OK. So I was wrong.

When Christy Clark became the latest Con stooge to denounce Thomas Mulcair,  for simply pointing out that the Dutch Disease is killing our manufacturing sector, I said it could only mean one thing.

Big Oil and its Con puppets were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

But I forgot I was living in the sinister petro state of Harperland.

Where the bottom of the dirty oil barrel goes all the way to China.

And I forgot about the Con Senate, and particularly Pamela Wailin’ . . .

“This is a cheap political ploy to pit eastern citizens against those in the West. Will Mulcair next attack the lentil business, the wheat and grain producers who have long fed the world — or perhaps the potash industry that allows the poor to bolster their depleted farmland in overpopulated areas?

“It’s time for Mulcair to act like a Canadian.”

And that like the Con turkey Mike Duffy, Wallin is capable of saying ANYTHING.

I mean can you believe that? As if Big Lentil is as dangerous as Big Oil. As if Mulcair wasn’t right. As if telling the truth was a crime.

These diatribes against anyone who even acknowledges potential downsides or side effects of the bitumen boom seem to herald a new, dangerous tendency in Canada’s political culture. Opposing a bitumen-exporting pipeline in Canada these days makes you a foreign-financed subversive. And it seems that questioning the economic effects of the bitumen export strategy makes you equally seditious. I call this “energy McCarthyism,” and it should be rejected forcefully not just by those concerned with Canada’s de-industrialization and staples dependency, but by those worried about the quality of our democracy.

As if those Cons weren’t selling us out to foreign interests. As if Albertans haven’t been screaming at those damn Easterners for 40 years over the National Energy Program. Which did to Alberta what Harper’s oil pimp policies are doing to the rest of Canada.

Which explains why the Cons and the other Big Oil stooges are attacking Mulcair like piranhas. They know a killer issue when they see one. But why is Stephane Dion joining in the feeding frenzy?

Stéphane Dion, the former Liberal leader, says he turned down a proposal from advisors to accuse Prime Minister Stephen Harper of favouring Alberta and the oil sands industry during the 2008 election campaign because he feared it would harm national unity.

He said Mr. Mulcair is effectively “giving up” on much of Western Canada and, if he forms a government in 2015, risks having little or no representation from provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan in his Cabinet.

Oh boy. When will he ever learn…

What Thomas Mulcair understands so well. He doesn’t have to win any seats in Alberta or Saskatchewan. All he has to do is win most of the seats in Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec, and he will BURY the Cons in the Tar Sands.

Which is one of the reasons he’s looking like a winner, and thanks to people like Stephane Dion, the Liberals are going nowhere.

Liberal support in Canada is steadily slipping as the New Democrats and Tories continue to battle for the top spot, the results of an exclusive poll for Global News indicate.

While the Grits may say that their troubles lie in finding the right candidate to lead the party, Ipsos Reid’s Darrell Bricker suggests the party may be losing a distinct voice in the political arena.

“The problem they’ve got is that they’re having a hard time finding their place in a debate about economic issues,” Bricker told Global News.

Yup. Mulcair is ruthless, the kind of leader these times demand. 

He has found a mighty issue, the truth is on his side. That’s why the Cons are running scared.

For 40 years Alberta used regional alienation like a blunt weapon.

Now it’s our turn . . .

By Frank Moher

The sacking of four instructors in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Keyano College in Fort McMurray is creating an uproar well beyond the city better known for its resource extraction talents. Artists, of course, are well aware that their masters — whether they be cabinet ministers or academic administrators — can swoop in at any moment and remove the struts that support not only individual work but entire cultural communities. What’s prompting the shock in Alberta’s artistic community (and give it a day and I expect it will be nationwide) is the way in which the swooping was reportedly done.

According to this blog post, the four were given 15 minutes to gather belongings from their offices, then escorted off campus by security. An anonymous comment confirms the account. It adds that a total of 19 staff were given notice — or whatever you call being told the job you thought you had when you woke up that morning is gone — with more targetted for tomorrow, Monday. So before artists start venting, we’d do well to remember that we’re not the only ones considered expendable in the halls of power these days. But since this is the Arts section of backofthebook.ca, I’ll focus on the VPA Department purge.

