OREANDA-NEWS. May 20, 2014. Stephen Harper was in need of a new friend with a big appetite for oil. The Americans just weren’t cutting it.

It was February 2012, three months since President Barack Obama had phoned the Canadian prime minister to say the Keystone XL pipeline designed to carry vast volumes of Canadian crude to American markets would be delayed.

Now Harper found himself thousands of miles from Canada on the banks of the Pearl River promoting Plan B: a pipeline from Alberta’s landlocked oil sands to the Pacific Coast where it could be shipped in tankers to a place that would certainly have it -- China. It was a country to which he had never warmed yet that served his current purposes.

Harper stood before a business audience in a luxury hotel banquet hall in Guangzhou, capital of China’s most populous province, putting on his best pro-China face while touting his nation’s virtues. “Canada is not just a great trading nation; we are an emerging energy superpower,” he said surrounded by a phalanx of red Chinese and Canadian flags.

Oil was top of mind. He noted that a single country -- the US -- took 99% of Canada’s exports, a situation he described as contrary to Canada’s commercial interests. “You know,” he said, “we want to sell our energy to people who want to buy our energy. It’s that simple.”

Chinese Juggernaut

The Chinese and Canadians in attendance had long waited for Harper to embrace the Chinese economic juggernaut. They held him up for half-an-hour posing for pictures. As he finally took his seat for a group photo with the organizers, he turned to Peter Harder, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs and president of the Canada China Business Council. “Do you think the Americans were listening?” he asked.

That Harper now found himself in the People’s Republic hawking Alberta’s oil spoke to the depth of his frustration with Obama. His view, according to people close to Harper who knew his thinking but aren’t authorized to speak, was that sensible Americans would understand the folly of allowing Canada’s massive oil sands reserves, estimated at 168 billion recoverable bbl, to be sucked up by China, a rising economic and political rival. Yet if the Americans -- most particularly a president inclined to indulge his green base at Canada’s expense -- didn’t pay heed, then Harper had primed the pump to do business with the Chinese.

Pristine Lands

The problem is that, his earlier declarations aside, it wasn’t that simple – not then and not now. Important elements of his Conservative party either shared Harper’s misgivings about China’s human-rights record and repression of religion, or were downright hostile to the country.

In British Columbia, with its zest for environmentalism, green and aboriginal groups had already emerged hostile to the idea that its pristine lands ought to be put at risk for a pipeline, known as Northern Gateway, to feed China’s fossil- fuel-propelled growth -- never mind how supertankers might damage the province’s postcard coasts.

This is the story of how Canada’s Plan B rejoinder to Obama’s repeated Keystone delays became mired down, jeopardizing future oil-sands development and production at a cost, according to a Calgary research group, of more than CAD400 billion (USD365 billion) in lost economic growth over the next 25 years. It was put together after on- and off-the-record interviews with more than 60 government and industry officials, environmentalists and aboriginal leaders. Some government officials close to Harper asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak.