March 2012 Archives

Obama's sleight of hand
Feigned support of Keystone pipeline by the U.S. president will only fuel gas prices for the American market

U.S. President Barack Obama posed in front of a stack of pipes this week, promising to cut through the red tape on the southern leg of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas.

Which is great. Except that the Oklahoma-to-Texas part of the pipeline was already approved. It had nothing to do with Obama — he only has jurisdiction over the part of the pipeline that crosses the Canada-U.S. border. And he vetoed that part of the pipe last fall.

So it's like Obama has approved attaching one garden hose to another garden hose. But he refuses to attach any of it to the faucet.

There is some utility to the lower leg of the pipeline — there is a bit of a bottleneck in Cushing, Okla., that this pipeline will address.

But it's the line from Canada itself that's so important — that could add about 800,000 barrels of oil a day to the U.S. economy.

That oil won't make Americans drive any more. It would only replace current U.S. imports from Venezuela — the Keystone XL would go all the way down to the very same Texas refineries where Hugo Chavez sends his oil, coincidentally 800,000 barrels a day. So it's a pretty straight swap of Canadian ethical oil for Venezuelan conflict oil. And Obama chose Hugo Chavez over us.

He made that choice last fall, and he's paying a political price for it now — gas prices in the U.S. are as high as $1.30 a litre, which is a shock in a country that is used to paying less than a buck a litre (they measure it by the gallon down there).

It's strange for Canadians to pay less for gas than Americans do. But then a lot of things have changed under Obama. Our unemployment rate is 2% lower than theirs. Our corporate tax rate is 20% lower than theirs. Our credit rating is higher. We haven't had any banks fail.

It's like Opposite Day meets Groundhog Day. We're stronger than them, and getting stronger all the time.

Keystone XL has been studied for three years by the U.S. government. The Environmental Protection Agency gave it a thumbs up. The refineries want the oil. All the states involved want the pipeline. Transcanada, the pipeline company, agreed to reroute the pipe in a politically sensitive region of Nebraska. Both the Democrats and Republicans there gave it the thumbs up. But not Obama.

The problem is that he actually hates oil — even though he is the world's largest consumer of it, between his SUV motorcades and his Air Force One jets.

He believes in electric cars — even though there is no market for $41,000 vehicles that only drive for an hour. He believes in solar panels — even though they're unworkable without massive subsidies. His own secretary of energy, Steven Chu, told a Congressional hearing last week that the government's mission is not to lower gas costs — but to get Americans off gas altogether.

Hey, great idea — when we invent that fantasy fuel of the future. But until that happy day — until dilithium crystals are invented — we're stuck with oil and all the wonderful things that come from it, ranging from gas for our ambulances and school buses, to petrochemicals for our iPhones.

You can't get off oil until you know what you're getting on to. And right now, there is no practical replacement.

Dreamy alternatives work for unserious people like science fiction moviemakers. James Cameron's movie Avatar talked about a resource called "Unobtainium." Exactly — we haven't obtained it yet. The president of the United States needs to be a bit more grown up.

Blocking the Keystone XL pipeline isn't going to stop a single American car trip. It will simply ensure that car is fueled by Hugo Chavez and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who must have been popping the champagne while laughing at Obama on TV.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

It ain't feasible being green

Dalton McGuinty has committed Ontario to a faith-based energy policy.

He believes passionately in the theory of man-made global warming, a theory that has been cast into disrepute through not only the misconduct of its high priests but by scientific observation itself: There has been no measurable global warming since 1998, according to satellite weather data.

But McGuinty's belief is deep. And he intends to build massive three-armed crucifixes across rural Ontario. The famous statue of Christ the Redeemer that overlooks Rio de Janeiro is only 130 feet tall. McGuinty's eco-idols will be three times that height, but will serve the same imposing purpose.

Do not confuse McGuinty's belief system with a true faith. It is a superstition, the tenets of which are capable of being scientifically disproven. It is a perverse faith, in that it reveres the "environment" ahead of people who live in it. It is a most ascetic superstition, in that it demands we live less happily and less freely and with less prosperity — the opposite of, say, the Protestant work ethic that helped build Ontario.

McGuinty wants to build billions of dollars worth of wind turbines — to call them mere windmills is to mistake their scale. No mere flour mill requires a skyscraper-sized turbine on top of it, a blight that can be seen for miles. And, like the massive cathedrals of medieval times, McGuinty's three-armed crosses are to be paid for with tithes, from the little people.

