Energy Security And
The Future Of CanadaBy Jeff Berg
13 January, 2006
Countercurrents.orgHere we Canadians are in the middle of a national election and yet not one of our political parties is speaking word one to us about energy security. You would think that in a country that is next door to the United States of America, a country currently at war for the purpose of energy security, that the subject might have some resonance at this particular moment in time. Especially in a country that tends to be rather unpleasantly cold for quite a lot of the year.
Now I can understand that the Liberals who failed both to renegotiate or abrogate the FTA and followed this up by immediately agreeing to the NAFTA might be a tad hesitant about raising the subject. And the Conservatives of course are right to be more than a little gun shy of revisiting the scene of the Mulroney crime that turned two consecutive majority governments into a party on life support that has since been turned off. But it is utterly baffling to me that neither the NDP nor the Green party, parties that need not even worry about finding themselves in the position of having to honour their promises, make next to no mention of either of these two subjects. Were I in charge of the campaign of either of these parties energy security and the “free” trade agreements would be central issues. After all what could be easier or more effective than wrapping these intertwined sets of facts up in the Canadian flag and using it as a club with which to beat both the Liberals and the Conservatives at every conceivable opportunity.
Now some of you may wonder what these trade agreements and energy security have to do with each other. In a nutshell. As a result of our governments signing of these two treaties we have abrogated our sovereignty as a nation to use our resources as we see fit. By abrogating our sovereignty what I mean in this context is that we have given up A) In times of scarcity having the right to keep what we do have for ourselves. B) Having the right to treat Canadian development preferentially to American business interests. C) Our government having the right to ‘interfere’ with market mechanisms for the benefit of our citizens. D) Having the right to determine that the liquid fuels we do have left will be needed by us in order for us to make the transition to the next generation of energy creation. (Ironically it’s going to take a whole lot of oil and gas to wean us from oil and gas.)
And what did we gain in return for these astounding concessions? What did we gain for having signed an agreement that says, “Even when you don’t have enough for yourselves you must to continue to export the same proportion of what you do have to us.”? What did we gain in return for guaranteeing the Americans even in times of scarcity access to about 50% of our oil and 60% of our natural gas? (This currently translates to 1.6 million barrels of oil per day and 3.5 Trillion cubic feet of natural gas per year) Well, we gained the right to “force” the Americans to follow American law in their dealings with our businesses. That’s right sports fans in exchange for the opportunity to freeze in the cold in times of scarcity we gained the “right” to make the Americans follow their own laws. (What exactly does it say that they have to be forced and that we thought of this as a major gain?) It boggles the mind I know and yet as they say in baseball, “You can look it up.” And if you are so inclined the relevant passages are Chapter Six of NAFTA and/or Articles 408, 409, and 904.
It is well that we also keep in mind that their laws can be changed anytime. Now supporters of these agreements say that this street is two way. To which the only sane response is big flipping deal. First of all we import essentially no energy from the U.S. (3% of our oil, and even less of other key resources) and secondly while the U.S. for obvious reasons has huge influence over what our lawmakers do our influence over the U.S. legislative process is next to nil. As the softwood lumber dispute is proving we don’t even have enough influence to make them follow NAFTA. Before we entered into these bilateral agreements with the behemoth to the south our trade disputes were resolved by the GATT and its dispute settlement mechanisms. Over the years we lost such an appeal precisely once. And the Americans never even once dared to defy these judgments because they are backed by the combined enforcement power of the global economy. By signing NAFTA we have cut ourselves off from this multi-lateral power and are now alone in the room with the 800 pound gorilla.
It is no exaggeration to say that as things now stand rights that other countries view as those that make them a country as opposed to an economic colony have been lost, lost, lost. The only question remaining is whether this loss is irrevocable. What is for sure is that they are lost to us until we find a political party able to win a majority of votes in a national election and then gain the agreement of a majority of its own party members to rescind these agreements. Any such effort will of course bring about the full furor of the American press, a full court press by America’s massively monied elite, and no small amount of brinksmanship by the American government itself. We are in other words in an extremely tight spot. Any attempt to back out of NAFTA will not be pain free.
