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Canada’s Trudeau Topples PM Harper In Shock Election Win

Canada’s Trudeau Topples PM Harper In Shock Election Win

By Randall Palmer and Rod Nickel

MONTREAL/CALGARY (Reuters) — Canada’s Liberal leader Justin Trudeau rode a late surge to a stunning majority election victory on Monday, toppling Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives with a promise of change and returning a touch of glamor, youth and charisma to Ottawa.

Harper conceded defeat and the Conservative party announced his resignation, ending a nine-year run in power and the 56-year-old’s brand of fiscal and cultural conservatism that voters appeared to sour on.

The Liberals seized a Parliamentary majority, a turn in political fortunes that smashed the record for the number of seats gained from one election to the next. The center-left Liberals had been a distant third place party before this election.

“My friends, we beat fear with hope. We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together,” Trudeau, 43, told a crowd of cheering supporters in Montreal.

“This is what positive politics can do.”

The photogenic son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to run a C$10 billion annual budget deficit for three years to invest in infrastructure and help stimulate Canada’s anemic economic growth.

This rattled financial markets ahead of the vote and the Canadian dollar weakened on news of his victory.

Trudeau thanked his two closest friends and advisers for shaping his campaign to show “that you can appeal to the better angels of our nature. And you can win doing it.”

Trudeau has said he will repair Canada’s cool relations with the Obama administration, withdraw Canada from the combat mission against Islamic State militants in favor of humanitarian aid and training, and tackle climate change.

Trudeau vaulted from third place to lead the polls in the final days of the campaign, and will now return to the Prime Minister’s residence in Ottawa where he grew up as a child.

“When the time for change strikes, it’s lethal,” former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said in a television interview. “I ran and was successful because I wasn’t Pierre Trudeau. Justin is successful because he isn’t Stephen Harper.”

Liberal supporters at the party’s campaign headquarters broke into cheers and whistles when television projected that Trudeau would be the next prime minister.

The Conservatives become the official opposition in Parliament, with the left-leaning New Democratic Party in third.

The NDP’s fall was highlighted in Quebec, where it had the majority of its seats, while the separatist Bloc Quebecois won 10 seats, up from just two previously. BQ leader Gilles Duceppe, however, failed to win a seat.

The Liberals’ win marks a swing toward a more multilateral approach in global politics by the Canadian government, which has distanced itself from the United Nations in recent years.

The former teacher took charge of the party just two years ago and guided it out of the political wilderness with a pledge of economic stimulus and stirring appeals for a return to social liberalism.

TRUDEAUMANIA AGAIN?

Born to a sitting prime minister who came to power in 1968 on a wave of popular support dubbed “Trudeaumania,” Trudeau will become the second-youngest prime minister in Canadian history and brings an appeal more common in movie stars than statesmen.

Pierre once jumped from a trampoline into the crowd. With boyish good looks, Justin thrusts himself into throngs and puts his hand to his heart when listening to someone.

Selfie requests are so common he happily takes the camera and snaps the photo himself, often cheek to cheek. He is the married father of three young children.

Criticized for being more style than substance, Trudeau has used attacks on his good looks and privileged upbringing to win over voters, who recalled his father’s rock-star presence and an era when Canada had some sizzle on the world stage.

Pierre Trudeau, who died in 2000, was in power for 15 years – with a brief interruption – and remains one of the few Canadian leaders to be known abroad.

Single when he took power, the elder Trudeau dated movie stars and models before marrying. He had three boys while prime minister, the eldest of whom now succeeds him in the nation’s top office.

Financial market players had praised the Conservative government for its steady hand in economic management, which had spared Canada the worst of the global financial malaise. Trudeau has also promised to raise taxes on high-income Canadians and reduce them for the middle class.

Political pundits have already began to speculate on the makeup of a Trudeau government while pondering what caused the downfall of Harper, 56, who has been criticized for his aloof personality but won credit for economic management in a decade of global fiscal uncertainty.

(Writing by Andrea Hopkins; Editing by Amran Abocar and Alan Crosby)

Photo: Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau gives his victory speech after Canada’s federal election in Montreal, Quebec, October 19, 2015. REUTERS/Chris Wattie

Stephen Harper’s Petro-State Is Built On Tar Sands

Stephen Harper’s Petro-State Is Built On Tar Sands

Late 21st-century graduate students of business studying the growing problem of stranded assets will almost certainly focus on the history of Canada’s Athabasca Oil Sand (aka tar sands). The case studies they read will either describe the gradual abandonment of the world’s largest reserve of bituminous crude, or they will read about the tar sands’ miraculous last-minute escape from becoming the world’s largest stranded asset. For either outcome, the turning point they will look back on is just about now.

