"Alberta is very much a petrostate," says journalist and author Andrew Nikiforuk. "It gets about 30 per cent of its income from the oil and gas industry. So as a consequence, the government over time has tended more to represent this resource and the industry that produces it, than its citizens. This is very typical of a petrostate."

The flow of money, he says, is at the heart of the issue. "When governments run on petro dollars or petro revenue instead of taxes then they kind of sever the link between taxation and representation, and if you're not being taxed then you're not being represented. And that’s what happens in petrostates and as a consequence they come to represent the oil and gas industry. Albert is a classic example of this kind of relationship."

In this interview with DeSmog, Nikiforuk explains the basics of his petrostate thesis and asks why Canada, unlike any other democratic nation, hasn't had a meaningful public debate about the Alberta oilsands and how they've come to shape the Canadian landscape, physically as much as politically.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

It turns out we have yet to reach peak oil, after all. And in this topsy-turvy world where the U.S. now produces more oil than it needs to import, it may be Prime Minister Stephen Harper's power that has peaked instead. Why? Because in his quest to build an "energy superpower," Harper tied his political fate to the price of Canadian crude.

Harper won his long-coveted majority in May 2011, with a simple promise to energy producers: he would do whatever necessary to get their wares to market. Higher export prices would unlock deeper, more marginal reserves. And for the Tories, the resulting spurt of growth could pay for tax cuts, helping to paper over voters' concerns about environmental tradeoffs. But Harper's plan, like a runaway oil train, is going off the rails.

The day before the last federal election, Canadian heavy crude was trading at $82.87 a barrel. Since then the price has gone up and down, only to end up right back where it started. Thanks to fixed-date election laws he himself brought in, Harper has at most 20 months to fulfill his promise to energy producers — or they will find someone else who can.

If your profits depend on getting crude oil to saltwater, you need the right political salesman. Right now those companies are looking for someone who can reboot Canada’s relationship with First Nations, maintain trust with voters and ultimately secure social licence for development. On all three, Harper is poised to fail. His current troubles may be largely self-inflicted, but they were set in motion by events beyond his control.

In the middle of the last decade, a technological revolution in U.S. oil fields inverted the logic on which North America's energy infrastructure was built. Instead of refineries around the edge of the continent sending imported petroleum inland, it's the interior that is suddenly brimming with oil and gas. Eventually those fracked wells will see their production drop off sharply, but for now the U.S. is swimming in high-grade crude. Canada's oilsands, more costly to extract and refine, have lost their lustre in all but the hungriest energy markets.

Harper's decline likely began in November 2011, with a nasty surprise from Barack Obama. The President announced he would push back his decision on the Keystone XL pipeline — indefinitely, it turns out. That "no-brainer" lifeline to heavy-oil refineries on the Gulf Coast was supposed to be open by now, draining nearly half the daily output of the oilsands on its own. That November, Harper met with the commander-in-chief in Hawaii to convey his grave disappointment. "In fact he was furious," reported Maclean's political editor Paul Wells.

According to Wells, "two days after the chat with Obama, at a meeting of cabinet’s priorities and planning committee in Ottawa, Harper handed out orders to a half-dozen ministers. Energy exports were the government’s new top strategic priority."

Why? Because Harper knew his political survival depended on the price of Canadian crude.

One of the people around that table was Peter Kent, who began using his platform as environment minister to gut any laws impeding the energy industry — all the while championing Canada's "ethical" oil. Of course, if refinery operators had the luxury of caring about human rights, they wouldn't buy oil from the places they do. What they care about are price and quality. On both fronts, oilsands producers find themselves at a disadvantage.

Eventually Kent's rhetorical gymnastics wore thin, and the hapless former newscaster was dismissed.

Another cabinet colleague was Denis Lebel, transport minister and Harper's lieutenant in Quebec. On his watch, rail companies ramped up their shipments of crude, in an effort to circumvent the slow approval process for pipelines. Then the Lac-Mégantic disaster struck, killing 47 people and prompting a backlash by municipalities. A week after the flames were finally put out, Lebel was shuffled off the transport portfolio. A string of derailments since has only deepened public anxiety over oil trains.

