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All hail the Supreme Leader

I can't believe our Supreme Leader, Uncle Steve Harper, doesn't favour legalizing drugs... all drugs.
opinion_maxedout1

I can't believe our Supreme Leader, Uncle Steve Harper, doesn't favour legalizing drugs... all drugs. If drugs were oil — Albertan oil — we'd all be able to shuffle over to 7-Eleven and buy a hit of smack and a pipe or two of crack to speed it on its way.

Alberta's hooked. The province is so strung out on the stuff they've already sold their soul and future to keep it flowing through their veins. And like the junkie in any family, they're not giving a second thought to stealing everyone else's future and happiness, to help pay for their next fix. Nothing else matters when the monkey's screaming in your ear to be fed.

Unlike your run-of-the-mill street junkie though, Alberta's both a user and big-time supplier. It's not enough they're hooked on the stuff, they've got to have everybody hooked on it and in ever increasing quantities.

Our Supreme Leader is in the unusual position of being both beholden to them and being their number one dealer, pimp and protection. If they kick, he's kicked... out of power and down the road towards the dustbin of history. There's nothing he wouldn't do to keep them high and strung out, keep that rich, black gold flowing through their veins and into everyone else's.

Supreme Leader is willing, even enthusiastically giddy about selling whatever your concept of that nebulous entity, Canada, is if it means keeping Alberta high. Democratic institutions? Individual rights? Provincial powers? Clean air, clean water? Gone, gone, gone and gone. Can't spend 'em. Got no cash value. Here, take this nickel bag and you won't miss 'em; hell in a few weeks, especially if hockey starts up again, you won't even remember you ever had 'em.

After all no one much cared when the Supreme Leader's first Omni-Bus left the station last spring, loaded down with so much baggage it couldn't even make it up hills Whistler's hydrogen busses can handle. Somewhere on board was a budget. It was hard to find considering what else was crammed in like commuters on a Tokyo subway. The cheap seats were taken by muzzled scientists who couldn't speak out about their work or the funding Baby Doc Harper had just pulled out from under them. The no-longer-endangered species that had just had open season declared on them were hiding under the seats. The ghosts of environmental protection were at the back of the bus and, of course, the radical environmentalists were simply left waiting by the side of the road for their own bus to take them back to whatever foreign lands funded them.

The good seats, the ones with a view of the road ahead and cute hostesses serving drinks and snacks, were reserved for the expedient measures that would gut environmental review and oversight, pave the way for Northern Gateway other projects designed to keep the junkie happy and, driving the bus as it turns out, was the Son of Mao who was smoothing the road for the Supreme Leader's Next Big Thing — the ultimate sellout of Canada and The Other provinces.

That ultimate sellout? The Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Act (FIPPA, perhaps better referred to as FLIP-YA, as in off). Before even wondering about the question of how and why FIPPA is likely to sell Canadians down the river to China, we might pose the question of why the Supreme Leader is so damn anxious to promote and protect foreign investors to begin with.

The answer is simple — the junkie's habit has grown so big that all the smack in Canada isn't enough for it. If it doesn't get more from offshore, especially more of that good China White, it'll start to crawl up walls. Or worse yet, it'll start to descend into economic recession. And as we all know, there is no higher deity in the Supreme Leader's firmament than economic growth and prosperity... regardless of how short-term or short-sighted it may be.

While Canadians were generally making fun of our close cousins in the U.S., laughing at their sub-prime hi-jinks, feeling a bit self-righteous about how much more stable our banks were than their banks — when did you ever imagine Canada's banks would be a source of pride? — and wondering when they turned governance over to comedy writers and sideshow barkers, a strange thing happened. Part fallout from the recession, part loosened environmental standards, part new technology, oil consumption in the U.S. declined and production increased.

And while our biggest foreign market will likely never completely lose its need for Canadian oil, the Obama administration's decision to cancel — delay — approval of the Keystone XL pipeline expansion scared the junkie, well, not straight, but straight to the Supreme Leader. "If they don't buy this stuff, who will?" they cried.

Andrew Nikiforuk, writing on The Tyee recently, summed the situation up nicely when he wrote, "...Alberta has flooded the market with bitumen due to bad planning, low royalties and sheer stupidity, Harper is frantically trying to save his Tory cohorts and their special petroleum interests by peddling bitumen to Asian refiners at any cost. He's prepared to sell out Canada in the process."

Even though Alberta is overbuilt and is producing bitumen no one wants except China, they want to build more, produce more, sell more. And the only ones strategic and greedy enough to pony up the capital are China and the Supreme Leader.

Enter FIPPA. Hammered out in dark back alleys, signed in Russia and kept off the radar until recently, FIPPA will, barring a miracle, come into effect November 1swith no parliamentary discussion or debate, no public consultation, no explanation and no way to wiggle out of its Sinocentric shackles for the first 15 of its 31 year reign.

It will tie the hands of Canada's provinces with respect to successfully enforcing legislation viewed as harming Chinese investors' investments, for example successfully blocking the Northern Gateway pipeline. Sure, provinces can pass the legislation but Chinese investors can bring actions to have those laws set aside and/or impose punitive monetary damages. And those actions will be heard and decided in closed-door arbitration panels, not Canadian courts of law. Don't like the decision of the arbitrators? Too bad; they're not subject to appeal or review by Canadian courts.

While that's just one scary shortcoming of FIPPA, the irony is it may not be a bad treaty. Or it may be a horrible treaty. We don't know and the Supreme Leader doesn't want us to know, doesn't care if we know, doesn't care if we have an opinion and, frankly, doesn't care how it may impact Canada and Canadians over the course of its long future. The only thing that matters is that it keeps the sludgy bitumen of the country's junkie-in-chief flowing out and the money flowing in.

All hail the Supreme Leader, Chairman Harper. Can't wait for the large picture banners to go up in the public squares.