‘Anti-petroleum’ movement a growing security threat to Canada, RCMP say | Hacker News Reader

‘Anti-petroleum’ movement a growing security threat to Canada, RCMP say

theglobeandmail.com

48 pointscentrinoblue32 comments

"The government has tabled Bill C-51, which provides greater power to the security agencies to collect information on and disrupt the activities of suspected terrorist groups."

FYI for any Americans reading this, when a bill is tabled in Canada, it means the opposite of what you think it does, the bill is put forward for discussion rather than suspending discussion indefinitely.

Also, when we have a majority government as we do now, a bill that is tabled by the government will almost certainly pass.

As an American, "tabling" to mean suspending has always seemed backwards! We say "on the table" to describe possibilities we are considering and "off the table" to describe options which have been rejected, so I don't understand why people say "tabling" to mean "removing it from consideration".

> “There is a growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels,”

Anti-Canada petroleum movement, or Canadian anti-petroleum movement? This doesn't seem like an accidental word re-arrangement.

It probably isn't.

There is a large portion of the federal government that have tied up Canadian economic interests in the tar sands. Entire regions of the central provinces are literally propped up on tar sands extraction. Take that away and you'll have swaths of blue-collar workers with mortgages, debts, and families and no income. They will probably be pretty mad.

Any group that harms tar sands extraction operations harms Canadian citizens... I can see the logic there.

The scary thing is the wider implications of C51 and that it hasn't been voted out, just tabled. This sort of thing winds up being buried in another bill with more obscure language around it when everyone has moved on.

The scariest thing is that this is just the "too big to fail" thing all over again, just in Canada now. We're doing something that's bad for the environment, just because it props up huge swathes of the economy. This is short sighted. No country should prop up significant portions of their economies with unsustainable activities. While it's profitable, the population pays. When it fails, the population pays.

My Pediatrician made a particularly profound statement to me when I was trying to get my first child to sleep through the night and it applies when you're considering industry:

Pay now or pay later, but one way or another you will pay. It might seem hard now, but the longer you leave it, the worse it's going to be.

As noted by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9063463 tabling a bill is not getting rid of it; Tabling a bill is the first step to passing it.

Exactly; often the first of many. Industry lobbyists have no shortage of time and resources when it comes to pursuing the interests of their employers. With the copyright battle in Canada we went through several bills before an outcome was achieved [0].

Unfortunately for those corporations with assets tied up in the oil sands the market hasn't been terribly kind of late and people who moved out there for the industry jobs are beginning to see the effects of market demand slowing for their rather expensive goods.

[0] http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2012/06/canadian-copyfight-succes...

'Harm' is such a vague word though.

Could divesting of oil stocks be considered tantamount to terrorism going forward?

the suggestion is, as in the US, that a lot of groups are receiving support from outside their respective countries.

There is a lot of money to be lost for other counties should the US and Canada develop their resources to their fullest and unlike many other current oil producers there is the ability to exploit freedom expression and movement to limit this expansion of resource development.

I don't see how that can possibly be taken seriously when, in the US at least, politicians openly take donations and swear allegiance to foreign interests. Additionally, if money leads directly to terrorism, then why not also investigate the companies that stand to make money by exploiting these resources? There is a long, bloody history of companies committing violent acts (in the US at least) to protect their economic interests against peaceful activists and protests.

Commerce is king in the US, so it's "alright" for politicians to accept money from outside sources as long as it can even slightly be cast as "pro-business."

Many common Americans don't agree with this necessarily, but there are enough that do or have been misled by propaganda that the "pro-business" agenda is given free-rein in this country.

That was my point, I don't see how anyone can say, with a straight face, that a protester taking a foreign donation is "dangerous". It is just an absurd excuse for the politicians to do what they want to do for their own, less publicly acceptable, reasons.

I presume they mean international groups that oppose the import of Canadian petroleum.

The Canadian oil sands are vast, but take a relatively large amount of energy to process into usable fuel. As such, Canada is particularly unpopular among some groups.

I'm sure it's not accidental. They either don't see the difference between your two alternatives, or see an advantage in intentionally confusing them. It's a standard tactic to paint your opponents as being unpatriotic.

There's an election coming up. The terrorism boogeyman has been so expedient in America that the Conservative Party is trying to invent a similar threat.

".. concludes the report which is stamped “protected/Canadian eyes only”

I smell a Canadexploitation ripoff of James Bond...

Oh, you mean Spyfall? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3462616/

There's a simple solution to this supposed "anti-Canada" activity and it's for Canada to build the pipeline over to British Columbia. Then y'all won't have to worry about dealing with US "anti-petroleum forces" and we won't have to worry about your oil spilling on our land on its way to China.

the people of BC (but not the government unfortunately) are understandably opposed to the pipeline as well. It benefits BC to the tune of 50-someodd jobs

> The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association has already launched challenges... ... over alleged surveillance of groups opposed to the construction of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline in B.C.

Anti-Canada activity if you do, anti-Canada activity if you don't.

Deleted comment

I'd assume that the logic is that Canadas' economic survival depends on its petroleum-product industries and anyone interfering with that is going to cause major harm to Canadas' survival as an oil-addled state. It is probably true that revenues generated by the oil industry are propping up the state, but then the RCMP should be doing a danger report on that, and not its own citizens. Probably easier for the gun-totin' types to deal with dirty stoned hippies than high-falutin' government economics-terrorists though, I'd imagine ..

Canada isn't as dependent on petroleum as Venezuela or Russia, but that resource is extremely profitable when prices are high so it often out-paces other industries in terms of margins.

There are other natural resource industries unaffected by this. Saudi Arabia isn't flooding the market with trees or minerals. There's also a large manufacturing base.

Who gives a fuck, if you live in Canada? I'd like to, personally.

Just make sure you buy the self-driving remote-controlled kill-me-now-intelligence-agencies model. It will be just so much easier for everyone.

Anyone else catch how activity these groups engage in "jeopardizes [...] the natural environment"?

Sweet, sweet irony.

Isn't Canada also being crushed by Saudi dumping cheap oil?

Pretty sure that is a bigger threat to them than protesters.

When exactly did the US and Canada turn into primary exporters of expensive oil, crazy times.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/01/28/claim-russia-fund...

It's a short step from linking breitbart to linking RT, the Daily Mail, or, hell, Stormfront.

Remember, Russia is our enemy, so their media is automatically as bad as a White Supremacist website.

Russia and the companies in the UAE fund a lot of the "environmental" groups in the US.

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