Oil Clout May Improve Canada-U.S. Relations, Wilson Says

It's much more important to improve relations with the United States than to ensure that our children don't freeze in the dark.

Bill Meyer

Wilson knows that the US already owns the oil in Canadian soil. He's just pleased that Canadians don't make a fuss about it. Canadians will continue submitting to foreign oil company profits with merely a squeek. How many times in the last several decades that we scream and holler about the increases yet continue to drive as if we get it for free. Just because we got it, don't mean it's ours to waste. That's why the Americans do. It's theirs and they know it.

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Expect little from life and get more from it.

>>Wilson said his government has set a ``new tone'' in relations with the U.S., and this is already paying dividends. Harper and Wilson last month helped negotiate the end to a four- year-old trade dispute over Canadian lumber exports.<<

The trade dispute on lumber started in 1982 less then two years befor the Conservatives took power under Brian Mulroney in 1984 which Wilson was a member of said party.

It does prove that the US Government finds a subservient Canadian Prime Minister easier to work with and a lot more valuable to US interests. Canada can not exercise its democratic rights and move freely without fear because it has not gotten approval from and risking offending our neighbor / friend / family to the south of us.

Canada needs to be looking after our own domestic markets first as well as having a diversified foreign trade with other countries other then the United States. This is the only way to protect Canadian trade.

>>Wilson, who helped negotiate the North American free-trade agreement when he was trade minister in the 1990s, said the U.S. must respect the results of dispute rulings under the agreement.<<

The NAFTA was to correct all disputes on trade between Canada and the USA. It was to provide the required dispute mechanisms that would deal with all the trade problems and why not, it was a dispute mechanism designed by the USA for US trade.

If the dispute rulings are in your favour and indicate that one is right in ones actions then one does not sign an agreement that amounts to blackmail and vindicates the others wrongful acts as beening just and right.

International Trade Minister David Emerson acknowledged that the new softwood deal will require provinces to vet any forestry-policy changes with Washington proves that the PM Harper sold Canada's trade sovereignty down the river!


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Perception is two thirds of what we perceive reality to be.

Difficult decisions are a privilege of rank.

What's the surprise ? The first and only purpose of any and every so called "free trade agreement" and WTO inspired globalization is to sell national and societal sovereignity and democracy down the river.

Thousands of us have predicted this 20 years ago, have the paper trail to prove it, and all our predictions have come home in spades.

The original FTA and the NAFTA were supposed to "lower costs and increase living standards".

So, where are the lower costs and increased living standards, except among the so called "foreign investors" who are trampling all sovereignity and democratic decision making powers into the mud under the guise of "rules based trade", which is not "trade", but " taking orders" from the carpetbaggers.

If wealth could be created, there wouldn't be crime, wars and these so called "agreements" stripping the Earth of its resources and humanity of its rights.

Canada may not be the greatest supplier of oil to the USA, or anywhere, for very long, because sooner, or later the facts will come home that the extraction of that oil uses more energy and ruins more health than the energy it produces.

Stop the useless and wasteful airliner traffic, plus the military adventures and corporate mergers and the oil crisis will be half solved.

Ed Deak. Big Lake, BC.

I say keep our petroleum for our own people and let those SUV driving energy hogs twist in the wind.

It's what they'd do to us if things were reversed.

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"and the knowledge they fear is a weapon to be used against them"

"The Weapon" - Rush

Wilson says: ``There is certainly an appreciation within the (U.S.) administration of the significance of the energy relationship,'' Wilson said. ``It creates a nicer backdrop for some of the other things that we may have to talk about.''

Wilson is another Bush dingleberry. God how do grown men stand in front of other grown people and say the most benign ridiculous things? Do they not know how they come across or is it really the USA is the Alpha-male and Canada will always be the lesser of the two laying on our back with our privates exposed and made vulnerable? I find our representatives to be just disgusting people. If this is backbone (as some lesser Harper dingleberries would like to tell us it is) then when are we going to develop the legs required to stand upright?

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"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche

``There is a security element that I think is being appreciated,'' Wilson said. ``If you look at your No. 2 and 3 and 4 oil suppliers in Mexico, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, each one of those has a question mark above it.''

The problem is that the US takes Canada too much for granted (on all fronts), like being the # 1 oil and gas supplier. Familiarity breeds contempt.

Maybe there should also be a question mark above Canada, as an oil and gas supplier. I agree with Ed Deak. Canada may find out that the Athabasca oil sands (using natural gas to extract oil) are actually uneconomical in the long run and environmentally unsustainable to boot. People have already called this "changing gold to lead".