December 2010 Archives

Earlier this month I was invited to testify before the House of Commons standing committee on natural resources.

Here's a link to the official transcript of that meeting.

I thought it was pretty pitiful that the only question that the opposition had for me wasn't actually for me -- it was to complain to the chairman that my testimony was being televised, because too many people would hear it. Lame. Agree with me, disagree with me, ask me straight questions, ask me curveballs, or just ignore me -- that's all fine. But to complain that too many other people might hear my ideas? Nathan Cullen, the NDP MP who made that whiny intervention, is a censorious loser. I mean, seriously, is that the best he could do?

Here's what I said -- what Nathan Cullen didn't want you to hear:

One day we might discover a fuel source with no environmental side effects that's affordable and practical; but until that day comes, we need oil. It's not just for us, but for the United States, to whom we sell 1.4 million barrels of oil sands oil every day.

Last year, for the first time, more cars were sold in China than in the U.S., and they all want to be two-car families too. The same goes for India and the rest of the developing world.

So the choice isn't oil sands oil versus some fantasy fuel of the future. It's oil sands oil versus the oil that comes from other places, mainly OPEC countries. I don't know what God was thinking when he was handing out oil, but he gave it to all the world's bastards—Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria. Out of the top ten countries ranked by oil reserves, Canada is the only western liberal democracy on the list.

That doesn't matter if all you care about is driving your car; it all burns the same. But what about the ethics of oil?In my book Ethical Oil—which I'd be happy to give everyone a copy of afterwards, courtesy of my publisher—I suggest four liberal values by which we should judge the morality of a barrel of oil: respect for the environment; peace; fair wages for workers; and human rights. I compare oil sands oil with OPEC oil using these four measures. I come to the conclusion that oil sands oil is the fair trade coffee of the world's oil industry.

Take the environment. Greenpeace propaganda pictures make the oil sands look like something out of the Land of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. But in only 2% of the area, where there is 20% of the resource, is the oil close enough to the surface for it to be mined that way. The rest of it has to be obtained underground, or in situ, with methods that don't tear up the surface. They don't use any river water, and even the 2% that's mined has to be reclaimed afterwards. Already more than 60 square kilometres have been. Compare that with the 2,000 unremediated toxic oil spills in Nigeria that will never be cleaned up.

Then there's carbon dioxide. Using the Obama administration's well-to-wheels analysis, oil from the oil sands has the same carbon footprint as oil from Nigeria or Iraq, because the latter waste so much natural gas. But we have a lower carbon footprint than U.S. imports from Venezuela, and much less carbon than oil from Nancy Pelosi's own state, which is actually called “California heavy” for a reason.

So if you're concerned about carbon emissions, shouldn't we replace higher carbon oil from Venezuela and California with our lower carbon oil from the oil sands? Since 1990, the carbon footprint of the average barrel of oil from the oil sands has fallen by 38%. I can hardly wait to see where it's going to be ten years from now.

But the environment is not the only measure of ethics. What about peace?

Canada invented peacekeeping. Saudi Arabia invented 9/11. Iran is using its oil profits to build a nuclear bomb. Sudan uses its oil profits to buy weapons to prosecute the genocide in Darfur. If you multiply 300,000 murders in Darfur by 185 ounces of blood per human body, and you divide it into the number of barrels of oil exported by Sudan over the same period of time, it works out to 6.5 millilitres of blood in every damn barrel. That would fill a lipstick tube.

What about fair wages, though? Fort McMurray is Canada's wealthiest city—and the most generous, according to the United Way. The working poor there, the lowest quartile, have 77% more purchasing power than in other cities, like Edmonton. Compare that to Saudi Arabia, which uses poorly paid migrant labourers who have no civil rights; or Nigeria, where over $300 billion has been stolen by dictators from bureaucrats, leaving the country one of the poorest on earth.

Then there are human rights. The mayor of Fort McMurray is a young woman named Melissa Blake. How many women mayors are there in Saudi Arabia? There are none. It's against the law. In Iran, women are stoned to death if they're accused of adultery. Ahmadinejad says there are no gays in Iran, and you know, he's not lying, because when he finds them he kills them.

Then there's the fact that the oil sands are Canada's largest employer of aboriginal people, not only providing 2,000 direct jobs but also billions of dollars to aboriginal-owned businesses.

If you don't care about morality, then buy oil from Iran or Sudan. It's just as good as Canadian oil. But if you believe in making the world a better place, then the moral imperative is to replace unethical OPEC oil with Canadian green oil, conflict-free oil, fair wage oil, human rights oil.

The leader of the opposition says it's important to increase trade with China and India. I agree. Right now those countries are forced to buy terrorist oil, dictatorship oil, Darfur oil, because we only let Americans buy our oil right now. I love our American neighbours, but it's dangerous to have just one customer for our product. We're at the mercy of protectionism and taxes, and sometimes we're taken for granted. That's why the pipeline to the west coast makes so much strategic sense. It makes us an independent country with options.

I find it very irritating that so many of the anti-oil-sands activists are taking their funding from U.S. lobby groups like the Tides Foundation. Of course it's in America's interests that no other customers are able to buy our Canadian oil, but it's in Canada's interests that we are able to sell it to whomever we choose, and if you care about industrial ethics, it's in the world's interests too.

A lot of people are watching how Canada is handling the oil sands—not just Canadians, the American ambassador is watching too. He hopes the pipelines shut down so he can have the oil all to himself. The Saudi ambassador is watching too. Maybe they're watching together, I don't know. He also hopes the pipeline is killed, so he doesn't lose any market share in Asia, the way he's lost in the United States. But for those who love Canada, expanding the oil sands is the right thing for our country and for those who think globally and act locally, because every barrel of oil sands oil we can sell to Asia or the United States is one less barrel sold by the world's terrorists and dictators.

Thank you.

Here are some of the questions I was asked by the Conservative MPs on the committee: 

Mr. David Anderson:

    Mr. Levant, in your book, do you deal with the issue of cancer rates? 

Mr. Ezra Levant:

    Yes, I do.

