[LINK] Samir Gandesha on Canada becoming a petro-state

[rfmcdonald]

At Open Democracy, Samir Gandesha makes the case that Canada is becoming a petro-state, oil income helping to drive out more creative forms of economic production and sophisticated political discourse alike.

If we understand basic research in science to be directly related to innovation insofar as many forms of technology and their application stem not from research in applied science per se but from basic research, then in Canada we have seen specifically a drastic diminution in a substantive commitment to technical innovation. Two years ago, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government announced that it would only fund science with determinant applicability, which is to say, those forms of sciences that could be directly marketable. Moreover, it has actively muzzled government scientists and librarians, severely limiting what they can and cannot say in public. For Karl Popper, the “open society” was a society in which there existed a robust culture of “conjecture and refutation” which constituted the very condition for the possibility of scientific innovation. That is, scientific truth-claims are those claims that can stand the open test of evidence-based falsifiability by other scientists and the public at large.

In my own province of British Columbia, the government has announced a dramatic shift of priority away from liberal arts and science at the level of secondary education, despite evidence that employers prefer prospective employees with a general education, to training geared specifically to the oil and gas industries which it is actively promoting as the economic future of the province. It has just secured the green light within the legislature for the development of a number of new Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) projects. The closure of scientific discourse, as well as roll-backs to liberal arts education, of course, does not bode well for social innovation. Prospects are slim for envisioning new modes of living together – ever more important with increasingly levels of migration and societal diversity – insofar as robust and unrestricted discussion and debate is its necessary if not sufficient condition.

Economically, with the price of oil now at $67 a barrel and falling, the Canadian dollar has plummeted with little end in sight. The oil-producing province of Alberta, as well as the federal government, is beginning to worry about the prospect of a staggering diminution of tax revenue. This is surely only to worsen with OPEC’s recent decision that it would not scale back its oil production and would wait to see what the reaction of the markets would be. Vulnerability to such fluctuations and contingencies of the market for its products has always been a hallmark of petro-states unless, of course, they can form a cartel, such as OPEC, to act in concert and have some chance of collectively determining the price of oil. Short of that, Canada will simply have to weather the stormy seas without a rudder.

[. . .]

While lack of innovation and economic vulnerability are serious, they are not quite as serious as the drastic rollback of Canadian democratic institutions as a result of the country’s metamorphosis into a petro-state. The reason for this is that it is at the level of democratic institutions that changes can be initiated. The Harper government won its long sought-after majority in 2011 on a promise to transform Canada such that it would be unrecognizable. This is one of the few promises that it has kept. On a power base of a paltry 40 percent of the electorate, it has centralized power in a Westminster system that already over-archingly favours the executive branch of government.

The Conservatives have introduced into Ottawa unheard-of levels of secrecy and control. They have stifled debate, to an unprecedented level, occasionally proroguing Parliament in order to do so, on some of the crucial questions facing Canadians. Government ministers typically send their parliamentary secretaries to the House of Commons who, often in a way that seems to express a limitless contempt for the democratic process, typically avoid answering the questions that are put to them. At the international level, the government in league with the governments of Australia and New Zealand, sought to keep the issue of global climate change off the agenda at the most recent G20 meeting in Brisbane, with the deeply disingenuous argument that the purpose of the meetings were to focus on “economic issues,” as if climate change could somehow be extricated from the economy as a simple “externality.”