In some respects Alberta’s gigantic deposits of bitumen, a dense mixture of sand and heavy crude oil, third in size only to the reserves of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, were stranded from the start by location. Situated in the heart of a vast boreal forest at the center of a very large continent, they are hundreds of miles from the nearest refinery and thousands more from navigable tidewater.

Of course, some of Alberta’s crude has made its way to market, but so much slower than it could have, or was projected to, that producers, refiners, shippers, banks and other investors, in tar-sands development are beginning to wonder whether they have backed a good play by investing over $160 billion to turn tar into oil.

So the economic stranding process has already begun. Five global energy giants — Shell, Total, Suncor, Statoil and Occidental — have cut bait on major bitumen deposits in Alberta, in which they had already invested billions. Suncor has just slashed another billion dollars from its capital spending program and $800 million more from operating expenses. And as oil prices slide lower, commercial and investment banks are reconsidering future underwritings. An industry that recently envisioned doubling production over the next two decades is now looking at something closer to the opposite, a halving of production or worse in far fewer than 20 years.

American media coverage of the tar sands has focused primarily on the approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which, if completed, would carry 830,000 barrels of Athabasca crude, every day, to the world’s largest refining center near Houston next to a booming export hub. Because American and Canadian politicians and oil execs have lobbied so hard for its approval, Americans tend to believe that construction of Keystone will secure the future of the tar sands. Not true. To even approach break-even, at least four other pipeline routes will be needed to carry bituminous crude to the world’s market: two to the Canadian west, one to the east and one north. If two or three of those lines are somehow stopped, and that’s quite likely to occur, the stranding of the tar sands will escalate, Canada will cease being a petro-state, and its business leaders will begin their search for yet another staple to drive its national economy.

Canada has always been what economists call “a staples economy,” reliant almost completely on one staple resource after another. Fur was followed by cod, then wheat, potash, minerals, timber, and hydropower. Today, Canada’s staple resource is carbon, some of which derives from coal but most of it from oil. Oil, in fact, represents 46 percent of Canada’s commodity production. Unfortunately, over 90 percent of its reserves are bitumen, the costly production of which nets only 4 percent to Canada’s GDP. But oil represents 40 percent of the country’s exports. So the urgency to develop and export the tar-sands oil has become a national priority.

Canada’s tar-sands booster-in-chief is Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an Alberta-based petrolero who rose to prominence in politics as Chief Policy Officer of the Reform Party, Canada’s version of the American Tea Party. Founded in 1987, Reform merged in 2000 with the floundering Progressive Conservative Party to form a new and almost unbeatable national coalition calling itself the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance (after adding “Party” to its name, it became CCRAP, and was nicknamed “see-crap”). Harper became party leader of CCRAP, which has since won two national elections. It’s as if Ted Cruz became the Republican frontrunner and won the White House twice.

Once a member of Canada’s Young Liberals and a supporter of Pierre Trudeau, Harper went west as a young man, worked in Alberta’s oil fields and followed his father into employment with Imperial Oil, Canada’s second-largest petroleum company (69 percent owned by ExxonMobil). There, like so many other western Canadians, he grew to despise Eastern Canada, rather like the scion of a prominent American family moving from Connecticut to Texas. In Calgary, he became an outspoken and eloquent opponent of Trudeau’s National Energy Plan, which seemed set upon nationalizing Canada’s last staple resource. While there is still talk of nationalizing oil and tar-sands oil in Canada, and in some polls a majority of Canadians support the idea, that couldn’t possibly happen with Harper in power.

At the 2012 World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, Harper announced that the expanded production and export of tar-sands bitumen was a national priority. Canada, he predicted, was set to become an energy superpower. In Ottawa, he took immediate and aggressive steps to weaken environmental protections like the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which was hindering pipeline construction, and to fast-track tar-sands production.

But Harper’s focus remained on Europe, where in 2012 the European Parliament and member European Union governments were debating terms of a revised Fuel Quality Directive (FQD) and considering an official ban on the import of “dirty fuels”— oil shale, liquid coal and tar sands, all of which have high extraction impacts, releasing more greenhouse gas than conventional oil through their “well to wheel” life cycle. A Stanford University study that many members of the EU Parliament relied on projected a 23 percent increase of lifecycle carbon emissions from tar-sands production.

Harper and his advisors immediately saw the danger of that study and the disaster a European ban on dirty fuel represented for Canada’s largest new staple. One vote in Brussels could leave the tar sands stranded immediately and forever, even if oil producers found a route to the Chinese market.