 

    John O'Connor was the doctor, from Nova Scotia originally, who rang the alarm bell really hard. He said there were six cases of this rare bile duct cancer called cholangiocarcinoma. The funny thing is as soon as he went to the media about that and Alberta Health said let's get to the bottom of this and the Alberta Cancer Board asked for his patient charts, he refused, which was startling. The chief nurse said they had to give those cancer reports; it's required by law. He stonewalled. So the College of Physicians and Surgeons launched an ethics investigation. These weren't politicians or bureaucrats. These were his fellow doctors.

 

    Dr. O'Connor had been talking about skyrocketing cancer cases, six rare cancer cases, a 33-year-old dying of cancer. He told this story for two years. Finally, when the ethics report from the College of Physicians and Surgeons came out, they ruled he was inaccurate, that he had reported cases that did not exist: four out of these six cholangiocarcinomas did not exist. No one could find a trace of the 33-year-old who allegedly died of cancer. Instead of punishing the doctor, the college said they would put out a factual statement they could all agree on, because he'd caused so much alarm in Fort Chip. Amazingly, Dr. O'Connor refused to put out a joint statement of fact with the college. Again, I'm not talking politicians or bureaucrats; I'm talking fellow doctors who issued a ruling that he had conducted himself unethically.

 

    When I saw Dr. O'Connor a couple of weeks ago in Calgary I asked him if he was going to appeal this ruling; they said he was a liar. He said no, he was not going to appeal it, which I think says it all right there. 

Mr. David Anderson:

    I have another question for you.

 

    You mentioned Tides Foundation, I think it was, in terms of funding from outside. The Rockefeller Foundation is one of the groups that organizes that. Steven Rockefeller is one of the drafters of the Earth Charter. The document says it laments that “the dominant patterns of production and consumption are causing environmental devastation, the depletion of resources, and a massive extinction of species”.

 

    Do you have any comment on that kind of funding coming from outside our country? I would suggest it's anti-Canadian. What are the reasons for that? 

Mr. Ezra Levant:

    Vivian Krause, who I understand has testified, has done all the research on this. But $190 million from United States lobby groups is poured into Canada to affect our domestic policy. I love the Americans, but I don't want them to tell us how to write our laws. I love them as neighbours, not as bosses. They're not the only ones. Greenpeace, which started out as a Canadian lobby group, is now a quarter-billion-dollar-a-year multinational corporation based in Europe.

 

    I really don't want foreign lobbyists telling us how to make our decisions. Let's make our decisions using Canadian values. When Americans tell us not to export oil to China, that we should stay totally dependent on them for a market, is that really in our interest? Follow the money, I say. Who is celebrating the slowdown of the oil sands? The Saudi ambassador.  

Mr. David Anderson:

    There's more to this than just environmental issues. 

Mr. Ezra Levant:

    Absolutely.

 

    It's an ideological agenda. It's a foreign policy agenda. I wish that everyone from Greenpeace to the Tides Foundation to the Suzuki Foundation, which has taken $10 million from these guys, would have to register as foreign lobbyists, because they're taking foreign cash. 

Mr. David Anderson:

     I'd like to turn it over to Ms. Gallant.

 

     But I notice, Mr. Lepine, you seem to be agreeing with Mr. Levant. 

Mr. Lionel Lepine:

    Yes.

  Mr. David Anderson:

    Thank you.

Mrs. Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, CPC):

    Mr. Chairman, our opposition colleagues allege the Canadian mining companies use substandard employment practices in other countries but deem it perfectly acceptable for foreign oil companies to oppress their workers in favour of Canadian oil. Even here today we hear the inaccurate juvenile slur “tar sands”, as opposed to oil sands.

 

    Mr. Levant, what's behind this contradiction? Are there outside or foreign entities influencing our legislators in some way?

 

Mr. Ezra Levant:

    Some of it is Nimbyism. I think there are some folks who don't want to see any environmental side effects in Canada, but they don't mind if Nigeria has 2,000 toxic waste dumps. They don't mind if women are oppressed in Saudi Arabia because they don't have to see it.

A few weeks ago 230 ducks were killed when they sat down on our tailings ponds. Mea culpa, that's terrible. I'm not going to call it a tragedy, though, because there really is blood oil out there--300,000 Darfuris. Maybe if those 300,000 Darfuris were ducks, Tides Foundation would give a damn, but they don't. And do you know what? I think we should always improve in Canada. Frankly, I agree with some of what Mr. Cullen says about constant improvement and constant self-criticism. And I think I actually agree with Mr. Lepine on that.

 

But what we're seeing instead, instead of focusing on improving, this Nimbyism...the people who say they would rather buy misogynist, terrorist Saudi oil or they would rather buy Russian military dictatorship oil, invade Georgia, than have it here.... And do you know what? I discovered this after writing the book; I didn't discover it until afterwards. Half of Canada imports its oil. We're exporting the oil in the west, but folks in the Atlantic, even in Montreal.... There are tankers of OPEC oil flowing into this country. I bet you most folks in Montreal don't realize that when they turn on their car, they're burning oil from Saudi Arabia, where women aren't allowed to vote.

 

I say let's pull the camera back and think globally and act locally. If you're okay with buying conflict oil from Sudan, go for it.

Here's a friendly review of Ethical Oil by Tim Banman in the Bonnyville Nouvelle newspaper:

...Ezra Levant blasts the oilsands detractors’ case like a seismic testing site.

...Levant starts Ethical Oil with a surprise – a list of admissions about oilsands, ranging from alleged fish deformities, to claims of a high rate of rare cancers, to images of environmental catastrophe. However, with the turn of the page, the author announces that every fact he raised was false.

The introduction is a reminder of the power of propaganda. The reader is lead to sympathize with the claims Levant presents convincingly in the first two pages, only to have each and every claim dashed against the rocks of reality. Some of these claims the reader is familiar with through media coverage, and it all seems easy to buy into, until he gets to the bottom of each claim throughout the book. It is a great introduction, and a telling reminder of the importance of critical and independent thinking to thwart would-be environmentalists out to sabotage the oilsands.