Another minister at that 2011 meeting would have been rookie MP Joe Oliver, a career investment banker chosen to quarterback the natural resources file. Less than two months after Obama sent the team scrambling for other pipeline routes, Oliver launched his attack on British Columbia's "radical groups," whom he implied were paid agents of shadowy foreign saboteurs. The episode galvanized grassroots opponents, adding friction to proposals across the country.

Seen through this lens, a pattern of events over the past two years comes into focus. The use of CSIS to spy on environmentalists and First Nations, on behalf of oil and gas companies. The use of the National Energy Board to stifle citizen input on project proposals. The use of the RCMP to break anti-fracking blockades at Elsipogtog. The use of millions in public money to buy ads for the energy industry.

With a four-year deadline, Harper bent the mandates of federal ministries and agencies to serve his "top strategic priority." And yet it's doubtful any new pipelines will be under construction before the next election. Meanwhile, international energy markets are shifting. On all fronts, time is running out.

Strongman tactics tend to conceal fear and weakness.

Harper's weakness stems from the pact he signed with energy exporters, while his fear is that voters' perception of Canada's economic performance will come unglued from his political brand. The irony is that one may be helping the other come true.

As University of Alberta economist Andrew Leach points out, despite Harper's outsized focus on oil and gas extraction, that sector now makes up less than seven per cent of Canada's GDP. Since the Conservatives took power in 2006, corporate taxes collected from the oil and gas industry have fallen from eight per cent of the total to 4.3 per cent.

All that political capital spent, for an industry that doesn't even pull its weight. Meanwhile, December's job losses brought the unemployment rate up to 7.2 per cent. Consumer debt has surged, while the income gap has only widened. Even if Harper's pipeline dreams come true, the resulting spike in crude prices could easily create more losers than winners.

It's not true that a rising tide of oil would float all boats. But if the price of Canadian crude falls, so too will Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Blame Canada is a four part series revealing how Canada has become a wealthy, fossil-fuelled energy superpower and an international climate pariah. Part 1 reveals Canada's emergence as a Petrostate, part 2 outlines Canada's climate crimes, and part 3 shows how energy 'wealth' contributes to the nation's poverty.

Canada's opposition to anything that might help developing countries is “mind-boggling” a delegate from Mali told me during a UN conference to slow the widespread extinction of species. “Canadians are known to protect the environment, I cannot understand why they are pushing policies that are clearly unsustainable," he said.

Only a few days before Prime Minister Stephen Harper told delegates that losing wildlife was an urgent and alarming issue. Then as nearly 190 nations made plans to take action, Canadian delegates blocked those plans with legal and technical manoeuvres.

“Do Canadians know what their government is doing here? You must tell them.”

That was in 2008. Since then at environmental or development gatherings around the world I've been asked dozens of times “what has happened to Canada?” And it's not just me.

“Wherever I travel in Africa people ask me, ‘what happened to Canada?” Joanna Kerr told the Globe and Mail March 30. Kerr, a Canadian, heads the global anti-poverty organization ActionAid.

It's no secret what's happened to Canada.

"Oil wealth has changed the culture of Canada, but there is no discussion about any of this,” says Alberta journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, author of the award winning book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. His latest book is The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude.

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Canada's media have avoided the issue or acted as cheerleaders of the energy sector. The tar sands are already too big and have had enormous impacts on Canada's politics, economy and environment, Nikiforuk says.

Energy Prosperity? Canadians earn only $100 for every $165 spent

All of Canada's newfound oil and gas wealth has ended up hurting most Canadians as documented in Part 3: The Bigger Canada's Energy Sector Gets the Poorer People Become. Canadians are poorer – one in seven children live in poverty – and hold enormous personal debts. Last year for every $100 earned, Canadian households spent $165. This is highest debt ratio in Canadian history.

While Canada's GDP has nearly tripled in the last 15 years, more than half a million manufacturing jobs vanished largely due to the high Canadian dollar amped up by energy revenues.

The huge amounts of money generated by the energy sector don't seem to stay in Canada given the evidence of huge governments deficits. Even oil-rich Alberta has had deficits the last six years. The federal and Alberta government response has been to make major cuts in public services like health care, education and environmental protection.

What's happening in Canada is the sacrifice of forests, rivers, wetlands and wildlife so one industry can profit by selling products that are polluting the global climate. In a mock trial at the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the CEOs of oil companies operating in the Alberta tar sands were found guilty of the international crime of ecocide for deliberate and extensive damage to the environment.

