If there have been any doubts before that relations between the leaders of Canada and the United States are at their lowest point in 60 years, they have been removed by Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
He said delays in getting a final decision on the US$8 billion Keystone XL pipeline reflect “the very peculiar politics of this particular administration.”
“Notwithstanding the facts, a positive decision has not been rendered (by the Obama administration) for a very long time,” Harper said in a Bloomberg TV interview. “That’s obviously not a hopeful sign.”
He then delivered his ultimate taunt, in declaring “that whether this project goes ahead or not under this administration, it will ultimately go ahead under a subsequent administration.”
What is beyond dispute is that Obama will end his eight years in the White House in January 2017.
Harper’s position not clear
What is far less clear is whether Harper will still be in office at that time. He has officially launched the campaign leading to a national vote on Oct. 19, which will determine whether Harper secures his fourth election victory.
If he loses, where Canada’s next prime minister will stand on Keystone XL is a head scratcher. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has endorsed the project, but not the point of offering to lobby in Washington, D.C., while New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair has argued the decision should be “up to the Americans.”
Harper, who has previously said that issuing a green light to Keystone XL should be a “no brainer,” has also qualified his hard line by suggesting he does not want to interfere with an internal U.S. decision beyond stating Canada’s position.
On verge of rejecting
The only break in a long silence in Washington came in late July when North Dakota Republican Sen. John Hoeven, who would normally be an unlikely candidate to speak for the Obama administration, said he had been heard from sources close to Obama that the president was on the verge of rejecting Keystone XL.
Hoeven said he understood Obama would make an announcement during the August congressional break in the hopes of using the summer lull to stifle criticism.
He said rejection of the pipeline would make no sense on environmental grounds and would disadvantage the oil industry in Canada, which has been the major external source of crude for the U.S., at the same time sanctions on Iran could be lifted, freeing that country to rebuild its oil exports.
Obama has questioned the benefits of Keystone XL to the U.S. and has vetoed a Republican-backed bill that would have bypassed a State Department review of the pipeline and allowed construction to go ahead.
“Even after all the objective analyses said that the project is better from an economic standpoint, an energy standpoint, even an environmental standpoint - it’s certainly preferable to rail - even after all those things, a decision hasn’t been rendered,” Harper said.
He said opinion polls have consistently shown American support for the pipeline, while the State Department has concluded it would not significantly add to global warming by displacing another 800,000 barrels per day of crude including 100,000 bpd from North Dakota - from outside North America and shipping them to the U.S. Gulf Coast where refineries are configured to handle heavy crude.
Clinton sidesteps
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State during most of the Keystone XL review by her department, has sidestepped questions on the project, including one in New Hampshire in July.
Clinton said she did not want to second-guess Obama on the file, while Jeb Bush, one of the Republican presidential hopefuls, tweeted that a decision on Keystone XL is an “easy” one.
Whatever happens in Washington on the pipeline, one of the key talking points in the Canadian election campaign is expected to see the opposition leaders attack Harper for mishandling the Keystone XL file and failing to resolve disputes with the U.S. on Canada’s supply-managed agricultural sectors that are the major sticking point in Trans Pacific Partnership trade talks.
For now, the mood between Harper and Obama has dragged Canada-U.S. relations at the top level to the lowest point since the 1950s and 1960s when Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had a series of spats with U.S. presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy.