In other words, through higher energy prices. The government itself estimates that electricity rates in Ontario will increase by 46% by 2015. That's an extra $1,100 a year, after taxes, for the average family just to get the same power out of a wall socket. That's like another GST.

That's called energy poverty.

It's not just hitting ordinary homeowners, of course. It hits industrial users of energy — that is, the very factories that McGuinty claims he wants to keep in the province.

By the end of next year, Ontario's residential electricity rates will be higher than any U.S. state other than Alaska and Hawaii. There are plenty of challenges to Ontario's manufacturing base that have nothing to do with McGuinty, or even with Canada.

But choosing to spend billions on solar panels and wind skyscrapers — and to jack up utility rates on purpose — is only hastening Ontario's decline.

There have been plenty of critics — good faith critics, who want to undo Ontario's shocking descent into the list of "have-not provinces" — who have criticized the premier's fundamentalist zeal in standing by his green schemes. Even Ontario's own auditor general has condemned the haphazard way in which the deals were announced, where the press release came before the business plan.

But that's the thing about religion, or superstition. It's hard to talk someone out of it. Instead of re-evaluating his province's course, he has done something very un-Ontarian: He has lashed out at other provinces, like Alberta, blaming their success for his province's failures.

That will come as news to the hundreds of thousands of Ontarians who depend on the oilsands for work, on Bay St. and in manufacturing. But that's not the point.

The point of any zealot is to have an external enemy to blame.

Ontario doesn't need green energy. It needs cheap, plentiful energy — some of it from fossil fuels — and the jobs that will come with it.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

It's time to raise the curtain ...
Left-wing news website has activists make a puppet show featuring yours truly

A year and a half after my book, Ethical Oil, became a bestseller, foreign NGOs have struck back at me.

With a puppet show. Seriously.

A left-wing news website called The Tyee had some activists make a puppet show rap video mocking me and the oilsands.

It wasn't really funny, and it wasn't too musical. But it's tough to sound light-hearted when you're really angry. And the anti-oilsands left is angry these days because for the first time they're being scrutinized ­— including their sources of funds.

An extremist group in San Francisco called the Tides Foundation wired $15,000 to The Tyee to help fund their "tar sands" campaign. So The Tyee isn't an independent magazine ­— they're more of a lobby group. A puppet, which makes their puppet video a little bit Freudian. The fact they rely on foreign money says a lot about the lack of Canadian support for their ideas.

So far, no big deal. A big reason why we're better than oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Iran is that, unlike them, we allow free speech. Even billionaire bullies from San Francisco have free speech here. And there's no law against a Canadian website taking quiet cash payments.

But why should Canadian taxpayers have to subsidize this propaganda?

Because it's not just the Tides Foundation in San Francisco that's subsidizing this anti-oilsands attack. Tides has a branch-plant in Canada, too ­— Tides Canada, it's called. It is a registered charity with the Canada Revenue Agency.

Tides Canada lets donors launder their gifts through their Canadian charitable number, and pass the money right on to The Tyee to continue its anti-Canada, anti-oilsands propaganda.

But a magazine is not a charity. Attack videos aren't a charity. It's a business. Or maybe a political campaign. But that's different. That's specifically banned under our tax laws.

Tides Canada invites left-wingers to give them the money, get a Tides charitable receipt, and then they promise to pass the cash right on to The Tyee to do their attack journalism. They're not hiding it. They're boasting about it. They have their own website showing you how to do it.

The Tyee couldn't get a charitable number on its own. No problem, the Canadian branch plant of those San Francisco bullies will make a tax loophole for them.

That's what it is. A tax loophole. So wealthy left-wingers ­ from Canada or abroad ­ can give money, get a charitable tax credit and have it go to attack the oilsands, and to attack me. And that donation can be 100% anonymous.

That's called money laundering. It's scrubbing the identity of the donor, giving him a tax receipt, and passing the money on to a non-charity.

The Tyee positively boasts about it on their own website, saying their Tides money will go to contacting "decision-makers" and to "mobilize citizens to take action."

Sounds great, for a political party. But that ain't charity.

I don't have a beef with some loser lefties making a puppet show out of me.

Frankly, I'm flattered. I don't have a beef with them attacking Ethical Oil. ­ I love the fact that they're talking about my idea.