...Take Sudan, where 300,000 were killed in Dafur region between 2006 and 2008. The country exports 350,000 barrels of oil a day. Dividing the total oil exported during the Dafur campaign with the number of killed people is 850 barrels per human body. Based on the average amount of blood in a body, Levant works it out to just more than a teaspoon of blood per barrel.

Now, if oilsands are boycotted, demand for Sudan’s “blood oil” and other countries with a distain for human rights will increase. Is this more ethical than Canada?

...The world needs more critical thinkers like Levant and less blind followers like the dupes of Greenpeace. Ethical Oil is a must read for 2011.

My new Sun column:

Julian Assange, the Australian hacker who runs WikiLeaks, is accused of rape in Sweden.

This has not caused some of Assange’s defenders to change their opinion of him.

Instead, it has caused them to change their opinion of rape accusations.

Heather Mallick is one such supporter. She’s a columnist for the Toronto Star and a feminist — just ask her. But she’s also a harsh critic of America and the war on terror, just like Assange.

So she’s made a choice about which is more important to her.

On Tuesday, she trivialized the rape accusations, saying Assange’s accuser is just mad that he “didn’t phone her after she slept with him. Here’s what you do with a guy like that. You marry him and keep raising the subject for 21 years. Priceless.”

Alas, there are two women in Sweden who accuse Assange of rape, so Mallick’s advice could only work for one of them.

And Assange really isn’t the marrying type — a former cult member, a rootless fugitive who sleeps in a different bed every night.

Naomi Wolf, a leading U.S. feminist, has also put her anti-war beliefs ahead of her feminism. She says the rape charges against Assange are the work of “international dating police.”

That’s what Assange’s supporters have been spinning for a month. But last week several newspapers, including The Guardian, which has a close working relationship with WikiLeaks, published the police complaints filed by the Swedish women.

One woman says Assange forced her to remove her clothing, ripped her necklace, forced her legs apart and was “violent.” She thought he tore his condom on purpose, and refused to get an AIDS test when she demanded one.

The second woman said she woke up in the morning to find Assange having unprotected sex with her. She, too, demanded an AIDS test. Assange refused.

Wolf made her dismissive remarks before these police reports were publicized. But Mallick doesn’t have that excuse.

We’ve seen this woman-on-woman cannibalism before. Wolf and other feminists took the 1990s off when Bill Clinton was in the White House. Despite a parade of victims from Paula Jones to Monica Lewinsky, America’s feminists decided they’d forgive a sexual predator as president if he was a Democrat — the same way they did for Teddy Kennedy ever since Chappaquiddick.

And then there’s Roman Polanski, the Hollywood filmmaker. Polanski drugged and repeatedly raped a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house in the 1970s. The girl testified that she repeatedly begged Polanski to stop, and was afraid of him, but that he forced himself on her. As he raped her again and again, she continued to say “no,” but he didn’t give a damn.

But Polanski makes movies, and he’s an impeccable liberal. So feminists rush to his rescue, too. Whoopi Goldberg told America “it wasn’t ‘rape-rape’. It was something else.” Got it? A 13-year-old girl who is drugged and repeatedly raped isn’t really raped if it’s a great artist doing the raping.

A philandering president who preys on secretaries and interns isn’t a bully or a sexual harasser, if he’s a liberal.

And an allegedly violent man accused of forcing himself on women in Sweden is a great catch to the Toronto Star, if he published thousands of classified national security documents including the private social security numbers of U.S. soldiers, the names and locations of Afghan human-rights activists secretly co-operating with the U.S. army, and revealed covert anti-terrorism missions in Yemen.

The charges against Julian Assange are not that he was a bad date, or that he didn’t call women back. It’s that he is a rapist. If those charges are false, you’d think he’d want to get back to Sweden as soon as possible to clear things up, not fight extradition there like his life depended on it.

My new Sun column:

Michael Ignatieff’s Christmas card isn’t a Christmas card.

It’s a “holiday” card. It has a Jewish menorah on it, which is great. Fully 1% of Canadians are Jewish and though Hanukkah was three weeks ago, it’s a nice thought.

The card has some snowflakes on it, too, and mittens and a gingerbread man (or a ghost, it’s not clear). Those are symbols of winter. Which is great, because it is winter time.

But there’s not a single Christian symbol on the card, the religion of the majority of Canadians. It’s the faith our Queen Elizabeth is officially the “defender” of, the religion that inspired the names of so many places in this country, from the St. Lawrence Seaway to St. John’s.

It is the religion whose cross adorns the coats of arms of almost every province, the religion from whose Bible comes Canada’s motto, “From sea to sea.” Our anthem asks God to keep our land, and the French version says we will “carry the cross.”

Even the Charter of Rights begins with the reminder that neither judges nor politicians are at the apex of Canadian society, but rather both are under the “supremacy of God.”

Jack Layton is slightly less embarrassed of Canada’s Christian character than Ignatieff, actually bringing himself to utter the word “Christmas” in his Christmas greetings. Last year’s message from him on Christmas Day used the C-word, but didn’t have much Christianity in it other than that. He said Christmas was a time to “laugh together” and a chance to talk about “lost jobs” and promising that the NDP “will do whatever we can.” Sounds more like an NDP convention, other than the laughing part.

Religion? Not a drop of it. Politics? But of course.

But compare that to Layton’s NDP greetings for the Muslim holiday of Eid ul Fitr last year. Layton didn’t talk about laughing or the NDP jobs plan. He had much more respect than that. He said that Muslim religious holiday was “an opportunity to renew the spirit and faith in Islam. We are not celebrating the end of Ramadan, but thanking Allah for the help and strength given throughout this special month and asking for that blessing to be extended throughout the year to all of humanity.” Note the use of the first person — Layton uses the word “we”. He personally wants to extend Allah’s blessings to all humanity. He wants to renew Islamic faith.

Could you imagine him or Ignatieff or frankly most Conservative MPs saying they want to extend Christ’s blessings throughout Canada? The mainstream media would have an embolism — remember when Stephen Harper dared to say “God Bless Canada” after his speeches — and the Canadian Human Rights Commission would launch a hate-speech investigation.