That verdict should not be surprising. As documented in Part Two: Canada's Plan to Get Rich by Trashing the Climate, the world's new energy superpower is betting its future on profiting from dumping two billion tonnes of climate-wrecking carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere by 2020 (Total emissions from extraction, processing and burning).

That's two billion tonnes of CO2 from Canada's energy sector alone. Add in emissions from all other sources of roughly 500 million tonnes and that's far more than India's total emissions, a country with 1.2 billion people and the world's third largest emitter.

You'd think it'd be hard to claim Canada takes climate change seriously.

“Canada is a global environmental leader … and yes, that includes the oil sands,” said Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver last March in address in Chicago.

The Alberta and Federal government seem to think no one reads George Orwell's 1984 any more

What Canada has actually become a leader in is gutting environmental protections and muzzling scientists. Stuffing gags in the mouths of government scientists was among the first things a Stephen Harper minority government did when they were elected in 2006. Scientists and other experts were told they had to get permission from the Prime Minister’s communications office to talk to media. Even when studies by Environment Canada scientists are publicly available in scientific journals, reporters have to file their science questions with the communications office who decide if scientists will answer.  The process takes days and sometimes weeks.

By 2010 media coverage of climate change in Canada declined by over 80% according to internal government documents obtained by the Climate Action Network (Canada), a coalition of 80 non-governmental organizations. Incidentally only weeks after Harper's election the coalition's funding was eliminated.

Even scientists in universities and independent research institutes hesitate to speak out. Thomas Duck, an atmospheric scientist at Halifax's Dalhousie University said he'd never again get federal funding for his research after speaking to me about the recent gutting of Environment Canada.

In 2011 the Harper government claimed financial hardship and slashed $200 million from Environment Canada's budget. The programmes targeted were those informing Canadians about the state of the environment and will have a direct impact on the health and welfare of Canadians, said Duck.

"I'm speaking out because these cuts will be very bad for my children," he added.

The muzzling of Canada's scientists has been widely criticized by international science organizations. This week Canada's Information Commissioner launched a formal investigation.

It may now be risky for ordinary Canadians to speak out in one of the world's most lauded democracies. The Harper government considers environmental activists potential threats to national security. Tar sands, gas wells, coal trains and pipelines are now conflated as essential to national security based on analysis of documents obtained by the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario

Those documents show that the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) view activist activities such as blocking access to roads or buildings as "forms of attack" and depict those involved as national security threats

It's the “new normal” for Canada's security agencies to keep a close eye on the activities of environmental organisations. Greenpeace Canada's executive director Bruce Cox, has had recent meetings with the head of the RCMP but Cox insists that it is “governments and fossil fuel industry who are the extremists, threatening the prosperity of future generations."

The world is finally figuring out what's happening to Canada.

“The Harper government's decisions reflect the narrow interests of Canada’s fossil fuel industry,” said Christoph Bals, policy director of Germanwatch, a German NGO focused on development and global equity.

Bals was referring to decisions to pull Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol, the only international climate treaty and last week's decision to abandon the UN organization fight to reduce drought and land degradation (UNCCD).

“That decision and the UNCCD decision do not reflect the majority of Canadians, in my opinion,” said Bals.

Perhaps the growing concerns by people outside of Canada will finally force more Canadians to cut through the curtains of corporate and government propaganda and ask themselves: “What has happened to my country?”

Image Credit: Tar sands refineries in Fort McMurray by Kris Krug, used with permission.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Blame Canada is a four part series revealing how Canada has become a wealthy, fossil-fuelled energy superpower and an international climate pariah. For Part 1, The Country has become a Petrostate, click here. For Part 2, Canada's Plan to Get Rich by Trashing the Climate, click here. For Part 4, What is Happening to Canada?, click here.

Few are aware Canada's GDP shot up from an average of $600 billion per year in the 1990s to more than $1.7 trillion in 2012. This near tripling of the GDP is largely due to fossil fuel investments and exports. However not many Canadians are three times wealthier. For one thing GDP is only a measure economic activity. The other reason is that little of this new wealth stayed in Canada. And what did stay went to a small percentage of the population, worsening the gap between rich and poor.

