Canada: Corrupt Petrostate?
At least that’s what I’ve heard (hat-tip, Anatoly):
Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of rampaging Neanderthals to trample all over it. Timber companies were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government’s scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.
That’s a bit alarmist, in my opinion. And disingenuous - Japan is a much bigger economy whose industrial history (along with the US and Europe) created the markets to which Canadian resource industries are responding. Any nation with that sort of resource-to-population ratio is going to respond in kind (Australia, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa being cases in point).
It’s not Canada’s job to change the world. Right now, I’d say that job is squarely in the hands of the US, EU and the BRICs. They are the market for Canada’s resources.
The local food movement was an end-user response to an amoral market. If Canada’s resource consumers want Canada to stop selling nasty, dirty, destructive stuff, they need to start shopping for an alternative.
Posted: December 3rd, 2009 under Canadophilia.
Comments
Comment from Марк
Time 21 December 2009 at 11:55 am
Thats, very very interesting. Thank, you for the, information.
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Comment from Laura
Time 20 December 2009 at 7:08 pm
BC citizens are alarmed by, Gordon Campbell, selling our natural resources to the USA. He also shipped our mills to China. I concur there will be a food shortage. People in my community, are going underground, to feed ourselves. Winter greenhouses, and a local supply of meat, chickens and eggs. etc. I guess marketing our resources to other country’s is fine. However, outright selling our resources to other country’s control and to privatize sales of resources, is one big, bad mistake. There will be no way to recover from the recession, without, our natural resources, to do so.