In an “open letter” published on Keyano’s website today, the school’s Vice President Academic, Ann Everatt, denies that the employees were marched off campus, at least by guards. “In only one instance was security asked to assist in escorting a faculty member off the premises and that was only because the human resource manager involved had another appointment to tend to.” She didn’t address the 15-minutes-to-get-out allegation. Russell Thomas, the College’s Director of Marketing and Communications (who happens also to be an actor, not to mention a blogger), couldn’t tell me if it was true, though he did acknowledge that the faculty had been advised of their firing that morning. I spoke with one of them this evening, who would not confirm the information, off-the-record or on, because “it might affect my severance package.”

In any event, Keyano’s open letter contains enough information and self-justfication to tell us what’s happening here. “If we left the VPA courses as they were,” says College President and CEO, Kevin Nagel, “declining low enrolments would eventually continue to all-time low levels, our theatre and arts related assets would continue to be under-utilized while concurrently, we would not be able to deliver the new engineering technology programs or the 4-year business degree program that we are planning to introduce this coming September.” Of course, a lot of this is projection, or, as the psychologists like to call it, “catastrophizing” — there are ways to arrest declining enrollments in particular areas, some of which Thomas tells me they’ve tried — but the Prez’s priorities are clear, and they aren’t the school’s arts “assets.” And is anyone surprised by this, coming from the President of a college plunk in the middle of the most avaricious example of asset exploitation on the planet — especially one who was, before this, Dean of the JR Shaw School of Business and who bills himself on his linkedin page as “a transformational leader, business consultant and post-secondary education administrator who brings extensive experience and a global business perspective into the board room and classroom”? (By the way, that grin-and-grip photo to the right shows him meeting oil sands apologist Ezra Levant, when the SUN News Network jihadist visited Fort McMurray in January to give a speech. Dr. Nagel seems very, very pleased to be shaking Levant’s hand.)

Keyano claims they will shuffle any remaining arts offerings into their “Conservatory” program, which is what they call Continuing Ed. courses in these areas. (Interestingly, the URL for the “Conservatory” is http://keyano.ca/business/academicscareers/workforce-development/visual-performing-arts. Yes, folks, it all comes down to workforce development.) The problem is that, when Keyano similarly decided a year ago to “suspend” its music program, it was supposedly in order to redesign and reintroduce it. Thomas tells me that never happened. So why they expect anyone to believe them about what will happen with their visual and performing arts programs beats me.

Fort McMurray got itself all into a tizzy when, in March, the British edition of GQ magazine published an article that depicted it as nothing but a drug- and prostitution-riddled magnet for hosers on the make. And quite rightly — as drive-by journalism goes, it was too easy. But Keyano’s actions don’t do much to help us see past that caricature. In fact, if this keeps up, pretty soon it won’t be one.

By Frank Moher

I’ll leave it to others to dissect why the PC’s ended up trouncing Wildrose in Alberta, despite all the polls and predictions. What interests me is what this portends for Stephen Harper and company.

Whether by happenstance or design, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith is a near-clone of Harper (except for her much-remarked upon charisma, which the Prime Minister is in no danger of catching). She is a field-operative for big-business, especially the oil companies, and for the Calgary School of economics, and its crash-diet approach to government. And she is a pragmatist who has separated out her party’s fiscal and social conservatism and placed the latter off to the side, where she hopes, bozo eruptions notwithstanding, it will be forgotten. It’s the latter which is a relatively new phenomenon in Canadian conservatism — this newfound recognition that separation of state and church might be a good idea after all, albeit it for strategic, not principled, reasons — and which makes her resemblance to her older sibling in Ottawa all the more striking.