But given the supply situation for natural gas in North America, and the extreme volatility and potential unreliability of the international oil markets, what we would gain would far outweigh these temporary disadvantages. For example. Since 1907 Canada had regulations which stated that we could not export any natural gas unless there was a 25 year supply of known reserves. Under Article 905 (2) that requirement was abolished. Today our natural gas reserves stand at about 8 years and our, and the American’s supplies, are in terminal decline. As to what the Americans would do to us if we were to invoke our right to pull out of NAFTA: outside of military force there is nothing that the Americans can do to us economically that would not hurt them far more than it would hurt us. The simple facts of the matter are that they depend on us to a greater degree than we do them. Their energy situation is far more precarious than ours as is their fiscal position and its not like there aren’t other very hungry markets for what we have to sell.
Much more to the point in any case than this kind of relative harm analysis is that what we would be seeking is not a cessation of trade but simply the regaining of our access to the multi-lateral power of the GATT’s. Something that every signatory in the world looks to in order to help them level the playing field with the American giant. The GATT’s themselves are a far cry from any ideal but they are nonetheless far preferable to the bi-national sleeper hold the U.S. now has us in.As things currently stand it is as if the whole of Canada’s resources, most especially important its liquid resources, lie on a buffet table that straddles the border. The northern legs of this table today are about a meter off the ground because the giant to the south of us is leaning with his full weight on his end of the table. As a result everything which sustains us in the style to which we have become accustomed is sliding at ever increasing speed into the insatiable maw that is America’s consumer society. And every extra percentage point of oil or gas that we export today is one that we are committed to tomorrow regardless of internal need. The chances of this trend of increasing exports being reversed or of our backing out of this tremendously short-sighted deal between this and the next election cycle are in fact zero. First because there is precisely no political appetite for this fight in our political class and secondly because America has every intention of increasing not decreasing their reliance on our limited energy supplies.
It seems to me highly unlikely that anything but extreme crisis is going to be sufficient to galvanize our political class to serve the interest of Canada’s citizens in defiance of U.S. business interests. Because this assessment is very likely accurate the question then becomes: By then what will be left of our once glorious country and its “limitless” future? Will we be leaving our children aught but an unsalvageable smouldering refuse heap of diverted waterways, uranium tailings, clear cut forests and devastated fisheries? How much oil and gas will be left and will there be anywhere near enough energy there to allow us to create a full blown renewable energy economy? These are questions well worth asking especially in light America’s history. In light of the shape that they have left so many other countries whose resources they considered it their “manifest destiny” to consume.
In time it is inevitable that our political class will be forced by public opinion to find the backbone necessary to decree that the Canadian people have the right to develop the resources of their country for the maximum benefit of their people. It is then that even our business class will likely come around to the idea that we as a nation should use the limited liquid fuels at our disposal for the purpose of creating a renewable energy economy. It is even possible that sustainability will someday rise to the top of the decision making tree that is used by the decision makers in our ruling elites. The question is whether this will occur before or after most of this extraordinarily precious one time gift of hydrocarbon energy is gone. If the history of the collapse of civilizations is any guide Yossarian had it good by comparison. At least he could go home again if he survived his Catch 22. We on the other hand may only be given back our rights as the ‘homeowners’ of Canada after the corporate class of America and Canada has sucked dry the very essence of the bounty that gives Canada its current vitality.
“Canada’s resources sustain Canada as a civil society.” This is a statement that is pretty hard to argue against. And yet we have put the control of these very same resources into the hands of a nation that has in its historical ledger: the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, etc, etc. How far along the path of these countries will we be allowed to go before our press allows champions of our people to speak to and for us? How long before our citizens of vision (of which there are still many) are allowed to become central characters in the drama of our nation? How long before these men and woman are allowed to speak to us as directly as Tommy Douglas was allowed to speak to the citizens of Saskatchewan? As John A. Macdonald and George Etienne Cartier were allowed to speak to the whole country. And by then will it be too late? Will our best choices be forestalled? Will we have naught left but forced moves that lead to markedly worse outcomes than were available only a few short decades ago? Questions worth asking no? Questions one would expect of our political class no? Questions you should be asking of you and yours no?
