A Hiatus From My Hiatus.

Back to my Ottawa Citizen column today about this.

The thing to notice is that what the federal Conservatives share with the Opposition New Democrats and Liberals is a comical inability to open their mouths on these subjects without insulting the intelligence of nine out of 10 Canadians. That’s the proportion of us who showed up in a February Harris Decima survey to affirm the obvious, which is that encouraging Beijing’s police-state racketeers to take over Canadian oilsands corporations — this is the core of the “national energy strategy” on offer, by the way — is unpardonably stupid and reckless. 

Beijing’s blood money is the only reason why the Enbridge pipeline idiocy is a serious prospect in the first place, but we’re expected to believe that’s beside the point. The NDP leadership is afraid that mounting a robust critique of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s $15.1-billion, way-above-market bid for Calgary’s Nexen Inc. might diminish the ability of the party’s doofus faction to throw “Sinophobia” mud pies at people.

The Liberal party remains beholden to party financiers who have been up Beijing’s backside for so long that Liberal windbags have become practised in the magical art of droning on for hours about the Chinese mess Canada has found itself in and everyone forgets everything they said the second they shut up. 

Meanwhile, as a Forum Research poll found in April, there are now fewer than one in five of us who believe that Prime Minister Stephen Harper puts Canada’s interests ahead of the interests of oil company shareholders. So Conservatives prefer to keep mum, too, saying only that the CNOOC proposition will be subjected to a “net benefit” test which everybody knows is completely bogus.

Former industry minister Jim Prentice helpfully admitted as much the other day. The test is useless precisely because it was “intended to be,” he said. Applying the Investment Canada Act’s “national security” test to the CNOOC bid will set off a similar charade because that’s what it’s intended to be, too. 

When the Act was amended in 2009, the federal cabinet ruled out any definition of “national security” and explicitly rejected recommendations to conduct national security reviews according to “concrete,” “objective” and “transparent” criteria. Just trust us, we know what’s best.

Meanwhile, don't get too self-righteous, hippies:

"In some ways, American liberals, even American radicals, have more in common with the Reagan right than they do with us. All of them, the whole bunch, are middle-class, Emersonian individualists. Emerson, Thoreau, all of these guys are scabs. Lane Kirkland [then the very Establishment president of the AFL-CIO] is outside the American consensus in a way that even Abbie Hoffman never was." 

 - from Which Side Are You On? by Thomas Geoghegan, Chicago labor lawyer.

"'Do your own thing' is not so different than “every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it, whether that means smoking weed and watching porn and never wearing a necktie, retiring at 50 with a six-figure public pension and refusing modest gun regulation, or moving your factories overseas and letting commercial banks become financial speculators. The self-absorbed “Me” Decade, having expanded during the ’80s and ’90s from personal life to encompass the political economy, will soon be the “Me” Half-Century." - Kurt Anderson.

Found here: "Individualism, Solidarity and the Love that Dare NotSpeak Its Name:"