And Albertans, of all people, have rejected her. Yes, I know she won her riding and led Wildrose to a total of 17 seats, up 13 from what they had before. But when an electorate turns on a party the way this one did in the last week of the campaign (and perhaps even in the last hours — it wasn’t until a Forum poll emerged on Sunday night, showing Wildrose down four points and the PCs up three, that we began to get an inkling of what might happen), then that electorate is sending a clear message: we have given you sober second consideration, and found you wanting. Sorry.

The big question is, of course, why they did so. Much emphasis will be placed on the bozo eruptions (which we chronicled here and here, while drawing attention to a longstanding one here), and on strategic voting (otherwise know as “anyone but the Wildrose Party.”) But if the results indicate, withal, a general exhaustion with Canada’s far right, it could spell a wider problem for non-progressive conservatives right across the country. Canadians have had a chance to take their measure, and increasingly, we don’t like what we see. Certainly where I live, in British Columbia, the Harper government grows more unpopular by the day, both for its aggressive pursuit of the Enbridge Pipeline and its ties to the even more unpopular provincial Liberal party. Torontonians look shamefacedly away from the ongoing bozo eruption in their Mayor’s office (and longingly towards, yes, Calgary, with its shiny, cosmopolitan Mayor). Quebeckers, of course, took Mr. Harper’s measure long ago. That’s what makes him so vulnerable to disaffection elsewhere — unlike most previous Prime Ministers, he doesn’t have Quebec to fall back on.

And so, as Warren Kinsella put it last night, “A hole has been kicked in a wall at 24 Sussex.” Or if it wasn’t, it should have been. The NDP are tied with the Conservatives in national support, even without Jack; indeed, much of their strength has to do with Thomas Mulcair’s strong showing out of the gate. Of course, all honeymoons eventually end. But as Stephen Harper looks to Alberta today and wonders, along with his fellow travellers, just what went wrong, he might also wonder how best to reconstruct his party to look quite a bit less like Wildrose than it does now. Because if Albertans are no longer buying what the far right is selling, what are the chances anyone else will?

By Frank Moher

Alheli Picazo at CalgaryPolitics.com has dug up some of the writings of Wildrose Party candidate and one-time Alberta Report Publisher/Editor Link Byfield, just in case Danielle Smith would like to defend someone other than Allan Hunsperger and Ron Leech for a change. Of course, this one’s almost too easy: any ex-journalissimo who runs for public office comes trailing a stack of clips that are bound to piss somebody off. Still, Link’s work was often ordure of a special order.

Jan. 1, 2001: “‘Houses of worship’ worth the name always have and always will reserve marriage solely to heterosexuals … homosexuality being what it is, relatively few homosexuals and lesbians want to be married anyway. They may want the right, but few seem to want the reality. This whole struggle has been about political mastery, not equal rights, for this is not a right they use . . . the few who do form more lasting partnerships already have the same tax and benefit rights as normal married couples . . . the Liberals gave them that last year: everything except the use of the word ‘marriage.’ And now, needless to say, a few activists are determined to get that too, and nothing seems likely to stop them . . . the goal now is status.

“This debate is not . . . between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘progressivists.’ It’s between nature and perversity; between reality and illusion . . . .The danger of homosexual marriage is not that there will be many such marriages. There will be few. The danger lies in recognizing them, or affirming them, or pretending they’re just as good as the real thing. It debases the whole institution.”

March 19, 2001: “A lesbian in our vicinity named Teresa O’Riordan, I read in our weekly Morinville-Gibbons Free Press, has been appointed to the local Community Justice Committee. She and seven other volunteers will help try to keep young offenders out of jail by giving them guidance and encouragement to turn their lives around . . . .

[SNIP:]

“…. All of which goes to show how absurdly our public attitudes have been turned on their head. Here we have a divorcee teaching families how to succeed, a lesbian teaching about parenting, and all on the state payroll. Here we see a noted permissivist assigned to monitor young criminals whose most urgent need is probably a good hard kick in the pants.

