And We Thought All We Had to Deal With Was Enbridge.

Nexen, the Chinese Communist Party's anchor in Athabasca, is urging Canadian National Railways to start shipping bitumen by rail car to Prince Rupert where it can then be loaded on supertankers for transport to the Peoples' Liberation Army and other users.

Apparently China is getting impatient with Comrade Steve's inability to make headway on the Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat and so they've taken matters in their own hands.  For some strange reason, opponents of the Northern Gateway aren't mollified by the proposal to ship bitumen across B.C. by rail.   This will give you some idea why:

Much of northern British Columbia is mountainous.  We don't build rail lines over mountains but around them, through the valleys.  Really scenic stuff.  Something else runs through those valleys - rivers.   You can blame that on gravity.  That's the same gravity that would send a bitumen spill in the same direction, downhill, right into those rivers as they wend their way inexorably to the sea or, as the Harper government calls it, "tidewater."

Now a little bit of bitumen goes a long way.   Just ask the people of Kalamazoo, Michigan.   The river in the picture isn't like the Kalamazoo River.   In Michigan, spill workers were dealing with a slow moving, soft-bottom, shallow river surrounded by open, level ground with easy road access.   As the photo above reveals we have very fast moving, very rocky bottom rivers, that are extremely hard to access and may not have a road anywhere nearby.   What the photo doesn't reveal is that these rivers are where our salmon come from.   They feed the spawning beds.

In oil spill recovery, rapid containment is the name of the game.   How in hell do you contain a bitumen catastrophe in a raging, mountain river in the wilderness of northern B.C. at all much less rapidly?

The totalitarian government's attitude (China, not Ottawa) seems to be 'just get the stuff to a northern port and our supertankers will take it from there'.   We're still back to the same supertanker threat as the Kitimat proposal but that's obviously no problem for the Beijing Politburo.   Like the Harper government, his Chinese masters could care less about coastal British Columbia.

And so, Canadian National, should they decide to accept Beijing's overtures, is as much a threat to British Columbia as Enbridge.  Just another fight.

Heather Sticks Her Bitumen Boot Up Harper's Backside

 It's gradually setting in.  Harper's capitulation to China's Communist rulers on Nexen is an admission of how much trouble the Tar Sands are really in.   The Toronto Star's  Heather Mallick wades into the Bully Boy's blunder on Nexen.

Harper couldn’t say no to China because he wants quick money for a tarsands industry that’s starting to look weak and because he’s an ideologue who thinks all business deals are good ones. Are the markets happy? Gosh, yes. Are Canadians of all political stripes pleased by increased foreign ownership of Alberta’s precious innards? Irrelevant.

Harper’s a bully at home, a wimp overseas. He happily torments environmentalists, refugee claimants, women, unions, public servants, you know, the locals. He ignores Parliament or prorogues it, and treats the Investment Canada Act — which states that foreign investment must benefit Canada — as a joke.

That’s his shtick and to be fair, it plays well, at least in the West. But when Harper the bully is faced with the biggest bully of them all, the power colossus that is China, he hands over our jewels, our natural resources.

Here, have some bitumen, he tells China, and laughs weakly.

The Harper government knows that approving the sale of Nexen — as well as the $6-billion sale of Progress Energy to Malaysian-owned Petronas — angers Canadians. Most of us could not map Malaysia’s industrial strategy nor indeed Malaysia. But we know China well because everything we own was made there and, frankly, it’s starting to grate.

China is implacable and the tarsands are wobbly. As the journalist Andrew Nikiforuk wrote recently in thetyee.ca, China’s funding of unbridled bitumen extraction will make the building of pipelines like Northern Gateway and Keystone financially necessary and therefore almost inevitable. It will turn Canada into “a bitumen plantation economy of oil, for oil, and by oil.”

As the U.S. (unwisely, I say) fracks for huge reserves of shale gas and Chinese economic growth inevitably slows, Alberta’s expensively refined oil-out-of-tar will be unsaleable. So let’s haul it out now, let fancy foreigners — not us — refine it and sell it cheaply. That’s Harper’s plan.

It’s a tragedy for Alberta and for Canada. Thanks to climate change, we have entered the most difficult and conflict-ridden century of human history. Fast cash from China won’t help. Chinese cash isn’t going into a sovereign fund, not even in Alberta. It will vanish.

It's stomach churning to know that Harper has committed Canada to pushing through the Northern Gateway regardless of opposition or the already rigged environmental review hearings.   That much was clear when he delivered Nexen into the Beijing Politburo's control long before the hearings are even concluded and while Enbridge continues to refuse to disclose who will ultimately own and control the pipeline itself.

Steve's Friday Night Special - China Gets Nexen

Steve Harper, whose credibility is beyond shredded, is pledging to Canadians that he'll never, never, ever, ever let the Chinese government corner a chunk of the Tar Sands - except for this one time.  Just this one.  No more.  Ever.  Promise.  Unless, of course, it's "exceptional."

While green-lighting the sale, Harper said the mounting wave of takeovers of Canada’s oilsands by foreign state-owned firms has gone far enough and will not be allowed to continue except in “exceptional” circumstances.

“To be blunt, Canadians have not spent years reducing the ownership of sectors of the economy by our own governments, only to see them bought and controlled by foreign governments instead,” Harper told the media after the announcement Friday.

“The government’s concern and discomfort for some time has been that very quickly, a series of large-scale controlling transactions by foreign state-owned companies could rapidly transform this (oilsands) industry from one that is essentially a free market to one that is effectively under control of a foreign government.”

Steve said Beijing's Northern Gateway reach around was just too sublime to refuse.   The Alberta government is beside itself with joy.   The Nexen sell-out obviously commits Harper to ramming through the Northern Gateway so those Chinese Tar Sands barons can get their sludge across the Pacific.   The gloves are off from here on in.