One of the hallmarks of a “petro-state” is that while a country's energy industry generates fantastic amounts of money, the bulk of its citizens remain poor. Nigeria is a good example. Canada's poverty rates have skyrocketed in step with the growth of the energy sector. One Canadian child in seven now lives in poverty, according to the Conference Board of Canada, the country's foremost independent research organization.

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Income inequality increased faster than the US, with the rich getting richer and poor and middle class losing grounds over the past 15 to 20 years, the Conference Board also reported January 2013.

"Most of Canada's increase in wealth went to the big shareholders in the resource industries,” says Daniel Drache, a political scientist at Toronto's York University. “It mainly went to the elites."

Drache argues that Canada has moved into a type of “reckless resource capitalism,” sacrificing innovation and creativity. Resource extraction industries like logging, mining or fossil fuel production create relatively few jobs, and most of them are short-term positions. Almost all of the equipment used in Canada for resource extraction is made by other countries.

Drache says Canada's economy has completely reversed from its high-tech days of the 1980s and 1990s and has returned to its colonial roots as a "resource-based economy selling rocks [minerals] and logs" — and now oil and gas.

The Petro-state Path to Poverty

The extraordinary wealth in one sector has been a disaster for the overall Canadian economy, according to another recent study. Up to 45 percent of job losses in Canada's manufacturing sector can be attributed to what economists call "Dutch Disease," wrote authors from Canada and Europe in a peer-reviewed paper published November 2012 in the journal Resource and Energy Economics.

Dutch Disease refers to the many examples where an increase in exploitation of natural resources coincides with a decline in the manufacturing sector. It was first documented in the Netherlands during its North Sea oil boom in the 1960s.

Canada's energy wealth has also exacerbated income inequality by spurring the cost of goods and services and making Canadian exports more expensive. Ten years ago, the Canadian dollar was worth about 65 cents on the US dollar. In recent years, the Canadian dollar has been on par with the US dollar, or even exceeded it in value.

The study in Resource and Energy Economics found that the "Canadian currency has been driven up by the prices of commodities." As the Canadian currency gained strength, more than a half-million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000. In 2011 Canada lost industrial plants at twice the pace of the United States.

"This illustrates a negative side-effect of the oil-resource richness in Alberta," the study’s authors concluded.

That is a conclusion the Harper government does not want to hear even though the study was commissioned in 2008 by a government department. Applying the term "Dutch Disease" to Canada has Harper officials saying it is an insult to the hard-working employees in the resources sector.

There's not many to insult. Relatively few Canadians work in the resources sector. It's all big machines and big money. The Alberta tar sands are the world's largest industrial project with investments in the hundreds of billions of dollars and only 20,000 people worked there in 2011. For all its rapid growth Canada's oil and gas sector created only about 16,500 new jobs between 2000 to 2011, the same period in which 520,000 manufacturing jobs were lost.

Canada's GDP has nearly tripled, its energy and resources sectors have never been bigger and yet governments are running huge and growing deficits. Meanwhile the federal and Alberta governments spend millions of dollars facilitating faster growth of the energy industry so it can rip more publicly-owned, irreplaceable oil, gas and coal out the ground. For whose benefit, Canadians ought to be asking.

Image Credit: Kris Krug via flickr.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Blame Canada is a four part series revealing how Canada has become a wealthy, fossil-fuelled energy superpower and an international climate pariah. Part 1 reveals Canada's emergence as a Petrostate, part 3 shows how energy 'wealth' contributes to the nation's poverty and part 4 asks What is Happening to Canada?

Like every other country in the world, Canada has promised to help keep global warming to less than 2 degrees C. However Canada's political and corporate leadership are committed to turning the country into a fossil-fuelled “energy superpower.” With a drug lord's just-providing-a-service hypocrisy Canada has openly declared it's future is tied to the profits from dumping hundreds of millions of tonnes of climate-heating carbon into the atmosphere every year.

And the world's new energy superpower plans to grow those annual emissions to 1.5 billion tonnes by 2020 giving one of the least populated countries a gigantic carbon bootprint.

Most of this climate-wrecking carbon energy will come from Canada's tar sands located just underneath the pristine boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta. The oil industry likes to call them “oil sands,” although there is no liquid oil only a tarry bitumen mixed deep in the sandy soil.