“As for anger management, I can’t help but wonder (bigot that I am) if Ms. T’s household suffers the kind of domestic violence and discord for which lesbian relationships are so notorious. The odds are that it doesn’t, but short of a police complaint or hospital emergency visit, how would anyone know? Did anyone ask? Is anyone these days allowed to ask?”

February 5, 2001: “The like-minded groups we now discreetly refer to as ‘sexual minorities’ — homosexuals, lesbians, pedophiles, etc. –

[Actually, that's all we need of that one, isn't it?]

And here’s one I dug up myself, from the January, 11, 1999 Alberta Report, in which Link waxed slightly delusional about the history of the magazine and its “Next 25 Years”:

“We learned one other lesson in the latter 1980s, as we started branching out with other editions, first Western and then B.C. Report. Instead of reverting to clear conservatism on the social issues of the day, we began to drift, subtly, into what could be called ‘lifestyle’ coverage . . . . There was a reason for this drift. Back in the 1970s, weirdo things like radical feminism and gay rights could be dismissed, at least in Alberta, as an amusing madness. But by the late-1980s they couldn’t.

Unfortunately for Link, most readers had by that point fled the not-so-amusing madness that Alberta Report had become, and it was dead within four years.

I call him Link because, you see, I worked with him at AR back in the early ’80s. I was the books and sometimes-other-things editor, in which minor capacities my lack of pure laine conservatism could be ignored. (His father, Ted Byfield, used to claim I was a closet conservative; I am afraid I have sadly disappointed him.) He even, as he prepared to move into the top position, offered me the job of Executive Editor. Had I said Yes, I’d be the president of Rogers Publishing today! (Okay, maybe not.) But I was more interested in a career in theatre, and already had one. And I could see, even if Link could not, that I might last six months in the job. So I moved to a Gulf Island to write plays, instead.

All of which is to say, I knew Link back when, and I liked him; he was a Nice Guy™. I have since learned, however, that Nice Guys™ are often up to all sorts of nastiness while they’re about being Nice; in fact, I have come to believe that their Niceness™ is often directly proportionate to the amount of nastiness they’re up to. Link has certainly gotten up to a lot of nastiness as a journalist over the years and, if it’s inevitable that it catches up to him as a politician, it’s also deserved. Mind you, he may be just what the constituents of Barrhead-Westlock-Morinville are looking for. (He wasn’t what those in Whitecourt-Ste. Anne wanted last time, but this is a whole different foodfight.) I have familial reasons, though, to believe that conservative Albertans still know the difference between principles and zealotry. And so one lives in hope.

As for myself, I’ve ceased being nice, as perhaps this post indicates. So here, for old time’s sake, are some blasts from Link’s pasts — covers from AR during his editorship. The most notorious is at the top, but for my money, it’s the last one that really ought to bring perdition upon him. Alberta Report gave us the Reform Party, which gave us Stephen Harper, which gave us our current truth- and math-challenged federal government. And if that isn’t damning, I don’t know what is.

Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith says she takes it personally when “accusations of racism and bigotry are aimed at me and at my party.” Okay, well how about if we accuse some of your candidates of being bone dumb?

We knew, of course, that Wildrose candidate Ron Leech had told an interviewer at a multi-cultural radio station that, as a Caucasian, he can “speak to all the community” better than someone who is not. But now that video has emerged of him telling yet another interviewer the same thing, we are agog at the pure simplicity of his cluelessness:

Actually, you have to wonder at the guy who sits there nodding agreeably as Mr. Leech explains to him, as if speaking to a four year-old, that “When a Punjabi leader speaks for the Punjabi, the Punjabi are listening. But when a Caucasian speaks on their behalf, everybody is listening.” Yes, massah. But it is Leech who is mesmerizing, especially as he then turns to the camera to explain to his audience the problem with their “ethinicity.”

Truly special. We’re not sure how this will go down with the “ethinic” community in Calgary-Greenway. But he sure does have the slow-learner vote locked up.

One waits with keen anticipation what Wednesday will bring.