Sooner or later the debt we are incurring with nature will have to be paid. Balance will have its day with or without our consent. The laws of the natural order of the universe have not been suspended even if our infatuation with celebrity, soap advertising and flickering light sources makes us think that this might be so. Liquid fuels are absolutely essential to our ability to create the kind of economic new world order that we and our children would like to see. Canada’s precious few remaining liquid fuels are the only chance we have of bridging away from the insanely profligate and wholly unsustainable ‘American dream’ towards a sustainable lifestyle that keeps something of the glories of the modern information age for the next generations. But will we use them this way? Or will they instead be used up in a vast consumptive orgy of a gulp? A frat party like chug-a-lug whose sole beneficiary will be the maximally profiting shareholder class. A very, very, tiny few who will thereby have enough money to escape the very great pain that this mad wastefulness will bring on the rest of us.
We have to marked degree seemingly gone right off our pretty little heads in this ole country of ours. We have let the Spartans play a Trojan trick on us and so have lost control of the treasures that once were ours. We have let the corporate directorship, the countryless financial elite, take our rights as citizens. Our right to be the voice in the way that our country is to be run; our resources are to be consumed; and our wealth is to be distributed.
We have come to a pass where corporate control severely restrict the power of our political class through the corrupting influence of monied elections. Similarly this enormous financial clout has been let loose on our information mediums and the result is a cacophony of celebratory noise on matters which matter not and a profound silence on critical issues where there should be national dialogue. The result being that as a nation we can now no longer hear ourselves think.
Very little is left of the Canadian sovereignty we knew a mere 25 years ago and we have not yet had the wit to see it. In a very few years we will have allowed unfettered American access to render unsustainable the very resources that have made Canada a great country. Conventional oil and natural gas production have peaked in North America and every year from here on out to the zero point these extraordinarily useful molecules and kilojoules will only get more precious.
In 1972 a significant sector of the global political and intellectual elite publicly
recognized the necessity for command and control economic responses to the natural limits that define the reality of the natural order and we human’s place in it. The ideological counterattack to this view has been relentlessly effective and now instead of the sanity of preventive medicine we are left to the wilds of Darwinian capitalism as panacea for our manifest ills. This is madness. A collective delusion brought on by the absence of critical thought in our democratic institutions and by a fevered obsession with consumption, celebrity and sensationalism by our media.
We have allowed the brains of our democratic institutions to be washed clean of the most rudimentary defenses against the ravages of concentrated power. And almost the whole of our society is either amusing itself to death or in a lockstep compelled by debt and the fear of falling off the economic edge of the world. As a result there is next to no willingness to risk what it takes in order to help awaken us from our consensus trance. We have precious little of that most important of all resources, time, to turn Canadian society away from the American project for Empire. For too long we have through our unquestioning transfer of our resources south been a chief enabler of America’s martial might. A might that has been used to destroy a great many local independent development movements across the world. For far too long we have turned a blind eye to the depredations that America has wrought. It is past time that Canada stood with the consensus of the world, with the consensus of international law, with the consensus of those countries that have been ravaged by America’s misuse of its enormous wealth and power. It is past time that all of us stood against the still increasing flight of capital to the North from the South. Past time indeed.
If per chance the call of internationalism does not appeal to you; if you are pessimistic about what can be done for the world; something it is difficult to fault; then I say at the very least look to your own self-interest and reject the bi-national resource embrace that North America’s elites have locked we Canadians into. An embrace that must be ended before the possibility of sustainability has passed us by. Look to your own best interests and acquaint yourselves with the natural gas supply situation here in North America: http://www.cbc.ca/wildrosecountry/oil.html3
Read Chapter Six of NAFTA.
http://wehner.tamu.edu/MGMT.WWW/NAFTA
/spring99/Groups99/7/group7_1.htm#Energy
And reject the path of short-term maximum profit at the expense of all other futures; at the expense of life itself.
http://www.countercurrents.org/en-inbaraj181104.htm
For if Canadians do not attend to their own self-preservation and the preservation of the biological life and natural resources that make life worth living it is for sure that no one else will do it for them.
