlic jello” is also true for values of jello that equal bread.
Actually, I think the issue is that the statement is only eve semi-plausibly true when the value for “Israel” is equal to “Jewish.” Even then, it’s a problematic statement since its hard to claim that there was one Jewish civilization during the diaspora: Ashkenazi and Sephradi Jews were (and to some extent still are) quite different.
I also like how they grossly inflate the numbers of US jobs potentially created by at least one order of magnitude.
Hey, the “mythical job year” had to start somewhere.
After all, only software geek still know what the “mythical man month” means. (Except that it’s so old it’s a “man month”.)
Of course, like all the rightwingnut, attacks on Obama over the pipeline, this is made-up garbage. Obama was quite willing to build the pipeline, but wanted a little time to tinker with the route, and finish environmental studies. The Rs, who had no interest in actually building the thing, preferred to give Obama a short-term deadline and use the unbuilt pipeline to beat Obama over the head. As for Canada, our relationship with that country was sacrificed to Bush Adminstration security theater years ago.
Yes, and as I remember it the “environmental activists” who helped convince him to scuttle it were actually elected officials, often designated as (R-NE).
I love the drama of the refineries desperate for sweet sweet dirty dirty dirty crude.
Because things have otherwise always gone swimmingly with Canada.
Best quote: “Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, whereas Canadians are malevolently informed about the United States.”
Mark August 10 on your calendar, people—the 200th anniversary of the surrender of Detroit to the Canadians!
Canadians are malevolently informed about the United States
Precisely right. Canada’s policy toward the US isn’t patron-client, it’s a policy of appeasement. We make significant concessions to American whims and interests to purchase your continued benevolent ignorance.
(it’s a positive sum game that’s mutually beneficial, but then that’s the point of appeasement)
It was James Madison who lost Canada and it still makes me want to vote Federalist.
I would blame the unholy crew of Benedict Arnold, Richard Montgomery, Daniel Morgan, and Aaron Burr.
Don’t forget smallpox.
Yes, but Smallpox was successful voted out of “office” long ago with that wonderful vaccine!
TransCanada also does not have a very good environmental record with the Canadian government and are less likely to get a permit to build a pipeline to either Canadian coast. Also, the refineries in Texas are in “free trade” zones so once the oil is refined it can be shipped to foriegn buyers without actually paying any US taxes. The current pipelines that are running from Keystone into midwest refineries are nowhere near full capacity at this time and any oil going through the XL pipeline would be diverted from the existing pipelines. TransCanada believes that this would increase the price that Americans pay for Canadian oil by $3.9 billion. So the US gets a double bonus of taking all the environmental risk AND paying higher prices for oil.
I respect your scholarship too much to believe that you really mean it when you say that Canada is “utterly dependent upon the United States in security or economic terms, will threaten to take its ball and go play with some other superpower.” Because, in the area of oil sales, this has never been true. Plus, US-Canada trade is much more typically characterized by American protectionist activities like the softwood lumber tax (with friends like that, we Canadians are well advised to find new markets.
Having said that, Derek Burney is a well known flack for Canada’s version of the neo-cons, and anything he writes needs to be classified as propaganda, not scholarship.
Keystone has nothing to do with Canadian nationalism. It has everything to do with the multi-national oil giants who dominate Alberta (and thus, federal) politics maximizing profits by selling Oil Sands crude at higher prices internationally. Though a portion of those profits might be re-invested in Canada, or paid out to the minority of shareholders who are Canadian, most will flow back to the US, or overseas. Canada benefits from the oil sands jobs, but remains the hewer of wood and drawer of water… well, almost. The US still wants our water, not so much our wood.
Derek Burney also serves on the Board of Directors for TransCanada Pipelines Ltd…just a coincidence I’m sure.
I let my subscription to Foreign Affairs lapse a while ago, but I still get the e-mails. This came in this morning:
“The Drone Blowback Fallacy
Christopher Swift
Critics argue that U.S. drone strikes are creating more problems than they solve and are driving al Qaeda’s recruiting. But as much as the terrorist network plays up civilian casualties and U.S. intervention in its propaganda videos, the truth is that economic distress, not resentment of U.S. strikes, is what’s pushing Yemenis into the insurgency.”
I cannot recall a single “critic” who thinks drones are the only reason Yemen is chaotic at the moment, but Christopher Swift is here to yell at them anyway.
No idea if the article is any good, but that is not a promising introduction. Neither this nor stupidly worrying about Canada makes me want to restart my subscription.
Ironically, as soon as there’s talk of using UAVs, even unarmed ones, within the US, people start getting very skittish about the whole shebang.
It’s the same principle by which the TSA touching your inner thigh is the death knell of human liberty, but we must refuse poltical asylum to Iraqi refugees. Liberty!!1
As always, Texas does it harder, not smarter
Let’s see:
Flagrantly false estimate for US jobs created, check.
Flagrantly false assessment of the environmental impact, check.
… Okay, this isn’t quite the usual boilerplate horseshit. Rather than taking the openly mendacious route of shouting “More oil for AMERICA,” they talk about the “needs of refineries in Texas that are desperately seeking oil from Canada,” in order to refine it and ship it overseas. See how they use “more reliable supplier than Venezuela or countries in the Middle East” to imply that it will benefit the US directly, without quite saying so? That’s how it’s done, people. Given that Derek Burney is a TransCanada board member, I wonder if the contemptuously blatant lies are his, and Hampson crafted the subtler, merely misleading point. Otherwise, given that everything else in the excerpt, possibly including the prepositions, is a bundle of outright falsehoods, why would that one point about the refined product’s destination be danced around? Is it because “job estimates” and “predicted environmental impact” are suitably vague, but the functioning of the global oil market isn’t?
Here’s a recent Canadian poll that completely torpedoes that silly article: Canadians say by more than 2-1 that relations are good. Obama’s approach to US-Canada relations polls at +21%. Obama personally is massively more popular in Canada than Romney (+58%!). 51% of Canadians say Obama’s actions have had no real bearing on relations, and more of the remainder say he’s improved than hurt them.
My guess is that the “cooling of relations” exists mainly in the minds of a few reflexively anti-environmentalist, Alberta-focused political hacks in the nebulous orbit of the Prime Minister’s Office. I would guess that one of the world’s deepest and most durable bilateral relationships can survive this terrible crisis.
I’d agree with your assessment that demographics are rather important when we talk about “popularity”. The people the author of the referenced article are referring to probably like Romney very much. I would guess they also live in the same general socio-economic class as Romney does.
Where as most Canadians probably could care less about building an oil pipeline through the US.
Who is Caroline Glick, and why does she hate China so much?
[...] Guns and Money’s Robert Farley commented upon a Foreign Affairs article written by two Canadians of a particular right-wing and [...]
Perhaps if TransCanada cronies like Mr. Burney would have reined in their teabagger buddies, we would have had a chance to FIND OUT whether this was true. Instead, we got a “BUILD IT NAOW OR THE ECONOMY GETS IT” whinge-fest…