By Montreal Simon

Until about 10 days ago I clung to the hope that all I ever needed to know about Danielle Smith was that she was the new Evita of the Alberta Teabaggers, and Big Oil’s Bubbah Barbie doll. The one with the big wheels.

That she had vowed to make it easier to drink and drive. That she had been cruelly accused of not breeding enough . . . like a good Alberta cow. And that Tom “Strangelove” Flanagan was her campaign manager.

Because that’s enough eh?

But of course now that polls suggest she could be the next Premier of the right-wing petro province, I’ve been forced to pay more attention to the Wildhog campaign and the stench is overwhelming.

Not only because her redneck party is full of some of the worst cranks and crazies this country has ever seen.

Including this grotesque anti-gay bigot.

“If you “were born this way” are you going to “die this way?” Well if that is true, and it is, then you have fallen right into the trap that is as old as time. That trap is what satan wants for you, but is that what you want? You see, you can live the way you were born and if you die they way you were born then you will suffer the rest of eternity in a lake of fire, hell, a place of eternal suffering. Now at this point I’m not judging, I am just stating a fact!”

But also because she’s shameless.

“On Monday, Smith declined to critique Hunsperger’s writings, saying she’ll work to protect Albertans with strong religious views from state persecution.

“‘I’m not going to be the sort of politician who engages in discrimination against religious candidates,’ she said.”

Let’s be clear. The issue isn’t Hunsperger’s constitutional right to his sacred beliefs. The issue is his public position that Edmonton schoolkids shouldn’t be protected from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and that public schools are wicked for trying to create safe, equal classrooms. He’s not the victim here. The victims are our community’s children, who deserve to go to school without fear, without being told by their aspiring MLA that they’re damned to eternal torment because of who they are.

I mean really, how many rodeo klowns does it take to ride a burro back to the 1950s?

A leader who can’t tell the difference between free speech and hate speech doesn’t deserve to be elected dog catcher. And a party so full of depraved wingnuts shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near power.

And I mean ANYWHERE.

Oh well. I’ll never understand why there are so many homophobic bigots and other drooling crazies in Alberta. Or why those firewall fanatics hate Canada so much.

But I think I found the Lake of Fire eh?

Somewhere between Sodom and Calgary.

And Hunny’s right, it’s HORRIBLE….

Alberta, the shiny oily new heart of Canada. The New Jerusalem of the West.

Hee Haw. Hee Haw.

Don’t make me laugh . . .

While in Washington oildrumming up K-XL support with US senators on tuesday, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver plumped for the Keystone XL pipeline in his keynote address to the 4th Annual United States Energy Association (USEA) Energy Supply Forum.

Here is the quote chosen by Natural Resources Canada “for broadcast use”:

“The future of North America’s economy and our national security is inextricably tied to energy,” said Minister Oliver. “Clearly, it is in both of our interests to ensure that our future oil supply remains stable, secure and developed in an environmentally responsible way.”

Our future oil supply? Really, Joe?

We’re still going with the tarsands = North American security model?

For starters, Canada imports half of its oil for domestic use — over a million barrels per day — from various “conflict oil” states, while exporting 65% of its “ethical oil” tarsands crude to the US.

Dear Joe: How does the K-XL proposal to export tarsands — owned in part by the Chinese state — to Texas to be refined by Saudi’s Aramco refinery in a Foreign Trade Zone [read: no import/export duties or taxes] so that it can then be shipped off to Europe and Latin America have anything to do with “our national security”?

Exporting Energy Security: Keystone XL Exposed

Interesting report. It contends that there is currently a glut of domestic oil in the US due to increasing vehicle efficiency and slow economic growth, so the real purpose of the K-XL is to make tarsands crude available to the FTZ refineries in Texas which are specifically set up to turn it into diesel for export.

Nothing to do with national security, nothing to do with energy independence, nothing to do with gasoline prices at the pump.

So who is it all you guys are working for again?

