From EnergyNow.Ca

By Jim Warren

On the bright side, at least President Donald Trump’s threat to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian oil and gas, might have alerted some Central Canadians to the critical importance of oil and gas to the national economy. Trump’s tariff pronouncements may also have forced the Laurentian Elite to rethink the wisdom of allowing anarchy to reign in our immigration system and border management.

Any nation hoping to be a serious player in the areas of international trade and diplomacy needs to meet several critical criteria. Without them a country can have difficulty marketing its goods and services to the world and in retaining meaningful economic and political sovereignty. One of the key criteria is for a country to have a good measure of control over its borders. But there are other elements critical to having effective sovereignty and independence. Having access to versatile, readily transportable energy commodities like oil and gas is one of those essentials. Accordingly, oil and gas are considered strategically important industries.

Lacking any of the major building blocks of strategic economic sovereignty, like the steel and aluminum industries and a thriving manufacturing sector, as well as highly developed transportation sector and the energy industries needed to support all the other sectors can leave a country vulnerable to domination by others. The vulnerabilities can lead to economic and political crises for a country during trade wars, international disputes leading to trade sanctions and embargoes, shooting wars and big natural disasters. A lack of strong trade and military alliances can make matters even worse.

It’s not like there wasn’t a mountain of evidence underlining the strategic importance of oil and gas in the last few years. How smart was it for Angela Merkel to allow Russia, a state run by a psychopath and his team of criminal oligarchs, to control a major portion of its energy supplies? The Ukraine gets it. After its war with Russia began, the Ukrainian government allowed Russian gas to be piped across its territory to Eastern Europe for nearly two years. This was because they realized messing with a commodity critical to bordering states such as Hungary, Slovakia and Romania was politically hazardous.

It is true that a country can still have a thriving economy even if it is missing one or two items from the basket of strategically important industries. Singapore, for example, needs to import fossil fuel but is still considered one of Southeast Asia’s economic tigers. But this is only possible because Singapore is so good at most everything else. It has several other economic engines that perform exceptionally well.

Looking back several decades reminds us that Japan risked entering a World War to obtain the petroleum they needed. To get it, the Japanese concluded they needed to conquer parts of Indonesia. (Similarly they wanted Southeast Asia for its rubber.) They knew these were actions the US wouldn’t tolerate, but they decided they had to do them anyway.

While we’re on the topic of World War II, it is instructive to recall Hitler fought it with one hand tied behind his back. Germany had no oil of its own and gasoline refined from coal and the oil available from their Romanian ally were never enough. That’s why the German’s placed such great hopes in capturing Russia’s Caspian oil fields in 1943. Similarly, Hitler invaded Norway to ensure access to Swedish iron ore—another strategic commodity Germany lacked.

Canada’s oil revenues along with the taxes and royalties collected from those revenues are derived almost entirely from the oil we export to the US. Our export revenues for 2022, following the worst of the covid years, were $123 billion. They accounted for 15.8% of all Canada’s exports and 6.6% of GDP. The following year saw exceptionally high oil prices globally. That year the value of oil Canada’s oil production hit $139 billion and accounted for 7.1% of GDP. Pull even half of those revenues out of the Canadian economy for very long and we’re in economic depression territory.

So, thanks for the wakeup call president Trump. The fact Trump has indicated he will postpone his final decision until February 1, is of some comfort. Danielle Smith has met with him at Mar-a-Lago to make the case against tariffs on Canadian crude. Smith is among the most knowledgeable and capable people there are when it comes to oil and gas production and trade. We couldn’t hope for a better advocate for the producing provinces. She’s certainly a cut above Justin Trudeau and anyone else in his cabinet. Let’s hope Smith she managed to convince Trump how imposing tariffs would harm the economies of both countries.

There is an obvious way to prevent being in this sort of situation in the future – diversify our export opportunities by building more pipelines to tidewater. In my last column I focused on the difficulties involved in getting a pipeline built to the Atlantic coast. The challenges identified focused on the barriers thrown up by Quebec’s politicians and environmentalists. Trump’s ongoing tariff pronouncements suggest it would be in Canada’s national strategic interest to use whatever legal measures are required to sweep those barriers aside in both Quebec and British Columbia to get new tidewater pipelines built.

There is plenty the federal government can do to override the demands of municipalities, special interest groups and provincial governments in support of high national purposes and in emergencies. Section 91 of the constitution gives parliament broad, albeit somewhat vague, powers to do what needs to be done “to make laws for the peace, order and good government of Canada” in all matters not exclusively the jurisdiction of the provinces. And, you would think that if the heavy hand of the Emergencies Act can be used to prevent horn honking and traffic snarls in Ottawa, it could be employed to prevent the environmentally sanctimonious from blocking projects critical to our economic and political sovereignty. Of course doing any of this will require voting the Liberals out of office.

Sorry premier Ford, retaliatory tariffs and export taxes can’t be the only tools employed; especially when they cause self-inflicted wounds.  Unfortunately, until we have more export opportunities for oil and gas we may need to limit our counter attacks on Americans to misleading travel directions and poor restaurant service.

From the Center for Immigration Studies

By Todd Bensman

Anyone wondering what kind of skullduggery is afoot to defeat the new Trump Administration’s imminent deportation operations need look no further than Bakersfield in Kern County in California’s Central Valley.

