Beyond the Bubble Lecture Part I

Harper Government Strategy on Torture: Talk out the Clock

Richard Colvin: "According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured…We kept hopeless records, and apparently to prevent any scrutiny, the Canadian Forces leadership concealed all this behind walls of secrecy….Instead of winning hearts and minds, we caused Kandaharis to fear the foreigners…Canada's detainee practices in my view alienated us from the population and strengthened the insurgency." Testifying before the House of Commons Special Committee, November 18.

Peter MacKay: “Clearly the reality is there is no credible evidence, none, zero, to suggest that a Taliban prisoner transferred from Canadian Forces was ever abused.” Question Period, November 19.

John Baird: “I should remind members opposite that there has never been a single, solitary proven allegation involving a transferred Taliban prisoner.” Question Period, November 20.

Peter MacKay: “There has never been a single, solitary proven allegation of abuse of a detainee, a Taliban prisoner, transferred by Canadian Forces.” Question Period, December 2.

General Walter Natynczyk, Chief of Defence Staff: “I want to correct my statement made to the [Special Committee] yesterday…The individual who was beaten by the Afghan police was in fact in Canadian custody [on June 14, 2006]…” Press Conference at National Defence Headquarters, December 9.

Section Commander’s Report from Afghanistan, quoted by General Natynczyk: “We then photographed the individual prior to handing him over to ensure that if the Afghan national police did assault him as it happened in the past, that we would have a visual record of his condition.” Field Report, June 14, 2006.

Stephen Harper: "It's the opposition who is accusing our soldiers of committing war crimes -- not this government…this government has defended, in all cases, our Canadian soldiers' actions." In French in Question Period, December 9.

The record is clear. The ground on which the Minister of National Defence, Peter MacKay, was standing when he said there was “no evidence” to substantiate the testimony of ex-diplomat and intelligence officer Richard Colvin has been pulled out from under him.

Prior to the bombshell dropped on the government by General Natynczyk, MacKay had gone as far as to say on CTV’s Power Play on November 19 that Colvin’s accusations were based on information which may have been propagated by Taliban sources. In other words, Colvin was likely a Taliban dupe.

This is the hallmark of the Harper government. When its members are pushed into a tight corner, they lash out at critics and political opponents, labeling them unpatriotic cretins who prefer the Taliban to Canada’s brave soldiers. Meanwhile, they alone---the Conservatives---walk the lonely path of virtue, serving the nation in a difficult hour.

Even when they have been exposed as incompetents or liars engaged in a deliberate cover-up, the members of this government concede nothing. As far as they are concerned, there will be no independent inquiry into the detainee scandal.

Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay are cynically talking out the clock. The House of Commons is about to rise for the Christmas recess and will not sit again until the end of January. By that time, they hope, Canadians will have moved on to other concerns.

Watching Peter MacKay in Question Period and delivering testimony to the parliamentary committee has been instructive. He repeats the same answer over and over, stressing the virtue of our soldiers and the perfidy of the opposition parties. In the parliamentary committee, his opening statement went on so long that, aided by a couple of breaks for votes in the House, he only had to face a few questions from the committee members. In answering those questions, he typically returned to square one, describing the mission and its purposes, and saying next to nothing about the issues raised. Later, of course, the Conservatives will insist that they were compliant in cooperating with the committee, yet another reason why no special inquiry is needed.

The government is making the assumption that Canadians are too befuddled to follow the details of all of this. Harper and his colleagues believe that if they hunker down and stick to their line, nothing will harm them. They cynically believe that torture in Afghanistan is an issue that only concerns a few pointy-heads, not the majority of double-double drinking Canadians.

And then one fine day with another election, and a majority, the Conservatives won’t ever have to listen to the nobodies on the other side of the aisle in the irrelevant “talking shop” that is Parliament.

Obama’s Goldilocks Plan for Afghanistan

Barack Obama got mired in Afghanistan during his campaign for the presidency in 2008. To fend off attacks on him from Hillary Clinton and John McCain that depicted him as a geo-strategic lightweight, Obama talked tough about Afghanistan. To lend credence to his criticism of the U.S. conflict in Iraq, Obama said the war the Americans really had to win was in Afghanistan. To show how unflinching he could be, Obama said he would be prepared to launch attacks on Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, along the Afghan border, even if the government of Pakistan withheld permission for this.