The Guardian: Koch company declared ‘substantial interest’ in Keystone XL pipeline

“In recent months Koch Industries Inc., the business conglomerate run by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, has repeatedly told a U.S. Congressional committee and the news media that the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline has ‘nothing to do with any of our businesses.’

But the company has told Canadian energy regulators a different story.

In 2009, Flint Hills Resources Canada LP, an Alberta-based subsidiary of Koch Industries, applied for — and won — ‘intervenor status’ in the National Energy Board hearings that led to Canada’s 2010 approval of its 327-mile portion of the pipeline.

In the form it submitted to the Energy Board, Flint Hills wrote that it ‘is among Canada’s largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters. Consequently, Flint Hills has a direct and substantial interest in the application’ for the pipeline under consideration.

The Koch brothers own nearly all of Wichita, Kan.-based Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States. The energy and manufacturing conglomerate earns an estimated $100 billion in annual revenue from its network of subsidiaries — a mix of oil, gas, pipeline, chemical, fertilizer and paper and pulp companies. In addition to its Canadian operation, Koch’s Flint Hills subsidiary operates oil refineries in Alaska, Texas and Minnesota as well as a dozen fuel terminals in the Midwest and Texas.

The Koch brothers have donated millions to Republican candidates and conservative movements, bankrolling groups involved in Tea Party causes and in campaigns to deny climate change science and the need for cleaner energy.”

Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives are celebrating 40 uninterrupted years in power. A Globe and Mail reporter talks to some unnamed “Tory stalwarts, opposition leaders and observers.” He concludes that the PC dynasty was “forged in the fire of Alberta’s hatred for Pierre Trudeau and his national energy policy.”

Sorry, Globe and Mail, but you really should bone up on your Alberta history.

The ascendancy of Peter Lougheed’s Conservatives had nothing to do with hatred of Trudeau or his short-lived, unilaterally imposed energy pricing deal. Trudeau’s controversial National Energy Program was not implemented until October 1980. Alberta’s PCs came to power nine years earlier, at the end of August, 1971. They won that election, plainly and simply, because of an overwhelming desire on the part of Alberta voters to see some new faces at the helm.

The provincial Social Credit party had been in power for 36 years. Its leader for 25 of those years, Ernest Manning (father of Reform Party co-founder Preston), had retired from politics. His anointed successor, Harry Strom, was perceived by the electorate as a fundamentally decent but boring guy who couldn’t hold a candle to radio evangelist Manning as a public speaker. Strom came across on television as wooden and grumpy and out-of-touch — like everyone’s crabby old grandfather.

Aside from the charismatically challenged Strom, the Socred party itself had a serious image problem. Born in the midst of the Depression as a rural-based grass-roots movement that promised to solve Alberta’s economic problems, the party had become — in the eyes of the province’s younger voters, especially — little more than a bunch of old farmers with two feet stuck in the past.

Strom emerged as the pan-piper of Alberta politics at a time when people wanted to hear trumpets. Lougheed had the right combination of brass and wind. A Harvard-trained lawyer who once played halfback for the Edmonton Eskimos, the 43-year old Lougheed managed to convince voters that the Socreds were old, tired, and inflexible while the PCs were young, progressive, and responsive to the needs of the citizens. Ideologically, there was little to choose between the two right-wing parties. As former premier Manning said afterwards, it was as if voters who had always driven Chevrolets had suddenly decided to switch to Buicks. “They were still driving GM vehicles.”

Offering the voters new faces and a new style was the first step for Lougheed and his young cabinet. What he described as “province building” was the next. The place Lougheed called the “greatest darned province in the world” could be headed for a bleak future of unemployment and social unrest, he warned, if it didn’t find ways to diversify its economy through development of new industries. He hoped to fund such development through maximizing the province’s return from its declining, non-renewable oil and gas resources.

