Monday, January 9, 2012

Being Canadian: hewers of wood, drawers of water, pumpers of oil sludge

That's quite a spin the Harperites are putting on this pipeline scam.

In the first place we're trying to help our very best friends in the world to wean themselves off that middle-east terror-petroleum. We want to build the XL pipeline to the Gulf coast so that their refineries can add value to our oil sand sludge.

Rebuffed, we come up with plan B to wean ourselves off our dependence on our very best friends. The Northern Gateway pipeline will deliver our oil sand sludge to the west coast for delivery to refineries in Korea and China and Japan.

In both cases a mysterious cabal of tree-huggers, movie stars, and socialist billionaires conspires against the Harper plan to create millions of Canadian jobs by exporting a raw material for processing elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the multi-national construction and energy conglomerates are lobbying hard for the right to import tens of thousands of foreign workers to facilitate expansion of the oil sands, because without massive expansion there'll be nothing to put in those new pipelines.

The same politicians who claim this is all about Canadian jobs are doing next to nothing to train Canadian workers to take these jobs. Nor are they doing anything to develop the processing infrastructure that would keep downstream jobs in-country.

The oil sands themselves are owned by the usual multi-national energy giants based in Holland, Britain, France, Norway, China, and of course the USA.

But we're to believe that the anti-pipeline protesters are somehow a threat to Canadian sovereignty?

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