Now, following two months of lengthy consultations with his national security advisers in the Situation Room, the president has come up with his plan to handle the so-called “forgotten” war.

With West Point as his backdrop--- the academy from which such legendary figures as Robert E. Lee and Dwight D. Eisenhower graduated---Obama announced what is being depicted as an “extended surge” which will see an additional 30,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan. By the end of May 2010, the American force in that country will total nearly 100,000.

The goal of the surge is to downgrade the Taliban insurgency to the point where a trained and expanded Afghan military can handle the job. By July 2011, Obama pledged, the United States will begin to pull its troops out of Afghanistan.

While the president did not claim that the fight was to transform the Kabul regime into a democracy, he did lay down some performance targets, in the areas of good governance and the fight to rid the country of corruption, that he says that Afghan President Hamid Karzai must meet.

What leaps out of Obama’s speech is that this is not so much a plan to achieve victory in Afghanistan as a scheme to ensure the political health of the U.S. president. It is a Goldilocks plan, not too hot, not too cold, not too big, not too small.

While the planned surge is not as massive as General Stanley A. McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, wanted it to be, it is big enough to fend off Republican critics who are all-too-ready to accuse Obama of endangering American security by risking defeat in Afghanistan. By holding the line at 30,000 troops---additional cost, thirty billion dollars a year instead of forty billion if McChrystal had had his way---Obama shows that he’s concerned about keeping Washington’s deficit manageable. By announcing a firm date for the beginning of the troop withdrawal, the president is trying to placate Democrats who believe that the war is unwinnable, that America has had enough of war, and the government should spend to combat poverty and homelessness in the United States, instead of wasting money and lives on a forlorn crusade in Central Asia.

The more you look at Obama’s plan, the more evident it is that the White House strategy is designed to suit the American political agenda at home, not the geo-strategic realities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The surge should have its maximum effect by the summer of 2010, just in time to hold off the Republicans in the midterm elections in the autumn of that year. The withdrawal of troops is to begin in July 2011, perfect timing as Obama seeks the re-nomination of his party and the ardent support of Democrats for the presidential election of 2012.

Does anyone in Obama’s inner circle actually believe that the plan will transform Afghanistan into a country that lives under the rule of law, with an effective non-corrupt central government, and a regime that respects the rights of women? Do any of them expect the Afghan army to become an effective fighting force? Probably not.

This porridge is being served up for the American people, not for the people of Afghanistan. Canadians, who have seen their soldiers suffer the highest casualties, per capita, of any NATO country in this war, should avoid this delicacy, and any temptation to continue our mission beyond 2011.

Under Harper: Canada Will Remain a Global Environmental Pariah

As long as Stephen Harper’s government holds the reigns of power, Canada will remain a global environmental pariah.

The reasons why this is so are not hard to find, but they are seldom analyzed in public discourse on the issue.

To the extent that the Harper government has an economic strategy, beyond letting the marketplace take the country where it will, it is to make Canada an “energy superpower.” That goal, in turn, rests almost entirely on the massive development of the Alberta oil sands to extract oil for export to the United States. Finally, under the terms of NAFTA, the more oil Canada exports to the United States, the more oil it will be required to export in the future. Large scale oil sands development is incompatible with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. Indeed, Canada is en route to passing the United States as an emitter of greenhouse gases on a per capita basis.

Let’s examine each of the links in this chain of inter-connected realities.

With its close ties to the multinational and national petroleum companies operating in Alberta, the Harper government is dedicated to the proposition that Canada should be a secure base for rising petroleum exports to the United States, in short an “energy superpower.”