Ottawa didn’t enter the picture until late 1973, when the minority Trudeau government — in a bid to appease eastern consumers — imposed limitations on Alberta’s ability to raise domestic oil prices and derive as much revenue as possible from increased royalties. Albertans responded by slapping bumper stickers on their cars that read “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark.” Tense intergovernmental negotiations over pricing and revenue sharing continued during the next six years, until Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives formed a minority government in 1979. At that point it became clear that the conflict between Ottawa and Alberta had nothing to do with the lack of Liberal representation from Alberta in Parliament, or tensions between Lougheed and Trudeau. Lougheed’s plan to maximize Alberta’s resource wealth and make the province something more than a “junior partner” in Canada was no more palatable to Clark than it had been to Trudeau. Low-cost energy, said Clark, was essential to give central Canadian industry a competitive advantage.

Trudeau’s National Energy Program remains a potent symbol of western discontent. But its most controversial elements were either modified or replaced within a year, and the achievement of a new federal-provincial energy deal, in September 1981, ended with a celebratory toast between Lougheed and Trudeau, a photograph of which appeared in newspapers across Canada.

There are many reasons why the Progressive Conservatives have remained in power in Alberta for 40 years. But hatred of Trudeau is not one of them.

Calgary writer Brian Brennan is the author of The Good Steward: The Ernest C. Manning Story. His latest book is a memoir, Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way from Ireland to Canada.

As God’s cruel jokes go, this one’s a doozy. Jack Layton, having built the NDP into the Official Opposition and created a sense of hope for the resurgence of a genuine left in Canada, one that would keep the right from running roughshod over the poor, the middle-class, and those who see the country as more than a balance sheet, is dead at 61.

As a westerner, I had watched his emergence on the national scene with an ingrained distrust. He seemed to be yet another Ontario pol elected to reinforce the NDP’s base in that province, but who would make little headway elsewhere. It was the same old centralist story — or so it seemed. And then there was that moustache — that moustache! — that made him look like a used car salesman, or worse.

But gradually he grew on me (as he did, obviously, on many other Canadians). He had a surprisingly good grasp of the entire country — of the issues in BC’s struggling forestry industry, say, or of the way a flood on the Prairies could wipe out years of hard work. And apparently he got Quebec; in any event, they got him. Maybe he had just whipped his party sufficiently into shape that he was well-briefed before heading out on a trip, but that in itself suggested a new competence that allowed one to conceive of the NDP as, one day, a governing party.

By the time of the election, and his astonishing sprint to the finish, I found myself in an odd position for a died-in-the-wool Westy: of hoping this Ontario pol would be the one who eventually chased Calgary’s Stephen Harper out of office. And, in truth, I was looking forward to watching Layton manhandle the Conservatives in Parliament

And now he is gone.

Next month, in Edmonton, the nation’s rightists will get together for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Reform Party. What they will be celebrating is the imposition on Alberta of a lot of old Orange Protestant ideas out of Ontario, as peddled from a kitbag by the likes of Ted Byfield and, yes, Stephen Harper. The conservatism of that province is no longer of the Bible Bill Aberhart brand, so similar to the populist politics of Saskatchewan’s Tommy Douglas as to be, at times, indistiguishable. It is now corporatist, and mean. That is the Reform Party’s achievement, which they have since spread, under the name of the Conservative Party, across the land.

They did so by cynically attaching themselves to the West’s regional aspirations — hence the title of their conference, “How the West Got in.” But they do not represent this westerner, nor most of the westerners I know. If we no longer have the stranger from the East with the funny moustache to dig us out from under them, well, maybe that’s just as well. No use once again importing a kitbag of policies; we are, after all, where the NDP began.

We might just have to do it ourselves. That could be Layton’s biggest bequest to us — a boot in the butt.

Thanks for that, Jack. And Rest in Peace.

The Republicans on the US House Energy and Commerce Committee have drafted a “North American-Made Energy Security Act” — legislation which would ensure swift approval of the proposed $7-billion, 2,000-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta to the Texas gulf coast, doubling tarsands exports to the US to over a million barrels of oil a day .

“The draft legislation requires the president to issue a Presidential Permit decision no later than November 1, 2011.”