During the two years leading up to the EU parliamentary vote on the issue, Harper mobilized Canadian oil executives and his cabinet behind a $30 million nation-to-nation lobbying effort. Their first target was the Stanford study, which they drove into the ground with their own industry-funded studies.

Week after week, planeloads of oil execs and PR flacks crossed the Atlantic, Harper aboard whenever he could be, laterally threatening a trade war with Europe if the vote went the wrong way. Side trips were made to Washington. And members of the European Parliament were flown to Ottawa and Alberta for gold-plated junkets.

Without Harper’s effort, the Parliament in Brussels would almost certainly have voted to ban dirty fuels. After two years of intense lobbying, the measure lost by a 12-vote margin, 337 to 325, with 48 abstentions. A few months later, in the fall of 2014, the first shipment of tar-sands crude arrived in Europe, with many more to follow, as a vote on the Fuel Quality Directive will not come up again for at least four years.

In the meantime, if a few EU member nations condemn tar-sands oil, and ban its import, more small nails will be driven into the tar-sands coffin. And if two of the proposed source-to-port pipelines on the drawing boards are blocked (see map and sidebar here), more producers and investors will abandon the sands.

If Canada’s tar sands do one day become stranded, the equivalent annual emissions of over 65 coal-fired plants and 50 million passenger vehicles will remain underground. And a lot of the credit (or blame) will go to environmental activists, aboriginal communities, litigious farmers and groups like Greenpeace, NRDC and 350.org, who have added to their anti-pipeline advocacy a campaign to pressure institutional investors to divest their “Big Fossil” holdings. Even before divestment began, 9 of 10 tar-sands producers’ stocks had underperformed the market. So they are vulnerable.

According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank in Cleveland, the campaigns of environmentalists and native communities have already cost tar-sands producers $17 billion. But that has not stemmed the determination of the North American fossil-fuel industry to move Athabasca crude to refineries around the world.

Despite the insistence of American Republicans and petroleros that everything rests on completion of Keystone XL, the pipeline means little to the U.S. economy. In Canada, however, economists estimate that U.S. rejection of the pipeline could cost the country as much as $1.7 billion a year, far more significant than the loss of two or three hundred permanent jobs the pipeline would create in the U.S. And by simply raising break-even higher than it already is for bitumen producers, stopping Keystone could place the tar sands in far greater danger of being stranded.

While assets like the tar sands should be stranded, because mining and burning them will raise the temperature of an already overheated planet a degree or more, they are more likely to become stranded, because they are either unable to reach market or have lost market value.

The sad irony is that before Canada selected tar-sands crude to be its staple export, the country was poised to become a major global contributor to clean energy. It had signed climate treaties, promoted solar-energy, developed hydroelectric power and had a prosperous renewable-energy industry under sail, for which the country possessed all the necessary natural and financial resources. Then one powerful neo-liberal free-market zealot decided to double down on high-carbon fuels and announce to the world that tar sands would become the next nation-building staple for his country.

It appears he was wrong about that, which would not be a bad outcome for the planet.

Journalist Mark Dowie is the author ofConservation Refugees: The Hundred Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native People.

This article appears in the March 2015 issue ofThe Washington Spectator.

Photo: Stephen Harper via Flickr

Deal Between U.S., Cuba Culminated 18 Months Of Secret Talks

Deal Between U.S., Cuba Culminated 18 Months Of Secret Talks

By Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald (TNS)

MIAMI — During a 2007 campaign debate when his White House prospects still seemed mostly like a pipe dream, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois was asked if, as president, he would sit down to talk to with leaders of countries like North Korea, Venezuela, Iran and Cuba. “I would,” he bluntly replied.

On Tuesday night, seven years later, President Obama finally carried out at least part of the pledge of Candidate Obama, talking with Cuban leader Raul Castro for 45 minutes by phone to put the finishing touches on 18 months of secret negotiations that restored diplomatic relations between the two countries for the first time in over five decades.

The process was carried out under an extraordinarily effective shroud of secrecy. “I hadn’t heard even the tiniest buzz that anything was up,” one senior State Department official who follows Latin American affairs confessed Wednesday after the president’s announcement.

In the clamor for the details of the agreement, which ranges from the number of cigars American visitors can bring home from Cuba to a spy swap involving a convicted murderer and a mysterious and unnamed CIA agent, relatively little has emerged about the negotiating process.

But interviews and statements throughout the day by officials in Washington, Havana and countries that lent aid to the process offer at least a glimpse of the road that led to the historic agreement.