With an estimated 170 billion barrels, the tar sands are the third largest crude oil reserves. Extraordinary efforts involving colossal amounts of water, heat, chemicals and machinery are needed to get the bitumen out of the ground and into pipelines. This the world's largest industrial project with more than $300 billion invested since 2001 by the oil industry.

Nowhere has fossil energy expansion or investment been faster or larger. Environmental activists call it "Canada's Mordor."

While the tar sands may be located in Canada, more than two-thirds of all oil production is owned by foreign entities. China alone has put $36 billion into tar sands development. Now another $15.1 billion can be added with the Chinese state-owned firm CNOOC Ltd takeover of Calgary, Alberta oil and gas producer Nexen Inc in February.

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Even “Canadian” oil companies like Suncor are predominately owned by non-Canadians, which means that a majority of the industry's profits are sent out of the country, according to a recent analysis of stockholdings by a Canadian conservation group.

In 1999 the tar sands produced 300,000 barrels of heavy crude oil a day. Now it’s up to 1.6 million barrels a day, and expected to increase to 2.4 million by 2017 and 4 to 5 million a day by 2020. And there's much more to come. An incredible $2.077 trillion is expected to be invested expanding and maintaining the tar sands over the next 25 years, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute.

Virtually all of the current tar sands crude flows south to the US via existing pipelines. Increasing production requires new pipelines such as the controversial Keystone XL and Northern Gateway.

Keystone XL is TransCanada Pipelines $7 billion project is designed to carry 800,000 barrels of tarry, unrefined oil every day 2,400 kilometres south through the US heartland to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. Most of the refined oil is expected to go to non-US markets. Since it crosses national borders only President Obama can approve it by declaring that the pipeline serves US "national interest."

Obama's decision is expected this summer.

There are other pipelines proposals to move bitumen out of Alberta. The $5.4 billion TransMountain to bring up to 900,000 barrels to Burnaby, British Columbia. There are two proposals to go east all the way to Montreal and New England. One of these, Enbridge's “Line 9” proposal involves reversing the flow of a 37-year old pipeline. Public hearings are underway and it may be approved as soon as 2014. 

These pipelines are needed in order for tar sands to reach its expansion goals of 4 to 5 million barrels a day by 2020.

Fracking Up Canada's Wilderness

Although the tar sands gets most of the media attention, Alberta is also one the world's largest suppliers of natural gas from conventional and unconventional gas reserves. In 2000 there were less than 100 gas wells that tapped "unconventional" natural gas. Today Alberta Environment, a provincial agency, counts 176,000 multistage hydraulic fracturing sites. US EPA estimates 35,000 wells are fracked in the US each year.

For two decades Alberta ranchers and farmers have been dealing with water and air contamination from oil and gas drilling. “What used to be a pleasant farming landscape just five years ago has morphed into a semi-industrial area. There are now more than twelve oil and gas sites within a four mile radius of the farm,” writes Paul Slomp about his family's farm.

Farmers and other landowners will no longer be able to refuse oil and gas activity on their land under Alberta's Bill 2, the “Responsible Energy Development Act.” Under this law landowners will no longer have their concerns heard at public hearings nor can they appeal to an independent review panel. Bill 2 and other laws are forcing Alberta's agriculture communities to shift from food production to resource extraction says Slomp.

British Columbia The New LNG Empire

Next door to Alberta is the province of British Columbia (BC), world famous for its pristine and rugged wilderness. BC's northeast is where some of the biggest shale gas operations in North America are getting started. Shale rock formations there contain hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that can only be tapped by fracking.

BC's Horn River basin may hold 165 trillion cubic feet of gas while another region called Montney is estimated to have 49 trillion cubic feet, according to an April 2011 report by the US Energy Information Administration.

"Northeastern British Columbia is a key habitat for grizzly bears, caribou and others. Fracking operations are moving into untouched areas, building roads, drill pads and wastewater ponds," says Tria Donaldson of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, an environmental NGO based in Vancouver.