But I do have a beef with the Government of Canada allowing a San Francisco-based bully to set up a Canadian branch plant and play our charities directorate for a bunch of fools.

And it's especially infuriating, given that the Conservative government has recently condemned foreign billionaires for meddling in our democracy and attacking our oilsands.

But as long as this Conservative government gives Canadian charitable receipts for anti-oilsands propaganda groups like these puppet-movie makers, I think it's safe to say they're not really serious about cleaning up the problem at all.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Propaganda pap
Non-Sun media types have created a fake scandalette

After weeks of front-page coverage in the Ottawa Citizen, a massive public rally on Parliament Hill this weekend gave us a measure of the public's outrage with the Robocall scandal.

Let's just say a sparse crowd showed up, in the most political city in Canada.

Roughly the number of journalists at the Ottawa Citizen writing about the "scandal."

The NSM — the non-Sun media — regularly ignores rallies with hundreds, even thousands of people in attendance, if the purpose of those rallies is not to sell their newspapers.

Last year's March for Life — a non-partisan, pro-life rally — had more than 15,000 people show up on Parliament Hill last spring.

In fairness, the Citizen did put a postage-stamp sized photo of that protest on its front page, below the fold. It was an extreme close-up shot showing fewer than 10 people in attendance. Like looking through a telescope the wrong way.

But even the Ottawa Citizen couldn't make this gathering at the newspaper's anti-robot rally look good enough for their front page. So they chose instead a closeup of a rally in Montreal, where a few dozen anti-robot protesters had the media-savvy to stand close together. That, plus a screaming front-page headline, took up two-thirds of the front page of the Citizen yesterday.

Hey, don't knock it. It's tough to sell the Ottawa Citizen.

But a few protesters is still more than the number of Canadians who say they were tricked by robots into not voting in the last election.

That's the whole excuse for the NDP-Liberal attempt to get a do-over of the election in dozens of ridings: The allegation that misleading robotic phone calls were so persuasive that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of voters simply couldn't find their way to vote. And that Stephen Harper is a democratically illegitimate prime minister as a result.

And yet despite the barrels of ink dedicated to this manufactured scandal, not a single Canadian has come forward saying they were denied their vote. Not one. That's the difference between a fake, media-generated scandalette and something that real people care about. Real people didn't get fooled by the robots. And they're not being fooled by the NSM now, either.

Sure, there are some NDP front groups that have set up web pages trying to get every teenager, foreign citizen and online robot to click on a button to protest the election results. Some of these lobby groups have claimed tens of thousands of clicks. That's not activism — that's slacktivism. Pressing a button on a computer simply meant those activists didn't like the Conservatives, nothing more. Sunday's protesters prove that.

In fairness, in Canada's biggest city, there were several dozen protesters at the anti-robot rally. One of the keynote speakers was Zafar Bangash. Who's he? He's an anti-U.S., pro-Iran extremist in Toronto. My favourite Bangashism is his description of Israel as a "Zionist parasitical state." Listening to him is like reading a translation of the magazine Der Sturmer from the 1930s.

Bangash didn't just crash the anti-robot rally. He helped organize it. He was a keynote speaker at it. But that didn't fit the NSM's narrative of these rallies being filled with severely normal Canadians who were tricked by Harperbots into not voting.

The robot scandal is fake. The real scandal here is the media pack's propaganda.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

To be charitable, tax breaks for political activism stinks

On Thursday, a registered charity called Tides Canada was summoned before the Canadian Senate to answer for their political conduct.

You don't have to be a lawyer to know that political conduct and charity work are not the same thing.

Charitable tax status is for real charities. You know — training seeing eye dogs. Helping widows and orphans. Feeding the hungry.

But Tides Canada is a political charity. They take money from anonymous billionaires, including foreign interest groups, and funnel it to Canadian lobbyists who do baldly political things. Like fighting against the oilsands, and oil pipelines.

I don't know why that's legal. And neither does the Senate. So they're asking questions about it.

For example, one of the lobby groups that Tides Canada has funneled money to is the Dogwood Initiative in B.C.

Their chief lobbyist, Eric Swanson, boasted on national TV about signing up 1,600 people to oppose the oilsands pipeline to B.C. Their campaign was called "Mob the Mic" — as in jam the hearings with a bunch of Occupy Wall Street types, just to slow it down.

