Oil’s not well in Canada

When a nation cannot safeguard its citizens against freezing in the dark, nor control how much energy it exports, nor set the price at which citizens can buy back their own energy from foreign transnational corporations, it is not an energy superpower, it is an energy satellite.

“A colony or satellite is a people who lose control of their resources to a foreign power,” according to Gordon Laxer, political economist and director of the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute. “Canada is prohibited from using its oil to supply half its citizens during international shortages. No other country is forbidden from using domestic resources to provide for its own citizens.”


As citizens of a democracy, Canadians naturally expect their own government to put them first in any and all emergencies. “What are governments for if they’re not going to do that?” Laxer wonders. “I think the Canadian government wants to focus on American energy security, not Canadian, because they see their interests not as protecting Canadians, (but) as being consonant with the corporate interest…”

Oil shortage emergencies are coming. The International Energy Agency’s 2008 report states the era of Peak Oil is imminent. Once the current economic crisis is over, the world will begin experiencing a unending and worsening series of oil supply shocks.

Canada, alone among major industrialized countries, has stripped itself of its energy sovereignty and now faces a succession of severe crises.

Canada has no Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). It exports 65 per cent of its oil and 59 per cent of its natural gas to the U.S. In 2007, it imported 50 per cent of its oil refinery needs, including a small amount of refined oil, from the U.S. Most of those imports come from unstable Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) nations such as Iraq and Algeria.

Canada’s pipelines do not serve about 40 per cent of Canadians — 92 per cent of Quebec’s oil is imported, as is 75 per cent of Atlantic Canada’s and 36 per cent of Ontario’s. The Sarnia-to-Montreal pipeline built by the Trudeau government to carry western oil east was reversed in 1999 and now carries imported oil west. There are plans to reverse its flow again, shipping Alberta oil, not to eastern Canada, but most of it on to Portland, Me., for tanker shipment to Gulf Coast refineries.

Canada has deliberately chosen not to put the essential interests of its own people above the interests of the U.S.

Winnipeg Free Press