Indeed, over the past couple of decades, the American reliance on Canadian oil has grown steadily larger. In July 2006, at 1.6 million barrels a day, Canada was the largest single exporter of crude oil to the United States. Rounding out the top five exporters to the U.S. were Mexico with just over 1.5 million barrels daily, Saudi Arabia at over 1.2 million barrels, Venezuela with nearly 1.2 million barrels, and Nigeria with just over 1.0 million barrels. These five countries were the source of sixty-six per cent of American oil imports. What these totals make clear is the high dependence of the United States on Canada and other Western Hemisphere sources of oil and its relatively low reliance on Middle Eastern sources.

The Harper government’s vision of Canada as a major world petroleum exporter is based on the Alberta oil sands. As oil, national security and the war on terror have become tightly aligned in the thinking of American political leaders, Canada’s largest petroleum deposit, the oil sands, has been ever more closely scrutinized from Washington. Located across an enormous region of north-eastern Alberta---in three major areas spread over 140,800 square kilometers, an area larger than the state of Florida---centred on Fort McMurray about three hundred kilometers north of Edmonton---the oil sands contains almost as much oil as the conventional reserves of Saudi Arabia.

In the early years of this century, oil sands investments totaled nearly $200 billion. By the spring of 2008, oil sands production reached 1.3 million barrels a day, more than half of Canada’s oil production. Ten per cent of North American crude oil production already comes from the oil sands. Incredible as it may seem, the Alberta government produced one scenario that concluded that by 2050, the oil sands could produce eight million barrels of oil a day, transforming Alberta into a North American Saudi Arabia.

The vision of Canada as a vast supplier of petroleum from the oil sands for a thirsty United States is one that promotes dreams of enormous profits in the minds the executives of the petroleum companies and the investors in those companies.

But it is a truly dark vision for the simple reason that the industrial process by which oil is produced from the oil sands results in the release of an enormous volume of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Pursuing the vision commits Alberta, indeed Canada as a whole, to the emission of greenhouse gases on a gargantuan scale, exactly what the earth does not now need. Not only is the production of oil sands oil very expensive, it involves strip mining on a vast scale and the reduction of huge tracts of land to a scarred horror. The production of oil from the oil sands requires enormous inputs of fresh water and natural gas.

The oil sands has become by far the biggest source of greenhouse emissions in Canada. It is no exaggeration to say that without a steep reduction in the production of synthetic crude oil from the oil sands, all other programs in Canada to reduce emissions will be fruitless. Oil sands development has directly shaped the environmental policies of the Harper government.

Let’s look further into this matter of greenhouse gas emissions. The way to do this meaningfully in the lead up to the Copenhagen climate change conference is to tally the metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per country per capita per year. Then we can examine the total emissions of key countries.

Using 2006 figures, the per capita CO2 emissions of the United States were 19.78 metric tons, Canada 18.81, and Australia 20.58. These were the top emitters per capita among the major advanced countries. Further down the list were other major industrialized countries: Japan, 9.78; Germany, 10.40; U.K., 9.66; Italy, 8.05; and France, 6.60. Then we come to the major developing countries: China, 4.58; India, 1.16; Mexico, 4.05; and Brazil, 2.01.

Here are the total emissions of these countries for 2006 in millions of metric tons of CO2: China, 6017.69; United States, 5902.75; India, 1293.17; Japan, 1246.76; Germany, 857.60; Canada, 614.33; United Kingdom, 585.71; Italy, 468.19; Mexico, 435.60; France, 417.75; Australia, 417.06; and Brazil, 377.24.

When we break out the Canadian per capita emissions further, we find that between them Alberta and Saskatchewan (with Saskatchewan higher than Alberta) come in at a staggering 70. The rest of Canada scored 16.

What the figures tell us is that on a per capita basis, developed countries are much more serious emitters of greenhouse gases than are developing countries and that includes the two giants China and India. On the other hand, because of their gigantic populations, China and India are enormous emitters of CO2, respectively ranking number one and number four among the countries of the world.

The nub of the problem is that the developed countries established their high living standards by polluting, on a per capita basis, much more wantonly than the rest of the world. Developing countries are not prepared to allow developed countries to acquire a “grandfather” clause in climate change agreements that would allow them to go on polluting much more per capita than anyone else.

