For the next couple of days, members of the Conservative caucus will be meeting in Charlottetown to plot strategy for the fall session of parliament. What is really on their minds is how to win a majority of seats in the next election.
For Harper and Company, who have big plans to remake Canada as their kind of neo-conservative paradise, the last few months has been a frustrating time. On Afghanistan, the environment, aboriginal issues, child care, and fiscal arrangements with the Atlantic provinces, the government has rubbed Canadians the wrong way. According to the polls, Harper is further from his holy grail----a majority next time---than he was the day after winning power in the election of January 2006.
While the Conservatives plot strategy, those who want to ensure that there never is a Harper majority ought to be doing the same. This is a theme to which I plan to devote a lot of attention in coming months.
I am starting here by putting one broad proposition on the table. A key to beating Harper next time is to focus on the fact that the prime minister and his party are above all else, the mouthpiece of “Big Oil” in Canada. Yes, the Conservatives are militarists who want to shift Canada from peacekeeping to war making. And they want to block public daycare, shoot holes in medicare, lower taxes for the wealthy, and avoid the expense of an historic deal with the country’s First Nations. But more than all of that, the Harper Conservatives are there to act for Big Oil.
The Harper government is determined to:
• Prevent the adoption of environmental measures that would slow the rate of development of the Alberta oil sands. Without such measures, Canada will increase greenhouse gas emissions and compound its record as one of the world’s most flagrant polluters on a per capital basis.
• Keep the door wide open to rising exports of petroleum to the US, whatever the implications in the future for the security of energy supplies for Canadians.
• Work with provincial governments to stand in the way of the imposition of higher taxes and royalties on petroleum companies. Harper and the Conservatives want to maintain Canada’s status as the bargain basement place to do business in contrast to countries like Norway that collect serious revenues from the petroleum industry to plan for their future beyond oil. Oil patch reporters have been rubbing their hands with glee this year as profits soar. For instance, Petro-Canada, Imperial Oil Ltd. and Suncor Energy Inc. - earned $481-million from petroleum products in the first quarter of 2007, up from $285-million in the first three months of 2006.
• Oppose any proposals to bring the petroleum industry under public control or public ownership. As the global energy and environmental crises worsen, there are bound to be voices in Alberta and the other petroleum producing provinces for royalties that reflect the true value of the resource. And across Canada, there will be voices insisting that energy is too important to be left in the private sector and that it ought to be developed under provincial and federal public ownership, as public utilities.
What I can’t understand is why the major opposition parties, the New Democrats, Liberals, the Bloc, and yes the Greens, utterly fail to make the case that the Harper government is the voice of Big Oil. Here is an industry and a government that is worsening the environment and that is deepening the income divide between the rich and the rest of Canadians, and the opposition parties tip toe around the subject in timorous politeness. A little populism wouldn’t hurt.
For Harper and Company, who have big plans to remake Canada as their kind of neo-conservative paradise, the last few months has been a frustrating time. On Afghanistan, the environment, aboriginal issues, child care, and fiscal arrangements with the Atlantic provinces, the government has rubbed Canadians the wrong way. According to the polls, Harper is further from his holy grail----a majority next time---than he was the day after winning power in the election of January 2006.
While the Conservatives plot strategy, those who want to ensure that there never is a Harper majority ought to be doing the same. This is a theme to which I plan to devote a lot of attention in coming months.
I am starting here by putting one broad proposition on the table. A key to beating Harper next time is to focus on the fact that the prime minister and his party are above all else, the mouthpiece of “Big Oil” in Canada. Yes, the Conservatives are militarists who want to shift Canada from peacekeeping to war making. And they want to block public daycare, shoot holes in medicare, lower taxes for the wealthy, and avoid the expense of an historic deal with the country’s First Nations. But more than all of that, the Harper Conservatives are there to act for Big Oil.
The Harper government is determined to:
• Prevent the adoption of environmental measures that would slow the rate of development of the Alberta oil sands. Without such measures, Canada will increase greenhouse gas emissions and compound its record as one of the world’s most flagrant polluters on a per capital basis.
• Keep the door wide open to rising exports of petroleum to the US, whatever the implications in the future for the security of energy supplies for Canadians.
• Work with provincial governments to stand in the way of the imposition of higher taxes and royalties on petroleum companies. Harper and the Conservatives want to maintain Canada’s status as the bargain basement place to do business in contrast to countries like Norway that collect serious revenues from the petroleum industry to plan for their future beyond oil. Oil patch reporters have been rubbing their hands with glee this year as profits soar. For instance, Petro-Canada, Imperial Oil Ltd. and Suncor Energy Inc. - earned $481-million from petroleum products in the first quarter of 2007, up from $285-million in the first three months of 2006.
