Big sacrifices are for others, not for us. We look sincere at workshops on carbon sequestration and agree to technology transfers to underprivileged countries (business is business) while ramping up the nukes and extraction industries and shrewdly picking our bedmates (China, India, the US). On global warming, international accords with teeth, and mandating green innovation, Canada is an opt-out nation: like the US, it will make small concessions but be bound by little, if anything.
The melting of the Greenland ice sheet will flood low-lying islands and may force St. John’s and Halifax to erect sea walls. These are unfortunate but manageable results. Abrupt climate change remains a good thing, thinks Harper, and if leading scientists say we have just ten years before more powerful hurricanes lay waste to islands and peninsulas, earthquakes demolish homelands, and the world’s biosphere starts to take an annual pounding, then our response must be to build fortresses, invest in private security, and bring it on. Canadians will be warmer, Florida submerged, and snowbirds will stay home and spend. As the Gulf Stream weakens and slows due to increased meltwater, Europe will go cold, and the purse dogs of Paris, their teeth clattering, will stop yapping. Pity about Britain, but when you are remaking history some friends get left behind. (Besides, once noble and treacherous, Britain has committed itself to wind power off its coasts — a clear sign that it has blinked, become fey, that there is weakness within.)
With our tar sands, natural gas, and stockpiles of uranium; with our bounty, our dreams, and our buyer — the US, infinite in appetite, with a rapidly growing population, and with investment dollars desperate for an energy home nearby — Canada has made a decision: to rebuff those pesky Europeans, and to provide energy security to the US. Continentalism, finally, under the US umbrella, where Canada will thrive — the UN and its attempts at world government be damned.
Harper sent John Baird and select minions (including executives from favourable corporations) to Bali to dance a jig of convenience with straw men (India, China, Brazil, et al.) and marriage partners (the US and Japan). Had he instead recognized the genuine concerns of developing nations and seized the opportunity to isolate the US, Kyoto II might have a road map with signposts and direction. Even perennial bad boy Australia, with its new Labour government, was onside, leaving only the US, Japan (with its US-tailored constitution), and Canada as outliers. Out of self-interest, we provided protective cover for a vulnerable and reviled US based on the crudest calculus: Canada provides; the US buys. One North America, united against the world, was and is Canada’s unstated position.
Under Harper, Canada is hardly naive, as has been suggested. Rather, it has graduated to the realm of realpolitik, and is now clever in a way few Canadians recognize — truly Machiavellian. With our international reputation as a green society shattered, we have become a nasty brute of a country, and Harper is proud of it. Bully for us. Canada, the middle power negotiating between Goliaths? The global diplomat? Hardly. Canada is smug at home and a global saboteur.
As the Bali dance neared its conclusion, former US vice-president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore lectured his homeland for killing the process, an “inconvenient truth,” he declared (and shilled). The time is nigh, Gore argued, but have faith: by 2009, the US under the Democrats will play ball with the world. It was a cri de coeur, forgotten by the next evening as UN climate chief Yvo de Boer fled the stage in tears from the stress of it all.
It’s easy to imagine the ensuing conversation. In the shadows of a hotel lobby, the Canadian delegation approached the American: “Just tell George that we’ve got his back, that our line is ‘aspirational targets by 2050,’ that we are one. The UN is finished. Looking forward to the US-sponsored talks. Your road map should be a country highway leading through our spare wilderness to oil and gas in the high Arctic. Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay may be a natural gas motherlode, but our tar sands are infinite. Mackenzie is on, and soon the pipelines will flow. As Russia has its own designs on the North, we might need some of your gunboats.”
On December 19, 2007, a resplendent George Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act into law. Among other tiny steps, it calls for greater automobile fuel efficiency by 2020. His administration looking less inept, less cartoonish, dangerous again, this was Bush’s nod to Bali, a final jig before retiring to his ranch in Texas. He couldn’t have done it without Canada. It was ordained.
