Get Some Of That Overseas Booty

Mr. Harper is crowing ( and I can’t even imagine Christie’s twisting and twerkings at this news) over the Petronas announcement that they will invest a total of $36 billion to build an LNG facility and associated infrastructure here in BC. Setting aside considerations of the fried planet with continued burning of fossil fuels, setting aside the devastation of hydraulic fracturing with its negative impacts of both land and water, not to mention the possibility of poisoning from sour gas, set aside the considerations of the corruption in the political and economic systems, and let’s talk about what investment really is in this context. Simply, it’s that we are unwilling to invest in our own economy, so we bring in the outside money, money that has a price. Not only does this take us back to the days of hewers of wood and drawers of water, it ensures that the best of the value generated by local activity ends up in Kuala Lumpur. This situation is particularly acute in the face of an administration that refuses to invest in a truly sustainable future by creating local capacity to employ our own citizens to provide for our own needs before we go off to look after the needs of shareholders in the international commodities market. For every $30 billion that comes into the country, we can count on that much leaving the country in short order, along with a premium for profit and the damage to the local landscape for which no one will be responsible under the current system of privatizing profits and socializing costs. Mr. Harper will just tell us to suck it up and either ignore what we can’t see or pay ourselves for his gifts to investors. My capitalist friend wags his finger at me and tells me that this attitude ensures that nothing will ever get built and that we will languish in the dark and twiddle out economic thumbs, that there is no prosperity without foreign investment. So far, based purely on my own narrow (but long time) observations, we’re headed that with the investors, so I don’t see that there’s a lot to gain. Saint Ronald Reagan’s Shining City On The Hill is a chimera populated only by those ranked bishop and above, or whatever the secular equivalent might be, leaving the rest of us to toil in obscurity and frustration. When investment becomes mostly local and supportive of people, I’ll be on board. In the meantime, I’m probably headed for some metaphorical equivalent of Lampedusa.