More shady dealing

The NDP (led by MP Dennis Bevington) points out that the softwood lumber sellout may not be the only bad deal Harper's pushed for now that the Cons have played a supporting role in a natural gas partnership between PetroCanada and Gazprom:

“Canada has so many opportunities in the energy sector and in conservation that we don't need our government to be a cheerleader for Russian LNG,” said Bevington. “It doesn’t matter whether you look at this deal from a trade perspective, from the perspective of workers drilling for natural gas, from an energy security perspective, from a government revenue perspective, or from an environmental perspective, this deal is just plain bad for Canada.”

This deal will have the following negative impacts:

- Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, the amount of natural gas Canada must provide to the United States would increase if we imported gas from Russia, however, if Russia cut back on the amount it was supplying, the American quota would stay the same, thus forcing Canadians to give up supplies we might need for ourselves;
- Canadians working in the natural gas exploration and development industries will face loss of employment as Russian imports replace the need for new wells;
- Canada’s energy security will be undermined as we come to rely on imported sources of energy, when we could be self-sufficient;
= The federal government will see a loss of potential revenue as every cubic metre of Russian LNG means lost royalty revenues from an equal amount of Canadian natural gas; and
- The liquefaction, transportation and regasification of LNG are energy intensive processes which would result in as much as 40 per cent more Greenhouse Gas Emissions than would result from burning domestic natural gas supplied by a pipeline.

In case you were wondering, that's the same Gazprom which Harper bashed just days ago based on its history of manipulating gas exports for political purposes. But now that it's Harper's political purposes at play, the problem seems to have vanished rather quickly.

So what comes next? It's worth taking a closer look to see if there are ways of mitigating the harmful effects of the natural gas deal (I hear the Standing Committee on International Trade has a few meetings planned already). But based on the Cons' track record, it doesn't seem likely that any of the potential negative effects have been taken into account in the deal as negotiated...and once again there's no basis to justify substantive problems down the road based primarily on Harper's desire pretend to be a competent dealmaker now.