Canada: Obama’s Keystone cop-out

Ezra Levant

Calgary Sun

President Obama would rather do business with dictatorships than with democracies, said Ezra Levant. That’s the message he sent out last week by rejecting the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline. The project would have delivered 700,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada’s tar sands to refineries on Texas’s Gulf Coast, “which is almost precisely the amount of oil Venezuela now ships to the United States.” That trade pumps about $30 billion a year into the Venezuelan regime’s coffers, money that President Hugo Chávez uses to suppress his own citizens and fund narco-terrorists in neighboring Colombia.

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“With one fell swoop, Obama could have replaced” that conflict oil with “ethical oil” from Canada. Instead he played politics, and nixed Keystone on environmental grounds, a cynical move designed to win the votes and money of the green movement. “Obama’s decision is a disgrace, but it’s America’s business.”

Canada’s business now is to sell our oil to Asia. Doing so will fuel our future economic success, and prove to the world that we’re an independent country, not bound by the selfish whims of our southern neighbor. “It’s about self-respect—and it will make America respect us more too.”