Dick Cheney, Alberta-bound

The creepy veep comes at the invitation of Michael Walker and the Fraser Institute.

by Derrick O'Keefe

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney will make a visit to Canada in early September. His itinerary, though, isn’t likely to take him anywhere near the nation’s capital in Ottawa. He plans to stick to the more familiar territory of oil-rich Alberta. Making his first visit to Canada since taking office almost five years ago, Cheney’s trip highlights once again the priorities of the US administration. Dick will in Alberta to size up the vaunted tar sands which, despite still difficult and costly extraction, some tout as the world’s largest reserve of hydrocarbons.

Avoiding Ottawa would likely suit both Cheney and Paul Martin best. Although members of the federal cabinet have been outspoken in recent weeks about the $5 billion softwood lumber dispute, their bluster about Canadian sovereignty is plain hypocrisy in light of the government’s overall relations with Washington. Minister of Industry David Emerson, MP for Vancouver-Kingsway, has been perhaps the most emotional in calling for tough action against the Americans: “Are we going to stand together?” Emerson asked. “Are we going to unite? Are we going to be stronger than the sum of our parts or are we going to be endlessly bickering among ourselves and allowing the bully to basically mop the floor with us?”

But Emerson has been absolutely silent about the same bully’s much more blatant and violent violations of sovereignty. Local activists have confronted the MP about Canada’s role in overthrowing the democratically-elected government in Haiti, and yet Emerson has not uttered a word about the disastrous human rights situation in this hemisphere’s poorest country. And the Liberals, Conservatives and even NDP leader Jack Layton have appeared to endorse whole-heartedly Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier’s warmongering statements about the “enemy” in Afghanistan.

The “sovereignty” that the Liberals have been invoking with respect to softwood expresses only the interests of the massive and still-influential forestry corporations in Canada. Emerson himself was the CEO of Canfor Corporation before entering federal politics in 2004. Claims to sovereignty by indigenous peoples in Canada have been consistently ignored by the forest industry, and received considerably less media attention. Art Manuel, a long-time activist against the expansion of the Sun Peaks resort near Kamloops, BC, has convincingly argued that forest companies’ use of unceded Native lands represents, in effect, an unfair subsidy to the industry.

Despite the hypocrisy of it all, federal government officials and the US administration may prefer to keep a certain distance from each other during the Vice President’s upcoming visit. As unpopular as the Bush administration is in Canada and internationally, Cheney is a particularly loathsome figure. One might even be forgiven for hoping that an opposition Member of Parliament would make some outspoken comments about Cheney and the war in Iraq during his visit, though even the NDP and Bloc Quebecois were unfailingly polite when George W Bush visited Canada last fall. So it appears, again, that it will be up to activists to make a visible show of opposition to Cheney.

On September 8, Cheney will have a high-level “invitation-only” dinner in Calgary with western premiers Ralph Klein and Gordon Campbell, with the evening’s host being none other than the “non-partisan” Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-headquartered right-wing think-tank.

The Fraser Institute is a familiar source for dissemination of conservative ideas, particularly for those on Canada’s west coast. Its press releases are all too often run as news stories, especially in CanWest-Global productions, no matter how recycled their latest “findings,” such as their tiresome annual school rankings aimed at discrediting public education. Nevertheless, the swagger that the Institute’s long-time mouthpiece Michael Walker displayed in announcing the V P’s dinner is worth noting: "It's a private dinner for a few friends of ours with the vice-president. It's by invitation-only," Walker announced.

In an interview with TheGeorgia Straight, Walker was at pains to avoid the perception that members of the federal government might deserve some credit for the Veep’s impending visit: “We invited Vice-President Cheney to come to Canada, although I heard yesterday, now, the deputy prime minister [ Anne McLellan] is claiming she invited him. He is coming up for a private visit with myself and another friend of his up in Alberta, where we’ll go off up in a lodge for a variety of purposes.”

Michael Walker’s bombast, though, shouldn’t come as a surprise. You might recall him from his delightful cameo in the documentary The Corporation. Playing himself, a right-winger amongst a cast of left-wing talking-heads, Walker delivers at once perhaps the film’s most frightening and comic moment, declaring that “every square inch” of the world’s air, water and land ought to be privatized.

No one should be surprised, either, by this free market zealot’s loyalty and devotion to Dick Cheney. They work for the same people, after all. George W. Bush assigned Cheney to draft the vaunted Energy Policy that was one of the Administration’s first orders of business in 2001. Then, along with the war in Iraq, Bush and Cheney ignored the Kyoto Accord on climate change at the urging of oil giants like Exxon. The world’s largest oil company just happened to contribute $60,000 to the Fraser Institute in both 2003 and 2004.

No company, of course, has profited as notoriously in Iraq as Halliburton, securing billions worth of no-bid “reconstruction” contracts from the US government. Dick Cheney’s last visit to Canada came in 2000, speaking to the World Petroleum Congress in Calgary as CEO of Halliburton, from which he still receives hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of deferred payments and dividends from millions in stock options. This September’s visit to Alberta, then, will see Cheney on very familiar ground.

In recent weeks, the growing unpopularity of the Iraq war and the closely-related crisis of legitimacy of the Bush Administration have become more evident in the United States, as the cross-country solidarity with protestor Cindy Sheehan has shown.

Here in Canada, activists will be greeting Cheney as a war criminal, just as his nominal boss Bush was last year. On Thursday, September 8, at 5 pm, the StopWar coalition is organizing a rally in front of the Fraser Institute Vancouver headquarters.

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Derrick O’Keefe is a co-chair of the StopWar coalition in Vancouver, and a founding editor of Seven Oaks, an on-line journal of politics, culture and resistance.