256) Day 24 -- Reason #24 to revolt against Predatory Capitalism

There’s a near-universal belief out there, held by so much of the public, repeated by so many of our politicians, and despite warnings from both environmentalists and economists for like, 30 years or so, these beliefs persist.

Which is that Canada’s oil patch is the heartbeat of our country.  And coupled with this, America is our biggest ally.  Together, Oil + America will keep Canada on the path to prosperity.

Based on these beliefs, a few decades ago and especially under Stephen Harper, Canadians doubled-down, tripled-down, quadrupled-down on handcuffing our country to the oil industry.  We invested BILLIONS of dollars, every year, tax dollars, dollars that came out of your pocket, and GAVE IT in subsidies to the oil industry.  

Why?  “Long term investment”, basically.  Believing that the oil industry was the economic engine of our country, we wanted to soup-up that engine as much as we could.

There were of course, important pockets of resistance.  On the front lines of that have been Indigenous people, who fought the construction of pipelines across their lands, and who heroically fought to protect Mother Earth, putting their communities and their bodies, on the line, being arrested, being lambasted by so much unsupportive media, and sadly, being ignored far-too-often by most Canadians.  

Then there were the environmentalists and (some) economists who worried about climate change, and/or who worried about long-term pollution, cancer, etc., and/or worried about “stranded assets” as the world shifted AWAY from fossil fuels in favour of Green energy.  Because gee, that would suck, eh?  If we made oil an increasingly central part of our economy, if we gave foreign interests even more control over our economy for short-term profits, and if we spent taxpayer dollars shoring up Big Oil in the hopes it would pay off in the long term, yeah, it would really suck if all that turned out not to give us the big pay-off we were promised.  

But, onwards we forged.  Especially under Stephen Harper, a topic we will cover in at least two upcoming essays.  

Instead of a “just transition”, in which Canada, over time, shepherded Green energy projects into existence, gave the work force time to train in new skills, gave entrepreneurs time to create new businesses and scale up production in Green energy technologies, Canada (and especially Ontario and Alberta), did everything we could to crush the Green energy transition, and keep on paying into the Big Oil promise.  

People like Doug Ford even made it a central part of his administration, spending untold millions of taxpayer dollars to cancel Green energy projects that were already underway, literally ripping out infrastructure that had already been built, and creating policies that would, in effect, de-fund Green energy innovation in favour of good ol’ fossil fuel companies.  

Right-wing media mouthpieces like Ontario Proud, Canada Proud, etc., who are FUNDED by the oil industry, and news outlets like the National Post (which is 66% OWNED by an American company with deep roots in the Republican Party, i.e., Chatham Asset Management, who bought it from a previous American company, Golden Tree Asset Management), flooded Canadian social media and news organizations with highly biased, poorly fact-checked drivel about how silly Green energy is, and how we need instead to double, triple and quadruple-down on Big Oil.  And people believed them. 

If you missed the implications of the previous paragraph, please re-read it. Much of “Canadian” news, especially pro-Conservative news, is OWNED by either the oil industry or American companies promoting Republican Party interests. So, what many Canadians believe, is fed to them by foreign agents who do not have Canada’s best interests in mind. But our Conservative politicians parrot these same views, and because people “saw it on the news”, they believe them. We have let foreign interests determine the outcome of our own elections, and sway the Canadian population to vote, literally, against Canada.

(No wonder Conservative politicians, always, always, always, including Pierre Poilievre, make such a big deal out of wanting to de-fund and “cancel” the CBC. It’s because they are literally working for American and other foreign interests. It takes about 2 minutes to figure this out, if you just google the various news organizations that YOU get your news from, and look at who owns them.)

Many people I know STILL forward and re-post absolute corporate propaganda by these agencies, and others.  It’s like the lessons we learned in high school, about media literacy and critical thinking, we just threw out in the trash upon receiving our diplomas.  Which is so sad.  Our teachers deserved a better legacy than this.

Coupled with this oil obsession, we also trusted our neighbour to the South.  Figuring that the United States would always be our ally, always be a stable market for our oil and gas, we built our pipelines in zig-zags across the border.  Because it was cheaper.  Simple as that.  

And gee, what could go wrong?  Building the most critical energy infrastructure of your country on another country’s soil, trusting them to honour the contracts and international trade agreements and such, for all time, no matter who got into power….what could go wrong?

Enter, Donald Trump.

Now, as Canada faces a tariff war, and is being literally THREATENED to become the 51st state, our single-biggest “weapon”, now that we have to think of Canada-US relations this way, is our energy sector.  We supply about 60% of the US’ oil and gas.  And it goes through our pipelines.

If we decide to play tit-for-tat against the US, and pull back our energy supplies, they can royally fuck us over.  Why?  Because our INTERNAL, i.e., province-to-province, transportation of oil to our own refineries and facilities across the country depends, in large part, on pipelines that run through the United States.

Yes, that’s right.  The genius of the Big Oil proponents has made us dependent on the goodwill of the country that is literally now THREATENING TO ANNEX US SO THAT WE BECOME AN AMERICAN STATE, using economic extortion to twist our arms until we capitulate.

And if we use our single-biggest weapon against them, economically speaking, we starve our own provinces of the oil that our oil-dependent country needs to function.

This, in a nutshell, is one of the biggest problems of Predatory Capitalism.  It promises the world. But it delivers a prison.  

And now we’re in that prison, thanks to decades of voters ignoring the expert warnings about exactly that, and instead trusting politicians who are owned by the oil industry.  And yes, all three of the biggest political parties in Canada are to blame for this.  But one is indisputably to blame more than the others, FORCING us to increase our dependence on oil, FORCING us to neglect to develop a diverse energy sector, FORCING us to be bombarded with anti-science, anti-expert propaganda, and FORCING us to make our country more fragile and vulnerable.

Remember this, in the next election.  Because we have to stop making the mistakes we keep making.  Or we may not even be an independent nation, much longer.  

If you want to know more about this, here’s a very short primer.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-oil-pipelines-trump-tariffs-1.7438889