Canada is a Christian country. Thank God that it is. Because it is precisely that Christian spirit of tolerance and charity that has accepted millions of refugees from countries that are less enlightened — and that don’t value freedom of religion for anyone.

Queen Elizabeth isn’t the only head of state who is also the head of a religious institution. So is King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who enforces the Koran as that country’s constitution. Iran is called the Islamic Republic of Iran, etc.

Which is precisely why the flow of refugees is from enslaved Arabia to the Christian West, and not the other way around.

A lot more jobs off limits to people who don't speak French -- including anyone who works at an airport, seaport, ferry terminal, etc.

Here's my new Sun column on the subject:

What would Michael Ignatieff do differently if he were prime minister?

Take a look at Bill S-220, proposed by his party in the Senate. S-220 would amend Canada’s bilingualism laws.

For starters, it would require all RCMP patrolling the Trans-Canada Highway to speak French.

Hundreds of English-speaking RCMP officers would have to be fired, including almost all aboriginal RCMP officers and minorities in cities like Vancouver, where the RCMP has recruited South and East Asian officers.

But it’s not just anti-minority and anti-English. It’s anti-common sense.

How many people driving the Trans-Canada from, say, Grand Falls, N.L., to Gander speak only French and therefore need a French-speaking highway cop? Not many.

And how many Newfoundland cops would qualify for a new bilingual-only RCMP detachment? Not many. Probably not any.

Canada’s current bilingualism laws require federal government services to be provided in French where numbers warrant. For most of the Trans-Canada Highway, the numbers don’t warrant it. Yet Ignatieff insists only bilingual officers be allowed to patrol any of it.

Except in Quebec. It has its own provincial police force, called the Surete du Quebec.

Bill S-220 doesn’t require those 5,000 officers to learn English. Ignatieff wouldn’t dare, because bilingualism, to him, isn’t a two-way street. Ignatieff wouldn’t ask Quebec to abandon its anti-English sign laws that violate the Charter of Rights.

No, to Ignatieff, forced bilingualism is a tool to beat up anglophone westerners (translation: Conservative voters) to the delight of Liberal voters in Montreal and Toronto.

‘Cranky old men’

It’s the wedge strategy proposed by Liberal strategist and CBC pollster Frank Graves, who advised Ignatieff he “should invoke a culture war” against the West and “if the cranky old men in Alberta don’t like it, too bad.”

But S-220 also applies to “all airports, railway stations, ferry terminals and ports that are significant because of their location or number of passengers they serve.” So the ports of St. John’s and Vancouver would have to be fully bilingual. The same with airports in Edmonton, Regina and St. John’s.

This would apply to everyone working at the airport, ferry terminal or port, including “third party contractors such as restaurants or car rental agencies.”

My own observations suggest the majority of workers in airport food courts and car rental desks are new immigrants, for whom English is already a second language. S-220 wouldn’t allow them to work there anymore until they learned French, too. Try doing that at age 45 while raising a family and working 70 hours a week.

There’s no other way to say it: S-220 is a bigoted, punitive, divisive law.

Ignatieff claims he wants to win the West. What does his Vancouver lieutenant, Senator Mobina Jaffer, have to say about what this bill will do to new immigrants, like she once was?

‘Noble’ bill

She calls the bill “noble” and “necessary.” She says the Vancouver Olympics made her “angry” because opening ceremonies didn’t include more French. And she has a warning for unilingual workers: Merely learning “translated sentences and memorized lists of words” isn’t enough — their French had better be “of the same quality” as their English.

Jaffer’s own French isn’t. But so what? She’s a Liberal senator. Unlike thousands of threatened cops, waiters, clerks and longshoremen, she has got a job until age 75.

But she has got some helpful tips for those about to lose their jobs: “My husband and I decided that our children would learn the three languages of the Americas, namely French, English and Spanish. It meant sending our children to Quebec and Mexico many times,” she boasted.

Got that, you minimum wage-earning immigrants? Send your kids on junkets to Quebec and Mexico. Ignatieff’s Liberals just gave you some free advice, and you’re probably not even grateful.

A pardon for Billy the Kid?

I've only read this side of the story, but I'm persuaded.

Here's my Sun column about the recent Cancun meeting of the permanent class of global warming bureaucrats and diplomats and various hangers on, almost all on the taxpayers' dime. They've been meeting annually for eighteen years now, at some of the most exciting places in the world -- Rio, Berlin, Marrakesh, Bali, etc., and now Cancun.

Wouldn't you like to visit your friends every year at an all-expense paid reunion at another 5-star hotel somewhere around the world?

What a great racket.

But it's starting to come undone a bit.

Here's the column:

Skeptics say the Cancun climate change beach party was a failure.

But they're wrong.

Granted, the A-list celebrities didn't come this time, as they had done at last year's five-star party in Copenhagen.

Nobel Peace Prize winners Al Gore and Barack Obama weren't there.

And then there was Cancun itself, which had its coldest weather in a century - as did much of North America and Europe.

Put aside the political dissonance of worrying about warmth in record cold. The point of having the party in Cancun was to make it more fun than last year's party at Copenhagen. Cancun was in keeping with previous climate beach parties at exotic locations like Bali and Rio de Janeiro.

Copenhagen was hailed by the world's media as the do-or-die moment to get a deal, before the Earth would perish.

Former U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown said it was humanity's "last chance." Fellow British scaremonger Lord Stern went further, calling Copenhagen the "most important gathering since the Second World War."

Greenpeace hysterically announced failure at Copenhagen could lead to a 20-foot rise in the level of the oceans - on a web page that helpfully asked for donations three times.

Similar end-times prophecies were made at the previous 14 climate parties, too.

All of which violates Apocalyptic Prophecy Rule No 1: If you say the world is going to end, it's best to pick a deadline far enough into the future that you'll never be held accountable if your prediction is wrong.

Saying end times are just a year or two away just doesn't make sense for a permanent bureaucracy.

But despite the lack of celebrities, and the embarrassing weather, the marked decrease in press hype, and the lower priority debt-strapped governments are giving the UN's plans for spending money, there were developments.