About 90 percent of the gas currently produced in British Columbia is exported to US or sent to Alberta, where it is used to boil the tarry bitumen out of the millions of tons tar sands. A massive expansion of shale gas operations is underway due to the recent approvals to build a liquefied natural gas plants (LNG) on BC's coast, at Kitimat. Korea Gas, Shell, Mitsubishi Corp and Petro-China are involved in a $12 billion project to liquefy 1.2 billion cubic feet per day and load it on LNG tankers for lucrative Asian markets.

At least nine other multi-billion dollar LNG export terminals have been proposed. The BC government is banking on having five export terminals operational by 2020 and collect a yearly royalty and tax bonanza estimated at $6 to $7 billion, or about 15% of the government's current budget.

As with Alberta's tar sands, the scale of BC's proposed gas development is staggering. Roads, well pads, disposal pits, pipelines, worker's housing would affect and fragment 7,500 sq km of land — an area nearly three times the size of Metro Vancouver.

The massive increase in fracking will put new burdens on the region’s fresh water resources. "Fracking is using huge amounts of fresh water in a region that suffers water shortages," Donaldson says.

Millions of liters of water are needed for each well. The gas industry has obtained rights to take 275 million liters every day from local rivers, lakes and streams. In 2011 sixteen companies were fined in for failing to account for how much water they were taking. According to media reports, the fines were less than $1,000.

Water holding facilities in BC. Images from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report, Fracking Up BC.

“Green ” Vancouver North America's biggest exporter of coal

Canada is also tapping into its coal deposits, the fifth largest in the world. Close to 30 million tons of coal exported each year mostly from from BC and Alberta.

BC is also Canada's main coal export hub, with three coal export terminals including Westshore, the busiest coal export terminal in North America. However the Port of Vancouver plans to double its coal exports and build another coal terminal on the Fraser river, turning the “green city” of Vancouver into North America's biggest exporter of coal.

Despite pledges to act on global warming, Canada intends to add billions of tonnes of CO2 to the overheating atmosphere. Four million barrels per day of tar sands oil by 2020 translates into one billion tons of CO2 over a year from tar sands extraction and burning the resulting fuels. Add in Canada's natural gas production – estimated at half billion tons of CO2 annually by 2020 for production and burning. Top it off with 80 to 100 million tonnes of CO2 from coal and 'normal' domestic emissions of half a billion tonnes and viola: Canada the 2.0 billion-tonne CO2 monster.

Keeping global temperatures below 2C requires a global CO2 diet that sheds 6 to 10 billion tons below 2011 levels by 2020 according to the latest science. And the diet must continue to push emissions lower every year thereafter.

What's Canada's excuse going to be to the world and future generations?

Lead blog image credit: ERCB. Tar Sands photo: Kris Krug via flickr.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is part 2 in a series. For part 1, click here.

Hugo Chávez first stormed the spotlight in Venezuela as the leader of an unsuccessful coup attempt against the government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992. Realizing that the coup had failed, Chávez admitted defeat on national television, famously vowing to try again before being shipped off to prison.

According to the ethical oil version of history, the story essentially stops here: an aspiring dictator attempts to seize power and fuel his despotic rule with ill-gotten oil money. Though Chávez would only take office in 1999 in democratic elections, he wore the authoritarian label until the end of his days. As usual, however, reality is more complex than the Canadian oil lobby would have you believe.

Venezuela before Chávez was a country marred by corruption, poverty and institutional decay, administered by a two-party oligarchy that took turns in power. Long kept afloat by oil revenues, the economy went into crisis in the 1980s as petroleum prices fell. President Pérez responded in 1989 by reversing his election promises and enacting IMF-mandated market reforms, including a wave of mass privatizations and the removal of crucial food and fuel subsidies. During the resulting rioting among the urban poor, Pérez called in the army, killing over 3,000 civilians in what came to be known as the Caracazo massacre.

Chávez emerged as a leader out of the turmoil of Caracazo and the Venezuelan resistance movement against austerity. Privatization and market reforms have a long and ignoble history on the South American continent; they tend to be imposed through the barrel of a gun.

From Pinochet’s bloody 1973 coup in Chile to the Argentinian military junta, violent state repression has often been used to accomplish what democracy could not: the elimination of social protections and the selling off of state assets to foreign investors.

After his election in 1999, Chávez sought to chart a different course for Venezuela, and he began by calling a constituent assembly to create a new constitution. The constitutional process, which incorporated indigenous groups, women’s rights advocates and urban social movements, produced an ambitious document that was approved by nearly 80 percent of the population in a referendum.

