Three PhDs and me
It's a little bit intimidating being part of a panel like the one in the video below. The other two panelists were PhDs, and so was the moderator. The closest I come to a PhD is "pile it higher and deeper"!
But what I lacked in smarts I made up for with enthusiasm, as I like to say.
I learned a lot from the others, and in fact it changed my thinking about Chinese investment in our oilsands. I see them now not only as a source of money for our industry and our country, but as a political counterweight to the bullying coming our way from the Obama administration. That is, if China had a large (say, $50 billion or $100 billion) stake in the oilsands, I bet we'd see a lot fewer jabs at us from the White House.
That's my joke about the benefits of "Unethical Oil".
But there would be another advantage to having Chinese investment in Canada's oilsands: it would expose that country's corrupt, human rights-abusing companies to western-style scrutiny and accountability. What I mean is, right now, companies like PetroChina (publicly traded but majority owned by the Communist government) is pretty much accountability-free in the countries where they operate. If they were on the ground in Canada, that would open them up to regulatory and statutory accountability that has never been shone on them before. I call it the "reverse Talisman". Talisman was the only liberal company in Sudan, and it got run out of there because of it.
Well, if Chinese companies were in Alberta, we'd "infect" them with our liberal values.
Now, Greenpeace wouldn't do that, of course. Because Greenpeace is in China's pocket. Greenpeace doesn't criticize China, because if it did, it would be kicked out of China, and a fast-growing source of donations would be cut off to it, and money is the real green in Greenpeace. But the rest of us would hold Chinese companies to account, while Greenpeace kept breaking into the Calgary Tower.
Here's the video:
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