Cuba seemed to drop off President Obama’s radar during his first term in office, aside from his occasional public complaint about the arrest of USAID official Alan Gross, charged with crimes against the Cuban state for distributing satellite phones to the island’s Jewish community.

But White House officials said Obama ordered a top-to-bottom review of U.S. policy toward Cuba after winning re-election in 2012. By June of 2013, talks between the two countries were under way, led on the U.S. side by Ben Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security for strategic communications, and Ricardo Zuniga, National Security Council senior director for the Western Hemisphere.

At least seven meetings took place in Canada. “I don’t want to exaggerate Canada’s role,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. “We facilitated places where the two countries could have a dialogue and explore ways on normalizing relations. We were not trying in any way to direct or mediate the talks. We just wanted to make sure they had the opportunity to have the kind of dialogue they needed to have.”

But the host of two other meetings played a more active role. The Argentine-born Pope Francis not only welcomed the negotiating teams to the Vatican, he issued an extraordinary “personal appeal” for better relations in personal letters sent to Obama and Castro after a meeting last spring.

Their reaction was positive enough to schedule another meeting at the Vatican, where the deal was sealed. “The Holy See received delegations of the two countries in the Vatican last October,” said a Vatican statement issued Wednesday, “and provided its good offices to facilitate a constructive dialogue on delicate matters, resulting in solutions acceptable to both parties.”

Both leaders thanked the pope Wednesday. He “played a very important role,” Obama told ABC News, calling Francis “the real deal, a remarkable man.”

Much remains unknown about the talks, including who negotiated for the Cubans and whether they were carried out with the blessing of Raul’s 88-year-old brother Fidel, who ran the country for 50 years until his retirement in 2008.

The irascible Fidel torpedoed several attempts at rapprochement between the United States and Cuba during his rule, notably by sending troops to Africa in the midst of negotiations with President Gerald Ford’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, in the mid-1970s and unleashing a wave of 100,000 refugees on Florida in 1980, soon after President Jimmy Carter restored partial relations between the two countries.

The ill health that forced Fidel to step down has continued to take a toll, and the extent of his influence on the Cuban government and even the degree of his lucidity these days is unknown. Cuba watchers are waiting to see if he makes a statement about the agreement with the United States.

“If Fidel does not come out and endorse this fully, you’ve got to wonder what’s going on,” said Brian Latell, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies and formerly the CIA’s top Cuba expert. “Is this being done over his objections? Or is he completely comatose?”

Also shrouded in mystery: the identity of a spy being freed by Havana as part of the agreement. “We have decided to release and send back to the United States a spy of Cuban origin who was working for that nation,” Raul Castro said during his televised announcement of the deal Wednesday.

“We recovered a highly valued intelligence asset, probably the most highly valued intelligence asset on Cuban soil in American history,” confirmed White House press secretary Josh Earnest at a news briefing Wednesday. “And that individual is now on American soil.”

A statement released by the office of National Intelligence Director James Clapper said the spy “provided the information that led to the identification and conviction” of the so-called Wasp Network, the ring of Cuban intelligence officers arrested in South Florida in 1998. (Three convicted members of the Wasp Network were released by Washington Wednesday, the other half of the swap.)

His information also helped identify three other Cuban spies in the United States: Defense Intelligence Agency senior analyst Ana Belen Montes, former Department of State official Walter Kendall Myers and his spouse Gwendolyn Myers.

Those clues led some retired U.S. intelligence officials to speculate that the man released Wednesday by Havana is 51-year-old Rolando Sarraff, a former Cuban intelligence agent arrested by the Castro government in November 1995.

“He’s the only one who really fits those details,” said Chris Simms, a former Defense Intelligence Agency spycatcher who specialized in Cuba.

Former intelligence officials say Sarraff was a cryptography expert for Cuba’s Interior Ministry who, with two others, passed huge amounts of information to the CIA that allowed Washington to break Cuban spy codes, read their reports, and identify and arrest them. “He just destroyed their communications,” Simms said.

But Sarraff and two other men helping him eventually fell under suspicion. Noting Cuban government surveillance, they sent a message asking the CIA to rescue them. Two of the men were extracted from Cuba. (One, Jose Cohen, lives in South Florida, where he’s a top Amway salesman. He did not respond to Herald emails asking for comment. The other has never been publicly identified.)

Sarraff, however, was arrested and has been in prison ever since. “And at Cuban intelligence headquarters in Havana, a film of those guys leaving the message for the CIA to come to the rescue has been used in training ever since,” said Simmons.

Photo: Alan Gross speaks to the press at Gilbert LLP law firm after being released from a Cuban prison on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2014. (Algerina Perna/Baltimore Sun/TNS)