The drafting of the new constitution began a contradictory process that would define Chávez’s presidency. One the one hand, new mechanisms for direct democracy alongside commitments to health care, education and welfare empowered millions of deeply impoverished Venezuelans formerly shut out of politics. On the other hand, the staunch opposition of the oligarchy, supported by anti-Chávez media both at home and abroad, meant that Chávez often resorted to moves like stacking the judiciary in order to maintain his power in office.

Many of the programs implemented under Chávez were innovative attempts at addressing long-entrenched social problems. He created a vast series of reforms called Bolivarian Missions that opened free medical clinics, massively expanded social housing, improved literacy rates and worked to reform land rights and establish food sovereignty.

While these social programs are routinely dismissed as mere patronage handed out by an oil-soaked populist, they functioned as genuine forums for direct democracy, empowering citizens to make decisions about the best uses of government funds through local debate. These programs were not all successful, nor were they able to transform Venezuelan society overnight. But for those they reached, the Bolivarian Missions made a big difference in their lives.   

Like all petro-states, Venezuela is a nation whose politics are defined by its most valuable commodity.

Yet while the petro-states of the Middle East have used their oil wealth to enrich a tiny elite and build vast monuments to unsustainable affluence (e.g., Dubai’s indoor ski resort), Venezuela under Chávez used its control of the nationalized oil industry to make meaningful improvements in the lives of its poorest citizens.

Since Chávez was first elected president in 1999, poverty has fallen from 42.8 percent of households to 26.7 percent, and extreme poverty has declined from 16.6 percent to 7.0 percent. The Gini coefficient, a measurement of wealth inequality, has fallen from 0.469 to 0.39, a drop that makes Venezuela’s income distribution the most equal in Latin America.

The routine demonization of Chávez by his ideological opponents, including the ethical oil camp, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Dismissed as an elected dictator, Chávez repeatedly won re-election in polls that Former US President Jimmy Carter has rated as the freest and fairest in the world. Accused of taking over the media and silencing his critics, Chávez’s state-run broadcaster actually commands a mere 5-8 percent of market share.

The corporate media, by contrast, is staunchly opposed to his redistributive policies, and played a key role in fomenting a coup attempt against him in 2002. That coup was only stopped when hundreds of thousands of Chávez supporters took to the streets demanding the president’s return to office.

Venezuela under Chávez was no socialist paradise, and the road ahead for the country will be difficult. It faces high rates of violent crime, rising inflation and diminished revenues from oil production—not to mention deep ideological divisions over the future of the country.

But neither was Chávez’s Venezuela the embodiment of evil that Ezra Levant would have us believe.

No matter how you evaluate Chávez’s legacy, he can no longer function as the cartoon villain that legitimizes the tar sands.

Canada is facing a series of stark choices about its energy future. The choice is not between green, friendly Canadian bitumen and the tar of tyrants. Oil markets make those decisions without a single thought for ethics. If we’re going to face up to the reality of climate change, it’s time to stop pointing fingers abroad.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Blame Canada is a four part series revealing how Canada has become a wealthy, fossil-fuelled energy superpower and an international climate pariah. Part 2 outlines Canada's climate crimes, part 3 shows how energy 'wealth' contributes to the nation's poverty and part 4 asks What is Happening to Canada?

What's happened to Canada? To the dismay of many a country with an international reputation for relatively progressive environmental policies (at least compared to the United States) is rushing headlong to dig up all the oil, gas, and coal it can. The country’s leaders can scarcely muster the effort to pretend to want to limit climate-heating carbon emissions. And the Canadian business establishment and media have largely gone along with the program. Put it all together, and you have a country that has become a full-blown “petrostate.”

People are starting to notice. Last December at the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar, Canada beat out tough contenders like Saudi Arabia to be elected "Colossal Fossil" by environmental organizations from around the planet. Canada had the dishonor of being the most uncooperative country out of 193 nations at the climate summit. It was the sixth year in a row that international environmental groups gave Canada their 'highest' award for its persistent efforts to block any agreement on reducing carbon emissions.