In China, the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter and home of 20 of the world's 30 most polluted cities, the Cancun meeting had immediate results.

A Chinese company called Huaneng Renewables cancelled its public share offering. China Datang Renewable went ahead, but lowered share prices. Analysts say the IPO for Sinovel Wind, another "green" company, is in trouble too.

Yuanta Research analyst Min Li says there's no mystery to the sudden retreat of China's environmental companies.

Without a firm treaty to force developed countries such as Canada and the United States to subsidize projects, the market demand just isn't there.

"Positive sentiment seems lacking in the sector given difficulty in getting any certainty that subsidies will continue," said Li.

Translation: Chinese windmill companies don't actually make any money. They only survive off the $20

billion or so a year in subsidies directed their way by the Kyoto Protocol.

And that's about to expire.

"For China, without (Kyoto), profits of some renewable energy projects may be affected," he said.

Other Chinese wind and solar companies are bleeding red ink.

If you've been part of the two-decade bacchanalia of climate conferences and subsidized green "investments," the party’s over.

But for beleaguered taxpayers in debt-wracked countries such as Canada, it's a refreshing change not to have to subsidize Chinese competitors anymore.

Here's my new Sun column:

In Parliament last week, the opposition joined forces behind an NDP motion to ban oil tankers off the coast of B.C. It passed 143 votes to 138.

Of course, a tanker ban off B.C. isn’t going to happen.

Oil tankers sail down the coast of B.C. every day bringing oil from Alaska to the lower 48 United States. You’d have to conquer the U.S. navy to stop that.

Oil is exported from Vancouver by tanker, too. And 1,500 tankers have sailed in and out of Kitimat, B.C., with petroleum products. The majority of oil used in Atlantic Canada and Quebec comes in by tanker, too — from dictatorships like Algeria and Saudi Arabia.

You’d have to conquer the opposition’s hypocrisy to stop that.

So this motion really isn’t about stopping tankers. It’s about stopping the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to B.C., that would bring 500,000 barrels of oilsands oil a day to the coast for export to Asia.

The opposition doesn’t mind U.S. tankers off the B.C. coast or Saudi tankers coming up the St. Lawrence Seaway. They don’t mind B.C. tankers going in and out of Vancouver or Kitimat.

They just don’t want tankers to do business with Alberta’s oilsands.

It’s a ban designed to keep Alberta landlocked, denying its oilsands an outlet to the sea.

It’s pure wedge politics, proposed by Liberal advisor Frank Graves, who counselled Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to “invoke a culture war” against Alberta, and to demonize the province. “If the cranky old men in Alberta don’t like it, too bad,” Graves told Ignatieff.

It’s not surprising that the NDP would be against the oilsands. How that benefits thousands of union workers employed in the industry isn’t quite clear.

The Bloc Quebecois has no qualms about telling B.C. and Alberta how to run their economies. But lord help the poor soul from the West who wants to tell Quebec how to run, say, its dairy cartel.

It’s Ignatieff who surprises and disappoints.

Though it pains this right-wing Albertan to say it, the Liberals deserve credit for the growth of the oilsands. It was under their tenure that the oilsands went from an experimental oddity to the largest source of U.S. oil imports, a milestone reached in 2004. Anne McLellan, the last Liberal MP from Alberta, championed the oilsands against others in the Chretien and Martin cabinets who would have taxed or regulated the industry into submission.

Stephane Dion abandoned that support as Liberal leader, with his proposed carbon tax. But then Ignatieff tried to walk the Liberals back from that hostility.

“Am I proud of this industry? You bet,” Ignatieff said. “Everybody expects me to say they’re terrible and shut them down. Absolutely not. The oilsands are an integral part of the future of Canada. No other country in the world would toss away this advantage.”

That was in early 2009, before Graves’ anti-Alberta strategy.

Surely, Ignatieff can scratch his anti-Alberta itch in other ways, like his requirement that all Supreme Court judges speak fluent French, or proposing to rename the province Trudeaupia. Does he really have to block a pipeline that would earn $40 million a day for Canada?

Ignatieff says he wants to expand trade with China and India. That’s who this pipeline could serve. It would help our trade balance and reduce the risk of having only one oil customer, the U.S.

The Liberals punished Alberta in the vote. But not everyone is upset.

The American ambassador is happy to have our oil all to himself. We’ll remain his branch plant economy.

And the Saudi ambassador doesn’t have to worry about us eating into his Asian market share.

Alberta loses. Canada loses. But a pretty good day for Riyadh and Washington.

Have you ever had hummus? It's a middle eastern dish, made from chick peas, which are sometimes called garbonzo beans.

It's a dip, typically scooped up with slices of pita bread. It's a good vegetarian hors d'oeuvres, the kind of thing you might serve with a parmesan cheese or olive tapenade. I'm getting hungry just writing this.

I mention all this because a group of university radicals have decided that they're going to strike a blow against the democratic State of Israel by calling for the boycott of brands of hummus that have ties to Israel -- brands called Sabra and Tribe.

I learn of this from the great Greg Gutfeld, host of Fox News Channel's Redeye. Here's Gutfeld's "gregalogue" on the subject. Some excerpts:

...I want to show you something that may make your eyes explode out of your face, and roll onto the floor.

It's called the Philly BDS, (boycott, divest, sanction) a group of really attractive men and women who "danced into action" at a local grocery, in order to get the poor clerks to remove the hummus.

You may want to have the children leave the room. 

 

 

Is every one okay? Does anyone need a bucket?

I haven't seen anything that hairy since they drained the pool at the Playboy mansion.

...So, the gist: in these students misguided brains, hummus is worse than... Hamas.

I only hope that the idiocy they flaunt in that clip is more than matched by the sheer embarrassment of their parents.

Note: If these shameless creatures are your offspring, please stop paying their tuition, and force them to fend for themselves. My guess is any hummus will start looking tasty, for it will be all these hopeless sacks of self-congratulating cretins can afford.

And if you disagree with me, you're a racist, homophobic hummusaphobe.

Gutfeld's right when he says these twenty-something (and in one case, fifty-something) adolescents are more pro-Hamas than pro-hummus. But that argument should be taken one step further.