• Oppose any proposals to bring the petroleum industry under public control or public ownership. As the global energy and environmental crises worsen, there are bound to be voices in Alberta and the other petroleum producing provinces for royalties that reflect the true value of the resource. And across Canada, there will be voices insisting that energy is too important to be left in the private sector and that it ought to be developed under provincial and federal public ownership, as public utilities.
What I can’t understand is why the major opposition parties, the New Democrats, Liberals, the Bloc, and yes the Greens, utterly fail to make the case that the Harper government is the voice of Big Oil. Here is an industry and a government that is worsening the environment and that is deepening the income divide between the rich and the rest of Canadians, and the opposition parties tip toe around the subject in timorous politeness. A little populism wouldn’t hurt.
4 comments:
Maybe the reason the Fed Libs havent jumped on the oil bandwagon is that they were part of the "big oil" problem. Lets not forget that it was the Libs who created Petro-Canada by buying up the assets of Petro Fina, Gulf Oil, BP and Texaco with our tax dollars and then sold it off.
Gees, talk about confusion.
Why? The Harper regime today is the political expression of the most reactionary section of finance capital. The defeat of the Harper neo-cons would demand a national discussion on what next for the labour, farm and peace movements. It would compel all political parties including the NDP to reveal their full programs before the people.
Harper is not the same representative of the business elites like his predecessors - Trudeau, Martin or even Mulroney whom all had intimate knowledge of the labour movement and the significant role that it plays in national bourgeois politics.
Harper has been hand picked and groomed by big oil to serve the corporate interests of energy finance capital.
Harper has no interests in representing the capitalist class as whole. His only motive is to give precedence to those interests who profit from US sponsored wars. He considers those interests the most powerful financially and politically. This preference therefore represents and creates a destabilizing and anti-federalist dynamic that encourages and disunites the country making it more vulnerable to US penetration, domination and control of US capital.
Harper has deliberately and with calculating purpose led our country into militarism and war. The Harper-Hillier-O'Connor engineered war in Afghanistan is play to expand Canada's imperial position and open markets for Canadian capital in such places as Central and South America.
The longer the war in Afghanistan continues the greater the pressure and tendency from the right and the reactionary sections of oil-finance-war capital to suppress internal opposition, abrogating democratic rights embodied in the Charter, by pass parliament with new variants of corporate governance, more actively engage the use of police and domestic security forces acting under “temporary” security legislation. This will all be in an effort to first hide the dominant and leading role of big oil capital and their oligarchs and then secondly to compel workers to obedience and unquestioning subservience to the privileged positions of the new “Imperial Energy Superpower”. Profits and luxury will remain high. And for all those that bow to this subservience gracious rewards will be forth coming. And those that challenge it – the swiftest of punishments and censure will ensue.
Why, you ask? Because the national political parties will have to muster enough courage to confront the most powerful sections of the finance-war-oil capital elite. And I am just not too confident that “Happy Jack” will be able to do that.
You are right. Harper is sensitive to this question big oil. Just how sensitive? The attempt by Leon Benoit, Chair of the House of Commons on International Trade Committee prevented Gordon Laxer from speaking about the consequences of the Harper energy policy. What social democratic politician would challenge that?
The fact that Richard Caldwell took out a full page add in the Globe and Mail recently speaks to the fact that right is not united around Harper. Harper is vulnerable. But I disagree. The first question is the war in Afghanistan “linked” to the question of the oil sell-out. These are the two most fundamental questions facing Canadians today.
With all haste a national forum needs to be called by organized labour, peace activists and representatives from Lakeland, CPPA, and the Council of Canadians to discuss the need of a left pole around which are selected and mobilized constituent candidates best situated to defeat the running neo-con Tory.
DEFEAT HARPER!
NO TO THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME.
STOP THE SELLOUT OF CANADA’S ENERGY RESOURCES. NATIONALIZE ENERGY.
Perhaps the other political parties sense that many voters think as I do about issues like this one.
As much as I despise the two main parties for their collaboration with the imperialists on our southern border, I would have to oppose creating any more Crown Corporations to produce tiny quantities of third-rate results, or pseudo-independent entities such as the CRTC to meddle in our lives. In my opinion, these organisations waste wealth and what they do not waste they transfer from taxpayers to the individuals employed in them.
Surely the question is: how can Canada protect its legitimate interests without creating more useless bureaucracies in Ottawa? I would say that a partial answer to this question would be for all parties to resist the temptation to rush to do whatever the Americans demand of them and, need one say it, to get out of NAFTA.
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Is this possible?
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