Probably could be filed under 'restoring dignity to the White House', but maybe under the Department 'Rules only apply to others'.
Memo to U.S.: Pay Attention to Canada
The U.S. stance on lumber tariffs has made our friendly neighbors to the north a lot less friendly - in fact, Canada is absolutely up in arms.... The North American Free Trade Agreement arbitrators have consistently ruled in Canada's favor. After the latest - and supposedly final - such ruling a few weeks ago, the United States trade representative, Rob Portman, announced that the United States would ignore it and refuse to refund $5 billion in tariffs it has collected in the last five years. (The American position is that the ruling is pre-empted by a parallel proceeding at the World Trade Organization.) THE stance has made our friendly neighbors to the north a lot less friendly - in fact, the country is absolutely up in arms. Canada's trade minister even walked out of softwood lumber negotiations recently, to the universal applause of his countrymen. “What is there to talk about?” asked Senator Pat Carney, a former trade minister who now represents British Columbia. “We won. The Americans won't abide by the rule of law.” That pretty much sums up the sentiment of the entire country.
and Canada has the potential to be one of our biggest petroleum suppliers:
...Saudi Arabia might not have the oil reserves we think they have? And how, as a result, a full-blown energy crisis might be a lot closer than most people now think? Pretty scary.But my Canadian friends keep telling me not to worry. Why? Because of the oil sands in Northern Alberta, which, they say, now have proven recoverable reserves of around 175 billion barrels - second only to the Saudis - and may in fact wind up having more reserves than any other spot on earth, especially as the technology to extract it improves.
This oil is not pumped from the ground, however. It's mined, and the oil is then extracted from the sands in an enormously expensive process. At $10 a barrel, this extraction process is uneconomical, but at $60 a barrel, it is a highly profitable enterprise. (Break even is around $20 a barrel.) Many of the major oil companies have made multibillion-dollar investments in the oil sands, which are now producing about one million barrels a day, most of that going straight to the United States. Neil Camarta, who heads up Shell Canada's efforts, told me that he expected production to rise to three million barrels a day by 2010.
Not having heard much about this before, I was a tad skeptical, so I called T. Boone Pickens, the 77-year-old former raider who knows more about oil markets than just about anyone I know.
Mr. Pickens turned out to be quite excited about the oil sands. “That oil is the jewel of North America,” he said. He says he thinks that production will never approach the 10 million barrels a day the Saudis currently export - “it's just too expensive to develop” - but that it could eventually get as high as 6 million barrels a day, which would cover more than half of America's oil import needs.He also said that it would be a very long time before the oil sands would face the “declining yield curve” that the Saudis will soon have to deal with. And although the Chinese have made some small investments in Northern Alberta, it is logistically impossible to ship the oil to China. So the United States is the logical market.
Mr. Camarta told me that Vice President Dick Cheney would visit the oil sands next month. Memo to Mr. Cheney: Can you settle the softwood lumber dispute while you're there? With all that oil, do we really want Canada mad at us?