Look at these kids. Let's not assume anything, but simply say that some of them are "alternative" and "experimenting".

In other words, living their lives freely.

Which, if they tried in Palestinian-controlled Gaza, would lead to their murders. They'd be subjected to an "honour killing" for their lifestyles.

Which is why there is a colony of 500 gay Palestinians living in Tel Aviv. If they were back in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, they'd be dead.

The adolescents in this video aren't morally serious. Being anti-Israel is just a fun hobby for them -- it's the 21st century way to act out against their parents and society, like going to a Ban the Bomb rally was in the 1970s. They have no idea what life is like in Israel, the Palestinian territories or Muslim or Arab nations. Perhaps they missed it when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Columbia University students that there are no gays in Iran. But he wasn't lying -- because when he finds a homosexual in Iran, he stones them to death.

It's fun and easy to pick on Israel, or Israeli hummus. Not so fun and easy to take on dictatorships.

Like Gutfeld, my chief reaction was aesthetic: I was just really grossed out by these activists, and glad that SCTV's smellovision hasn't been invented yet. But I'm also morally grossed out: that such transgressive libertines don't realize they'd be killed anywhere in the Middle East except for Israel.

I have seen both Tribe and Sabra brand hummus in my local Safeway. I'm going to make a small personal resolution to by a dish of those brands every week for a year, as my personal, financial and political response to the hypocrisy of this video.

If you agree with me, why don't you do so, too?

Here's the text of my remarks to the Parliamentary Natural Resources committee, as drafted. When I find a link to the official transcript, which would include the questions and answers that followed, I'll post that too.

If I have time I'll talk more about one of the other witnesses who appeared at the same time as me, an Aboriginal rights advocate from Fort Chipeywan. I disagreed with much of what he said (including his outrageous statement that oil companies are "brainwashing" Aboriginal youth to get an education to join skilled trades like welding), but to my pleasant surprise he agreed firmly with one of my key points: that Canadian policymakers must screen out foreign lobbyists who are meddling in our national debate -- including not only Greenpeace, but the U.S. Tides Foundation, that funnels tens of millions of dollars into anti-oilsands lobbyists like the David Suzuki Foundation.

Anyways, here's my remarks as written. Much of it I've said before; but given that Parliament was voting on an anti-oil tanker resolution that day, I emphasized the economic and sovereignty issues involved with the proposed pipeline to the West Coast (I've highlighted those parts in bold.)

Thank you for the invitation to be here.

One day we might discover a fuel source with no environmental side-effects, that is affordable and practical. But until that day comes, we need oil.

Not just us, but the United States, to whom we sell 1.4 million barrels of oilsands oil every day. And last year, more cars were sold in China than in the U.S. And they all want to be two-car families too, and same for India and the rest of the developing world.

So the choice isn’t oilsands oil versus some fantasy fuel of the future. It’s oilsands oil versus oil from the other places where oil comes from – mainly OPEC countries. I don’t know what God was thinking when he was handing out oil, but he gave it to the world’s bastards – places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria. Out of the top ten countries ranked by oil reserves, Canada is the only western, liberal democracy on the list.

That doesn’t matter if all you care about is driving your car. It all burns the same. But what about the ethics of the oil?

In my book, Ethical Oil, I suggest four liberal values by which we should judge the morality of a barrel of oil: respect for the environment; peace; fair wages for workers; and human rights.

I compare oilsands oil to OPEC oil using these four measures.

I come to the conclusion that oilsands oil is the “fair trade coffee” of the world’s oil industry.

Take the environment. Greenpeace propaganda pictures make the oilsands look like something from the Land of Mordor in the Lord of the Rings. But in only 2% of the area of the oilsands is the oil close enough to the surface to be mined that way. The rest will be recovered using underground, or in situ methods that don’t tear up the surface, and don’t use any river water. And even that 2% must be fully reclaimed afterwards – and already more than 60 square kilometers has been.

Compare that to the 2,000 unremediated toxic oil spills in Nigeria that will never be cleaned up.

And then there’s carbon dioxide. Using the Obama administration’s well-to-wheels analysis, oilsands oil has the same carbon footprint as oil from Nigeria or Iraq. But we have a lower carbon footprint than U.S. imports from Venezuela. And much less carbon than oil from Nancy Pelosi’s state, which is called California Heavy for a reason.

If you are concerned with carbon emissions, shouldn’t we replace that higher-carbon oil with our lower carbon oilsands oil?

And since 1990, the carbon footprint of the average barrel of oilsands oil has fallen by 38%. I can hardly wait to see where we are in ten years from now.

But the environment isn’t the only measure of ethics. What about peace?

Canada invented peacekeeping. Saudi Arabia invented 9/11. Iran is using its oil profits to build a nuclear bomb. Sudan uses its oil profits to buy weapons from China to prosecute its genocide in Darfur.

If you multiply 300,000 murders in Darfur by 185 ounces of blood in the human body, and divide that into the number of barrels of oil exported by Sudan over the same period of time, it works out to 6.5 mL of blood in every damn barrel. That would fill a tube of lipstick.

What about fair wages? Fort McMurray is Canada’s wealthiest city – and the most generous, according to the United Way. And the working poor there have 77% more purchasing power than in other cities like Edmonton.

Compare that to Saudi Arabia, which uses poorly-paid migrant labourers who have no civil rights. Or Nigeria, where over $300 billion has been embezzled by dictators and bureaucrats, leaving the country one of the poorest on Earth.

And then there’s human rights. The mayor of Fort McMurray is a young woman named Melissa Blake. How many women mayors are there in Saudi Arabia? None. It’s against the law. In Iran, women are stoned to death if they’re accused of adultery.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says there are no gays in Iran. Which is true, because if he finds them, he kills them.

And then there’s the fact that the oilsands are Canada’s largest employer of Aboriginal people – not only with nearly 2,000 direct jobs, but also billions more in contracts with Aboriginal-owned and operated businesses.

If you don’t care about morality, then oil from Iran or Sudan is just as good as Canadian oil. But if you believe in making the world a better place, then the moral imperative is to replace unethical OPEC oil with Canadian green oil, conflict free oil, fair wage oil, human rights oil.