Developed countries, the United States in particular, is determined to be allowed to go on spewing out CO2 emissions, per capita, at a vastly higher rate than China, India or Brazil. The Europeans, who pollute less, are less committed to their right to pollute because they got there first, but they too pollute, per capita much more than China or India.

The Harper government is the worst of the bunch. Our government is determined to insert a rising rate of CO2 emissions right into the heart of our economic strategy. Right now, Canada’s per capita emissions of CO2 are close to five times as high as those of China. The emissions of Alberta and Saskatchewan are fifteen times as high as China’s on a per capita basis.

Any government committed to increasing the production of oil from the oil sands, precisely the position of the Harper government, is dedicated to the proposition that Canada should have the right for decades to come to pollute far more per capita than other countries. On this agenda, Canada will certainly pass the United States, per capita, in greenhouse gas emissions and will likely overtake Australia. Admittedly, it will be as a supplier of dirty oil to the United States that Canada will make itself a “pollution superpower”.

The members of the Harper government did not arrive at their environmental policy, relying on so-called intensity targets, which allow oil sands production to keep on rising as long as emissions-per-barrel go down, for nothing. They did it for the oldest of political reasons. As a government, they are serving the interests of oil companies that have tens of billions of dollars in future profits at stake. It’s as simple as that.

Finally, there’s the matter of NAFTA. Under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada has to continue exporting as much petroleum to the United States as it has been exporting on a rolling average of the previous three years. This means, among other things, that Canada would be required to continue its exports of petroleum to the U.S. even if imports of petroleum to eastern Canada from overseas were cut off as a consequence of a supply crisis generated by falling supplies or a geo-political conflict. This stipulation means that Canada has to make the supplying of the American petroleum market a higher priority than meeting the requirements of Canadian markets experiencing a shortage.

If, as the Harper government fervently wishes, the expansion of oil sands projects dramatically increases Canadian petroleum production, the country’s commitment to export more petroleum to the United States will rise in lock step. The whole point of more oil sands operations is to meet the oil requirements of the U.S.

The plain fact is that when you combine the Harper government’s economic strategy with the stipulations of NAFTA, this country is being locked into rising, not falling, CO2 emissions. Anyone who wants to change the course Canada is on with respect to climate change needs to come to terms with these hard realities. Anything else is nothing more than hot air.

Stephen Harper is going to Copenhagen because the presidents of the United States and China are going. He will be there to try to prevent a binding agreement on greenhouse gas emissions from being achieved. As long as he remains in power, Canada will be a global pariah on the issue of climate change.

Harper and MacKay Have a Wicked Sense of Humour

Sometimes Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Defence Minister Peter MacKay are given insufficient credit for their wry sense of humour. The serious, literal-minded members of the opposition need to lighten up.

Yesterday, three Canadian generals testified before the parliamentary committee that is hearing testimony on the allegations that detainees handed over to the Afghans by Canadian soldiers were tortured and that the top soldiers and government ministers failed to heed the warnings coming to them from diplomat Richard Colvin in 2006-2007.

The soldiers---Major General, See No Evil, Lieutenant General, Hear No Evil, and General General Speak No Evil---seemed genuinely mystified at what Colvin said in his testimony last week. The generals didn’t get Colvin’s message at the time, they told the committee. In fact, Colvin didn’t even use the word “torture”, Lieutenant General Hear No Evil insisted.

Two of the generals are now retired, but that didn’t stop them from being allowed to read Colvin’s missives so they could prepare for their testimony.

Meanwhile, Colvin is being blocked by the government from releasing those missives so that we can all learn what he said in them. And the government won’t let the members of the parliamentary committee read them either.

In a perfectly realized military operation, the generals aimed their heavy fire power at Colvin, but no one on the other side could shoot back.

That’s because in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister and the Minister of National Defence were carrying out their own maneuver---denying the MPs the Colvin documents, while insisting that the opposition was trying to block those on the anti-Colvin side from testifying.

Peter MacKay plays a great straight man to Harper’s straight man. Droll. So much wit and leger de main that the plodding opposition members don’t stand a chance.