An interesting thing about that House Energy and Commerce Committee:

LA Times, Feb 6, 2011: Koch brothers now at heart of GOP power

“David and Charles Koch no longer sit outside Washington’s political establishment, isolated by their uncompromising conservatism. Instead, they are now at the center of Republican power, a change most evident in the new makeup of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Wichita-based Koch Industries and its employees formed the largest single oil and gas donor to members of the panel, ahead of giants like Exxon Mobil . . .

Nine of the 12 new Republicans on the panel signed a pledge distributed by a Koch-founded advocacy group — Americans for Prosperity — to oppose the Obama administration’s proposal to regulate greenhouse gases. A top early goal: restricting the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the Kochs’ core energy businesses.”

Americans for Prosperity organized the Tea Party rallies and funneled millions of dollars into various groups promoting climate change skepticism, including Canada’s Fraser Institute.

The Tyee, March 22, 2011:

Koch Industries processes one in four barrels of U.S.-bound Alberta tar sand, while pumping millions of dollars into highly conservative, anti-green causes.

What do Tea Party rallies, Republican victories, climate-change deniers, Wisconsin’s anti-union push, and attacks on a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions have in common?

They’re all fueled in part by profits derived from Alberta, Canada’s oil sands.

Charles and David Koch. Together, America’s fifth-richest citizens — each worth $21.5 billion — own Koch Industries, a refining, pipeline, chemical and paper conglomerate.

Reuters: Koch Brothers Positioned To Be Big Winners If Keystone XL Pipeline Is Approved

A Koch Industries operation in Calgary, Alberta, called Flint Hills Resources Canada LP, supplies about 250,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day to a heavy oil refinery in Minnesota, also owned by the Koch brothers.

Flint Hills Resources Canada also operates a crude oil terminal in Hardisty, Alberta, the starting point of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

The company’s website says it is “among Canada’s largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters.”

Fun fact: “Koch Industries has had 300 oil spills (mostly from pipelines) in six states over a seven-year period.”

Speaking at the White House presser in February, Stephen Harper plumped for the pipeline:

“Canada is the largest, the most secure, the most stable and the friendliest supplier of that most vital of all America’s purchases: energy.”

and tomorrow a TransCanada exec will address the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee in support of the pipeline.

TransCanada’s chief Washington lobbyist, Paul Elliott, as it happens, also served as national deputy director and chief of staff for delegate selection for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Because the pipeline crosses the border, it will be Clinton who will decide whether to approve it.

So what’s all this tarsands oil headed for the US in aid of anyway?

From the proposed “North American-Made Energy Security Act “:

“Continued development of North American energy resources, including Canadian oil, increases domestic refiners’ access to stable and reliable of crude and improves certainty of fuel supply for the Department of Defense, the largest consumer of petroleum in the United States.”

I think they meant to say the Department of Defense is the largest single consumer of petroleum in the US.

But what is the largest single use the DoD makes of petroleum?

Jet fuel.

The environmental disaster that is the tarsands, the health hazards to First Nations downstream from them, the undermining of Canadian sovereignty, the danger to the Ogallala Aquifer pictured at the top, the tea party nonsense, the attacks on Obama and on a cap and trade market for carbon emissions, the gutting of the EPA, the buying of committees, the funding of rightwing thinktanks and climate change deniers . . .

– all this so Koch Industries can make a buck off apes playing with firesticks.

Monday Update: Brave New Films vid on the Kochs and the Keystone XL pipeline up at DeSmogBlog today: US farmers calling on Secretary Clinton as their last faint hope to stop it. Thanks to Holly Stick.

Also from The Hill: Koch and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton respond:

“A Koch executive, in a statement Friday afternoon, reiterated that the company has ‘no financial interest’ in the pipeline project . . . ‘Given these facts, we are confused about why Koch is being singled out and inserted into these discussions,’ said Philip Ellender, the company’s president for government and public affairs.”

Unbelievable.