What's happened to Canada is that it has experienced a steady takeover by the fossil fuel industry. Canada's is now the world's fifth largest crude oil producer and the biggest supplier of oil to the US. Canada is also the third largest producer of natural gas and one of the top ten miners of coal. This enormous boom in fossil fuel production has been underway since the late 1990s. Like Saudi Arabia, fossil energy is by far Canada's biggest export and has become the dominant economic and political focus.

The emerging energy superpower

Newly-elected Prime Minister Stephen Harper made this perfectly clear in 2006 when he proudly proclaimed Canada as "the emerging energy superpower" during a G8 meeting. Harper, the son of an oil company executive, heads the Conservative party that has pulled Canada sharply to the right. Prior to entering politics, Harper was the climate-change denying head of a right-wing lobby group. Not surprisingly, his government has done little to reduce Canada's carbon emissions, which are among the fastest growing in world. By contrast, US emissions declined in recent years.

But it’s not the only difference between the two countries. Financial support for clean energy has been a consistent priority of the Obama Administration. In Canada, the federal government has effectively ended its support for new renewable energy production and for residential energy efficiency improvements while continuing to give the oil and gas industry $1.4 billion in annual subsidies.

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Even as Canadian carbon emissions rise, the Harper government is shutting down some of the country’s few remaining “green” programs. In 2012, the government cancelled a popular home energy retrofit program. The retrofit program reimbursed costs of up to $5,000 for improving energy efficiency in homes. It was unexpectedly cancelled with more than half its budget — $200 million — unspent.

Not surprisingly Canada's climate change policies rank at the very bottom, 58th out of 61 countries, beating only Kazakhstan, Iran and Saudi Arabia according the 2013 Climate Change Performance Index (pdf).

With a majority government Prime Minister Harper doesn’t have to contend with the checks and balances (and filibuster rules) that President Obama faces. If the PM wanted to put a strong climate policy package in place, he could do so tomorrow.

Instead Canada pulled out the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. Under the 1997 Kyoto agreement Canada promised and was legally bound to reduce its CO2 emissions by six percent compared to 1990 levels by the end of 2012. (Note: CO2 and carbon are used here interchangeably. Burning fossil fuels are by far the largest source of Canada's emissions, i.e. +90%.)

"My early Christmas present to myself — and to Canada — was to exercise our legal right to get out of the Kyoto Protocol," Peter Kent, Canada's Minister of the Environment, said in a speech in Calgary, Alberta.

“It really wasn't a tough decision," Kent said.

Canada's 2012 emissions were around 26 percent above 1990 levels mainly due to expansion of the tar sands. They're going to be far higher. During the two weeks following Kent's self-gifted Xmas present, Canada handed out very big presents to oil giants Exxon, France's Total, and Canada's Suncor by approved expansions of their tar sands operations. Those multi-billion-dollar expansions are expected to increase tar sands oil output by one million barrels per day in 2020. With 450 kg of climate-heating CO2 locked in every barrel, plus the additional CO2 emissions from extraction and processing the tarry bitumen, just these three projects will dump an additional 200 million tons of climate-wrecking CO2 into the atmosphere every year.

That's more than the annual emissions of sizeable economies such as Argentina or the Netherlands.

Oddly enough, 88 percent of Canadians believe their country should protect the environment even if this slows economic development according to an October 2012 survey by Environics Institute. Most Canadians are even willing to pay (pdf) higher taxes for solutions to combat climate change.

"Canada has become a 'petrostate,'" says Alberta journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, author of the award winning book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. A petrostate is a country where much of the wealth comes from oil.

"The Canadian and Alberta governments now lobby on behalf of the oil industry and fight any restrictions on carbon emissions to combat climate change," Nikiforuk says.

Canada's federal government collected about one billion dollars in 2011 in corporate taxes from the tar sands industry. It does not receive royalties. The province of Alberta where the tar  sands and much of the oil and gas industry is located receives about $10 billion a year in revenues from the oil and gas industry from 1999 to 2008 according to the Parkland Institute, an independent research centre at the University of Alberta. Those revenues are now estimated to be more than than one-third of Alberta's $40 billion annual budget.

Hooked on energy dollars, the Canadian and Alberta governments only make decisions that favour growth of the energy industry, Nikiforuk says.

Click here for Part 2 of Blame Canada.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.