Surprise Border Patrol sweeps earlier this month – the first large-scale deportation operations anywhere since Trump’s election – picked up some 80 illegally present aliens but also kicked off an emotionally manipulative brand of media propaganda most Americans must call out and reject as operations spread across the nation soon.

I call it “Injustice Porn” – exploitation propaganda that the mass migration advocacy industry, with eager helpers in local, state, and national media, will employ to undermine the current broad political support for Trump’s coming national interior deportation initiative.

What Is Injustice Porn?

Injustice porn is “news” coverage and commentary that emphasizes hyperbolic, emotionally triggering government abuse allegations or migrant sobbing to generate headlines, spin up public outrage, and force government counteraction –before they can be proven false when no one cares much later. Take these few examples where highly inflammatory unverified claims and tragedy stories about immigration enforcement actions proved incredibly effective at undermining public policies before the truth emerged:

• The September 2021 allegations that white agents of the Border Patrol’s Horse Patrol Unit used their reins to whip black Haitian migrants during the Del Rio bridge crisis, claims determined to be without merit 11 months later. 
• U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s July 2019 allegation that migrants she met in Trump-era detention centers were forced to drink their water from toilets as part of an organized racist government campaign of “psychological warfare,” a claim strongly disputed by officials who pointed out that clean-water drinking fountains were integrated into apparatuses that also included toilets. 
• Allegations that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s “death trap” floating marine barrier in the Rio Grande caused the drowning deaths of at least two immigrants upon its summer 2023 installation and that sharp metal gears between buoys wounded others. The allegations were deemed unfounded. 
• Allegations in 2018 that Trump’s administration was stuffing “kids in cages” – using video of practices that actually occurred during President Barack Obama’s administration. 
• Allegations in 2014 of widespread sexual misconduct by guards in a Texas-based family detention center, which were found to be without evidence by an investigative report. Detention center abuse allegations have proven an especially favored allegation for their ability to gin up widespread national outrage and government action before truth prevails. 

There are other popular forms of “injustice porn”, like news videos relating the “plight” of weeping deportee mothers and exploiting young children by staging them in ways engineered to tug at heartstrings. These kinds of “news” stories dehumanize migrants for political advantage in much the same way that makers of abused-pet support shelter commercials solicit donations on late-night TV.

An example of this came Monday, as inadmissible aliens with appointments to enter the U.S. through the unlawful CBP One port interview scheme were disappointed to learn that the program had been cancelled by the new administration. Print and broadcast coverage led with the tears of a Colombian migrant.

Accounts of hardworking illegal immigrants who kept their noses clean until the deportation bill finally came due are ever a favorite of the injustice porn industry, the telltale sign being that the storytellers rarely attempt to verify anything they’re told and accept all statements of fact as axiomatic.

Injustice porn propaganda is likely afoot when human rights and migrant advocates, UN agencies, and the news media put forth visuals and arguments that favor their agendas, without evidence. For instance, another favorite to forestall imminent deportations is to claim extreme widespread violence, hunger, and probable death await deportees in home nations. Many of these kinds of claims fall apart with even the mildest of factchecking and are usually dead wrong. (See House Envy: The Unacknowledged Real Motivation Behind Guatemala’s Mass Migration to the American Border, CIS February 2020; and Video: US Enabling Mass Asylum and Humanitarian Permit Fraud at the Southern Border, May 2023).

Which brings us back to the Border Patrol El Centro Sector’s Kern County “Return to Sender” operation as a foreshadowing indicator that the injustice porn industry is gunning the motor again and has released the emergency brake.

A Harbinger of Propaganda to Come

It’s unclear how the Border Patrol in the Kern County was able to get away with operations while President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas were still in office. But once unmarked Border Patrol cars, sweeps of Home Depots and farmlands began, the “injustice porn” machine sparked up for days without end.

At demonstrations and on local news, out came the familiar hyperbolic allegations without evidence as local media gave full unchecked voice to illegal alien protection advocates who claimed the operation was “an abuse of power,” “racial profiling”, and had “terrorized” the whole valley without justification. They vowed investigations and lawsuits to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

Frightened, terrorized children, the advocates alleged, felt compelled to hide at home rather than go to school. They got school employees like middle school teacher Belen Carrasco to assert that “students are scared”.

One child of about six years old was photographed carrying a pink sign that read in English: “My family picks your fruit!!!” – as though she’d written it herself rather than that someone else posed the cute little girl with the sign to gin up animosity against federal agents doing their normal work.

Another unverified claim that got uncritiqued air time for days on end was that the arrests had created a worker shortage that was damaging the local economy.

Like clockwork when the injustice porn machine churns media stories, out came local elected leaders promising to protect the illegal immigrants at all costs, undermining federal efforts to enforce immigration law.

One incident, when agents flattened the tire of a U.S. citizen to keep him from fleeing in his vehicle and then arrested his passenger on a warrant for human smuggling, especially outraged the activists, some of whom promised lawsuits.

Eventually, the ACLU showed up to investigate how the agents conducted themselves.

“What (agents) have done is terrorize communities and profile people who look brown, who look undocumented and who look like farmworkers”, said ACLU lawyer Rosa Lopez. “There was a lot of terror – or just fear – that trickled into kids not going to school”.

Now that Trump is in office with a strong mandate to return to normal detention and deportation activity, Americans need to recognize injustice porn when it targets them. They must call it out as manipulative, exploitative, and often outright false. They must begin to noisily reject injustice porn, to fact-check it, and to urge elected leaders and one another to blunt its impact.