Terry Glavin: Ottawa’s energy policy, as ghost-written by Beijing

Terry Glavin | January 26, 2012
More from Terry Glavin

REUTERS/Hamed Jafarnejad/FarsIran's Navy Commander Habibulah Sayari announces a 10-day war game in the Strait of Hormuz. China has become Iran's biggest customer, helping to prop up the regime against western sanctions.

 

 

Why is Stephen Harper allowing energy policy to be ghost-written in China?

Last August, the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China appointed the ambitious and aggressive Wang Tianpu as president of the Sinopec Group, the seventh-largest corporation on Earth and the absurdly corrupt and ravenous behemoth that is the main money, so far, behind the $6 billion Enbridge Inc. plan to punch a pipeline from Alberta’s oilands to the B.C. coast at Kitimat.

Just how Sinopec became co-author of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s new foreign policy and energy strategy isn’t a question any of us are supposed to be asking. There are other questions I intend to keep chasing in the coming days, but here’s a taste .

It was Sinopec that spent $2 billion on an outright purchase of the Alberta oil and gas firm Daylight Energy late last year. A direct Beijing foothold – this was a first for Canada’s oilfields. But it was an earlier $2-billion Sinopec takeover of Vancouver’s Tanganyika Oil that won Beijing its first big piece of Syria’s Oudeh oilfields, and that’s how Sinopec provides the sanctions-busting revenues that allow the delusional mass murderer Bashar al-Assad to hang on in Damascus.

It’s the same game Sinopec has been playing in Sudan, keeping the genocidaire Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum instead of in the prisoner’s dock at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. But here’s where it gets really ugly. China is now Iran’s number one trading partner. Sinopec is now Iran’s main buyer of crude oil. Tehran has managed to avoid the bite of Euro-American sanctions aimed at curbing the ayatollahs’ nuclear ambitions. Sinopec is the reason why the sanctions are failing. If sanctions fail, it will almost certainly mean war.

Another question.

In the summer of 2010, Richard Fadden, the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, got in big trouble for saying that politicians in at least two provinces were under “foreign influence” and China was funding political activism in Canada. Fadden followed up with a detailed memorandum to his boss, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. He named names. Toews knows who the politicians are that Fadden was talking about. Prime Minister Harper must surely know.

Who are they, exactly?

National Post

Terry Glavin is the Harvey Stevenson Southam lecturer in journalism at the University of Victoria. His most recent book is Come From the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle For Peace in Afghanistan.