The leader of the opposition has said it’s important to increase trade with China and India. I agree. Right now, those countries are forced to buy terrorist oil, dictatorship oil, Darfur oil. Because we only let Americans buy our oil.

I love our American neighbours. But it’s dangerous to have just one customer for our product. We’re at the mercy of protectionism and taxes. And sometimes we’re taken for granted. That’s why the pipeline to the West Coast is so strategically important – it makes us an independent country, with options.

I find it very irritating that so many of the anti-oilsands and anti-pipeline activists in Canada take their funding from U.S. lobby groups like the Tides Foundation. Of course it’s in America’s interest that no other customers are allowed to buy Canadian ethical oil.

But it’s in Canada’s interests that we are able to sell to whomever we choose. And if you care about industrial ethics, it’s in the world’s interest, too.

A lot of people are watching how Canada handles the oilsands miracle. Not just Canadians. The American Ambassador is watching, too. He hopes the Gateway pipeline is strangled, so he can have our oil all for himself.

The Saudi Ambassador is watching too. He hopes the pipeline is killed also, so he doesn’t lose any market share in Asia.

But for those who love Canada, expanding the oilsands is the right thing for our country. And for those who think globally and act locally, every barrel of oilsands oil we can sell to Asia, is one less barrel sold by the world’s terrorists and dictators.

Thank you.

 

UPDATE: Links below are now fixed.

Yesterday I testified before the House of Commons standing committee on natural resources, about my book Ethical Oil. It was a good chance to take my message to Parliament.

Nathan Cullen, the NDP MP, didn't much like me being there. He raised a point of order, complaining that my visit was being televised. He didn't dare debate me -- he wouldn't ask me a single question -- but he did try to filibuster my presentation with his complaints that too many people were watching.

How pitiful and petty -- and how typically NDP. I gave him a copy of my book anyways, but it will probably wind up on his compost heap.

Cullen would rather oil be produced in OPEC countries like Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, where workers are exploited, than be produced in Canada, where workers, unionized or not, are typically paid more than $100,000/year.

But what does Cullen care? He's got his own six-figure job. So his passion is stopping the proposed oil pipeline to the west coast.

It's not just all the lost jobs that Cullen has to answer for. It's the fact that he wants us to remain in the strategically weak position of having only the U.S. as an energy customer. An oil pipeline to the Pacific would let us build economic and political ties to Japan, Korea, India, Taiwan and even China, not only evening out our trade deficit, but reducing our exposure to the risk of Barack Obama's cap and tax schemes.

Apparently, the NDP believes that the U.S. should be our only oil customer. So much for national sovereignty.

Anyways, even though Cullen and the rest of the opposition tried to filibuster and then stonewall me, I was able to get my message out.

Here's a story in the Sun.

And here's a story in iPolitics (quick, free sign-up needed).

Here's my latest Sun column on WikiLeaks:

Julian Assange, the boss of WikiLeaks, gave himself the online nickname Mendax. It means liar in Latin. It's a good fit for him.

Take the word WikiLeaks itself. Wiki is a Hawaiian word that means quick. But its meaning on the Internet is different. A wiki is a website that allows many people to collaborate on something quickly - like Wikipedia, the encyclopedia anyone in the world can edit.

So it doesn't just mean quick. It means quick and democratic.

Which is the opposite of WikiLeaks.

Only Assange, the unelected boss of WikiLeaks, gets to decide what's published.

Wikileaks' original mandate was to expose repressive countries such as China, Russia and Iran. But Assange vetoed that. He's all about being anti-American.

But wiki is only half the name. The other half is leaks. A leak implies someone on the inside of an institution voluntarily releases information.

The thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents WikiLeaks has published were not leaked by someone with lawful access to them. They were stolen. One of the alleged thieves, a U.S. soldier named Bradley Manning, told a fellow hacker he was feeling sad and conflicted because of his sexuality, and "no one took any notice of me," and his theft might change that. He was about to be kicked out of the Army for assault, so he had to act fast.

That’s not a leak on principle. That's an act of sabotage by an emotional infant.

Does WikiLeaks distance itself from Manning's alleged theft? The opposite: Its logo now has the words "Free Bradley" added to it.

Is stealing secret information justifiable if it blows the whistle on wrongdoing? Perhaps. But that's not what WikiLeaks does. It doesn’t embarrass wrongdoers. It exposes and endangers real whistleblowers.

WikiLeaks published a document that named an Algerian activist covertly aiding the democracy movement there. It identified a Venezuelan reporter secretly exposing the appalling conditions of hospitals for the poor. Both are real whistleblowers. Both were outed by Assange.

Assange admits WikiLeaks will probably end up with "blood on our hands." But he's not too worried.

Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can't believe their good luck.

So it’s not wiki. It's not leaks. It's not whistleblowing. It's not even journalism. Assange got his hands on e-mails sent by Venezuela's ambassador to Argentina. He tried to auction them to the highest bidder - presumably to Chavez, too. That's not journalism. That's a shakedown. Maybe even a willingness to keep secrets, for the right price.

Then there's Assange's threat that if he's treated improperly - say, if he's forced to stand trial for rape in Sweden - he'll release another batch of secrets, he has labelled "insurance."

If a real journalist had real news, he'd publish it for its own sake. But by using his "news" as a bargaining chip, he gives away his game. It's not journalism. It's espionage. It's a weapon of war. And if police try to hold him accountable to the law, he'll use his weapon.

Assange revealed secret U.S. counterterrorism work in Yemen. That will likely end now, and Yemen may fall to al-Qaida.

Do you doubt if WikiLeaks was around in the 1940s it would have tipped off the Nazis to D-Day or leaked Anne Frank's hiding place too?

There seems to be some oil drilling right in the middle of Los Angeles!

hat tip Aaron Braaten

Who should be Newfoundland and Labrador's next premier?

QMI Agency's David Akin recently made a compelling case for Gen. Rick Hillier. But I'd like to suggest Rick Mercer.

Mercer is a comedian. But his candidacy would not be a joke.