That's political activism, not charity. But he got Tides charity money for it — and the Canada Revenue Agency approved all this.

How's that legal?

Tides Canada, along with its U.S. parent, has funded 36 cookie-cutter anti-oilsands and anti-development lobby groups.

But when asked by the Senate about their anti-oilsands partisanship, they denied it. They fund 36 lobby groups — but they're not taking sides. I'm impressed that they said that without laughing.

Tides gives money to Forest Ethics, the ironically named extremist group.

Forest Ethics is part of the Rockefeller brothers' $7 million-a-year campaign against the oilsands.

Were the Tides executives even under oath when they told the Senate they weren't anti-oilsands?

Forest Ethics — I hate saying their name, because it's propaganda in itself — is famous for their campaigns to get companies to boycott Canadian oilsands product. Last December, they pressured Chiquita Banana to comply.

That ethically challenged company — recently convicted of supporting narco-terrorists in Latin America — announced they would stop using "tar sands" oil in their banana trucks.

How many Canadian jobs did that "charitable" project kill?

That's what Tides does with its charitable status. They fund lobby groups that pressure foreign companies to impose anti-Canadian economic sanctions.

Ironically, it was Grant Mitchell, a Liberal from Alberta, who made the best point in the Senate hearings. Mitchell was the failed Liberal leader in that province until he was given his patronage reward. He's a bizarrely anti-Alberta, anti-oilsands senator. But he made a rare good point last week: The Conservative government of Canada itself does projects with Tides Canada.

Mitchell's point was clever: How can Conservative senators be upset with Tides Canada's political activities, if the Conservative government itself participates in them?

Good point. And it's time to change that.

It's time to stop the practice that the only political groups in this country that are immune from scrutiny are environmental extremists.

Like any other lobbyist or partisan, we can and must question their conduct; their national loyalty; their funding; and their compliance with the law.

Foreign billionaires and their local lobbyists are just doing what we allow them to do — what Stephen Harper allows them to do.

It's a problem that foreign interests are trying to shut down our oilsands economy, the same way they went after our forestry industry and our aquaculture industry.

But it's a bigger problem that the Canada Revenue Agency is allowing them to do so, and give charitable receipts.

And that the federal government is working right alongside them.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Sorry, robots didn't highjack the election

The NSM - ­that stands for the non-Sun Media - ­thinks robots stole the last election for Stephen Harper by calling up Liberals and using their robotic powers to convince them not to vote.

The NSM is caught up in this conspiracy theory. It's become a mania. They've whipped each other up. It's a study in the madness of crowds, of pack thinking.

It's like the NSM's other bizarre obsessions. Like the long-form census that the Tories made voluntary. Or the NSM's obsession with unfounded rumours about our soldiers' treatment of Taliban prisoners; or the fake freak out over a common parliamentary procedure called prorogation; or, more recently, the fake freak out over the right to have gay divorces in Canada for gay marriages performed in other countries.

What all these fake scandalettes have in common is the NSM deciding, all together, that they've found some Watergate moment that will make them heroes and bring down the hated Conservatives. So any facts that contradict their central theory are discarded.

Today's narrative is that robots stole the election. They say Elections Canada admits that they've received "31,000 complaints" about robots so far.

You couldn't pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV without hearing that stat.

Except that's not what Elections Canada actually said. They said "more than 31,000 contacts have been initiated with Elections Canada by Canadians."

Thirty-one thousand contacts. Not 31,000 complaints. What's the difference?

It means recent form letters sent in by Liberals and NDPers complaining about the scandalette.

In fact, robots have become quite a fundraiser for them ­ and for a left-wing front group called Leadnow.ca -- http://leadnow.ca. They've set up a website automating complaints to Elections Canada.

Leadnow.ca is run by NDPers like Ian Capstick and Judy Rebick. Their "non-partisan" website has generated thousands of clicks on the Elections Canada website ­- just like clicking "like" on Facebook. It's enough for the NSM to scream that thousands of robot "complaints" are flooding in.

Even Americans are getting in on the game. Avaaz.org -- http://Avaaz.org -- a New York-based lobby group, has asked their members to contact Elections Canada, too. You'll remember Avaaz as the propagandists who tried to get the Sun News Network banned by the CRTC before we even broadcast a single minute on TV. They're asking their international membership to contact Elections Canada.