First, Mercer is a household name - not just in Newfoundland, but across Canada. Name recognition is important in every stage of a campaign, from getting people to read your campaign literature to getting them to remember what box to check on the ballot.

Second, although Mercer is now based in Toronto, his Newfoundland roots run deep. He's a Newfoundland booster who regularly visits home, and has been awarded many of that province's highest honours - from an honourary degree at Memorial University to that province's Artist of the Year.

It's clear why: Mercer is a perpetual Newfoundland champion, a charming ambassador for his province across the country.

Merely being well-known and well-liked are not criteria for public office. Mercer is also intensely political, and follows political news voraciously. It doesn't feel like it, because his TV shows and public appearances are so light-hearted and watchable.

But almost every segment or sketch that he performs has a political lesson to it - the medicine that his spoonful of sugar makes go down easy.

It's not just his patented "rants" and his quick quips on the news headlines of the day. Almost all of his sketches - such as his prescient mockery of heavy-handed airport security - have a moral to the story, and are part of a coherent political philosophy.

You couldn't say it about most comedians, but Mercer's work forms a body of opinion not too different from a campaign platform. Jerry Seinfeld used to joke that his famous TV show was "about nothing." Mercer's show is about Canada and its inspiring possibilities.

Like most entertainers, Mercer could fairly be called liberal. But it's not a partisan sort of liberalism - he's an equal opportunity mocker whose scourging of Stephane Dion was more powerful than anything the Tory war room ever cooked up.

His occasional antipathy towards the Conservative Party is rooted, in part, in his assessment that the federal government doesn't respect Newfoundland and Labrador. Whether or not that's a fair conclusion, it's an opinion that wouldn't hurt Mercer in a province that loves anti-Ottawa champions like Danny Williams and Clyde Wells.

Newfoundland has always contributed disproportionately to Canada's military. And in his own way, Mercer continues that tradition. He is a frequent visitor to our troops in Afghanistan, bringing both the relief of laughter and heartfelt moral support.

Mercer's stump speech at conferences and conventions across Canada always has a large part dedicated to Canadian Forces, and the moral obligation citizens have to support them, not just emotionally, but in tangible ways too, like with modern military equipment.

If Mercer is liberal on other matters, he's a rock-solid hawk when it comes to supporting the troops.

Being a premier of any province means dealing with less adventurous matters than foreign and military affairs. Provincial politics is the stuff of schools and hospitals and roads and countless boards and commissions.

But Newfoundland is growing up, too; it's a "have province" not only with its own oil, but with an enormous expat population in Alberta's oilsands, too. So interprovincial relations, and dealing with Ottawa, are likely to grow in importance.

And that may be Mercer's greatest strength.

He has travelled to every city and town in Canada, in a humourous and patriotic travelogue of the country. He can find the good and the interesting in every little place, maybe even things that the locals can't see.

Frankly, he should have been our governor general. But a Canada-loving premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, proud of his own province and welcome in all others, would do quite well, too.

Here's my Sun column from Tuesday -- sorry to take so long to post it.

It was tough to jam everything into just 550 words -- I could easily have written 2,000 just about how freaky Julian Assange is. I probably spent an hour reading about the child-abuse cult his mom married into when he was a kid.

As Michael Caine said in Batman, "some men just want to watch the world burn."

Why isn’t Julian Assange dead yet?

Assange says he’s the editor of a website called WikiLeaks. But he’s not really an editor, because WikiLeaks doesn’t do much writing.

It’s a website where secrets are posted to the Internet.

But most of the secrets revealed there aren’t really leaked either. They’re stolen.

When WikiLeaks debuted in January 2007, it promised to shine a light of scrutiny on dictatorships. Many of its early directors were Chinese dissidents.

Its focus would be “oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.” They said their “roots are in dissident communities and our focus is on non-Western authoritarian regimes.”

But then Assange, a computer hacker from Australia, took over.

His obsession is to embarrass the world’s freest countries — the U.S. and U.K. And as to repressive regimes, well, put it this way, Assange says U.S. forces must remember “shooting the Taliban is shooting the Afghan people.”

He’s not anti-war. He’s on the other side.

Assange published the names of Afghan human rights activists and others who have co-operated with the U.S. — giving out names of villages and GPS coordinates.

That’s not journalism. That’s not whistleblowing. That’s setting up “deadly revenge attacks,” says Reporters Without Borders.

Zabihullah Mujahid is grateful. He’s a Taliban spokesman who says “we know how to punish them.”

Assange published details about technology used to stop improvised explosive devices (IEDs) from being detonated. WikiLeaks calls roadside bombs a “rebel investment,” proudly pointing out for every dollar spent by the terrorists, the U.S. and Canada have to spend a thousand to defend against them. So Assange published those anti-IED details online.

This week, Assange started to publish 250,000 U.S. diplomatic messages, many marked secret. The fight against terrorism is being endangered.

Other members of WikiLeaks have complained about Assange’s anti-American obsession. But it’s his show now.

So who is he?

Assange has never been a democracy activist. His parents were travelling entertainers in Australia. When Assange was eight, his mother remarried a member of a cult called “The Family,” infamous for abusing children with psychiatric medication. When that relationship crumbled, Assange’s mother took him into hiding for five years.

She boasts she moved her son 37 times before he was 14.

Assange became a computer hacker and took the nickname Mendax, which means liar in Latin. He was convicted for hacking into Nortel.

His run-ins with the law continue. This month, Interpol issued an arrest warrant against him for rape. Assange claims the sex was consensual. But the Swedish prosecutor says Assange refuses to present himself for interrogation.

Why is Assange still alive? Why is he being treated as a journalist or political activist? If someone had published the intimate details of the D-Day plans during the Second World War, he would never have been seen again.

Assange and his colleagues act like spies, not journalists. WikiLeaks could have its assets seized, just like the Taliban has. And U.S. President Barack Obama could do what he’s doing to the Taliban throughout the world.

He doesn’t sue them or catch them. He kills them. Because it’s war.

Obama has even ordered the assassination of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki.

How does Obama see Assange any differently?