Talk about manipulating democracy.

But what did Elections Canada's actual 190-page report from the last election say?

It referenced hundreds of irregularities the 2011 election. Most of which were Elections Canada staff sleeping in or otherwise not showing up at a polling station on time. There were a few reports of shenanigans. But here's what they concluded, on page 3: "There was no conduct reported that would bring into question the integrity of the election result overall or the result in a particular riding."

In fact, their report calls media comments to the contrary "speculation."

So were there irregularities? There always are in a country of 34 million people and thousands of temporary Elections Canada workers. But Elections Canada concluded the results were not affected.

Why did the NSM not mention that Elections Canada concluded there was no change to the results?

Because that troublesome fact didn't fit their agenda.

Here's one more inconvenient fact. Not a single Canadian ­- not one ­- has come forward to say that some robot phone call made them miss out on voting.

Not a single Canadian was fooled.

Robots didn't fool you. Will the NSM?

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY

Iron Burka descends on Middle East
The term Arab Spring is a dead dream, too sad even to be called a joke

One of the cruelest facts about Saddam Hussein's dictatorship were his two sons, Uday and Qusay.

With Saddam's approval, Uday had descended to a Paul Bernardo level of evil.

It was well known in Iraq that beautiful women had to keep out of his sight, for if Uday wanted a woman he saw, he would simply order his secret police to bring her to him, and then he would rape her.

Even brides out in public on their wedding day. Especially them.

This barbaric act happened so often, Uday had "rape rooms" specially built.

That is the depravity from which Iraqis were rescued when the NATO-led coalition liberated them in 2003.

Now comes news that Syria's dictator, Bashar al-Assad, has rape rooms. A video of one of them — a container truck, into which women are frog-marched to their doom — is on YouTube depicting this horrific crime.

Retired Lt.-Col. Jonathan Halevi, an Arabic-speaking counter-terrorism expert who used to work for the Israeli Defence Forces, brought the stomach-turning video to my TV show last week.

But it's not Assad himself who is the rapist — at least that we know of. It's his soldiers. They gang-rape women — and, according to reports, select the particularly pretty ones for their commanders. Some of Assad's more human henchmen are reported to have actually defected to the rebels after witnessing such barbarism.

Is this an attempt to morally defeat the enemy through grief and horror?

Is it just the sexual expression of Assad's cult of violence and death?

Is it a last unbridled act by Assad's soldiers, sensing the approval of their masters and knowing that they may die soon enough and so, like the Red Army advancing on Berlin, they became less than men and barely more than animals? Whatever the reason, it doesn't matter.

So then it's settled: We are for the rebels.

Except there's one thing about that. Al-Qaida is part of the rebels. We know this in many ways, including that, in response to Assad's depravity, al-Qaida dispatched a suicide bomber against the Syrian government.

So, on the one hand, we have a murderous dictator who has killed more than 8,000 of his own citizens and now countenances indiscriminate rape by his own forces.

So he's a mass murderer and worse.

And on the other side, we have al-Qaida — an unrepentant death cult that murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and kills westerners and infidels to this day.

There are no good guys here. There are only two evils: Assad's evil, protected at the United Nations by their dear friends the Russians and Chinese.

And al-Qaida's evil, protected or financed by their dear friends the Pakistanis and Saudis.

It is a given that Bashar Assad will fall — Halevi says it's a matter of short months; other experts like Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum give him as long as two years.

I tend towards Halevi's prediction. But what is certain is that what replaces Assad will be no less totalitarian — it will simply add a layer of theocracy on top of the existing dictatorship that Assad, and his father before him, have wielded for decades.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. This is the pattern across the Arab world.

One short year ago, the naive fools of the consensus media looked at the riots in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and projected themselves onto the rioters.

Look, they use iPads and Twitter and Facebook, just like us! So they must be liberals and democrats just like us, too!

And there were some liberals there in Cairo's Tahrir Square, to be sure. But as is often the case, the gentle revolutionaries are quickly dispatched by the brutal ones. The phrase "Arab Spring" is a dead dream, too sad even to be called a joke. A new phrase must be coined.

Churchill looked at the Soviet Union strangling Eastern Europe and said an Iron Curtain was descending.

Given the theocratic nature of Arabia's revolutions, the "Iron Burka" might be more appropriate.

EZRA LEVANT, QMI AGENCY