Glavin: Canada is facilitating Russia’s energy blackmail

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Okay. That was embarrassing.

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It’s not quite the same as the spectacle Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made of himself on his magical mystery tour of India in 2018, with his multiple costume changes, extravagant banghra dancing and suspected convicted murderer in his entourage. And then have his national security adviser calmly try to explain away the disgrace by insinuating that it was all a set-up by Indian intelligence agencies.

As embarrassments continue on the world stage, the Trudeau government’s decision last week to break NATO ranks and suspend Canada’s own sanctions law to release half a dozen pipeline turbines, allowing Vladimir Putin will further increase his treasury with the natural gas money he is extorting from Germany. hapless Olaf Scholz, was, well, still pretty embarrassing.

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In reality, it is an entirely different ignominy that Canada’s ambassador to Ukraine is summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Kyiv for a reprimand while Ukrainian civilians are being blown to bits in Putin’s missile attacks and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is at the vanguard of liberal democracy. The bloodiest crisis since World War II.

But Scholz and Trudeau are cast in the same mold as German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Trudeau’s Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Stéphane Dion, the Chrétien-era fixture. who you never hear about these days, even though he is the representative of Canada. Ambassador to Germany and special envoy to the European Union. They are bright, happy holdovers from the neoliberal illusions of globalization, the days of stratospheric profits racked up on the pretext that torture states like Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China can be weaned off their savagery through free trade and the festivals of the rich and famous in Davos.

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The US State Department has been caught up in the Canadian and German turbine betrayal by having to give the appearance of NATO unity by publicly supporting Canada’s decision, which was supposed to be about a single turbine from Siemens Energy in a one-off deal to keep Germans from freezing this winter, which itself was rubbish and everyone knew it. The arrangement turned out to involve six turbines at a Siemens maintenance yard in Montreal, in a sanction waiver that will last up to two years.

Not that Germany’s political and industrial establishment hadn’t been warned, for more than a decade, that it was crazy to become so dependent on the energy of the butcher in Moscow, but the Germans saw too much easy money in it and the Bundestag kept Russia’s natural gas protection racket running at full throttle even after Putin expropriated Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and invaded Lunansk and Donetsk in 2014.

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Less than two years after that barbarism, as Trudeau’s first foreign minister, Dion was courting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, publicly wishing for a welcome mat for Russian oligarchs in Canada and rationalizing his hopes, in the House of Commons, to put all those pesky Russia sanctions behind us. And he almost got away with it.

Meanwhile, the like-minded Schröder had become the world’s richest former politician, amassing it from his boardroom sinecures with Gazprom, the Russian natural gas giant. In the run-up to Putin’s full-scale war of conquest in the Ukraine, Scholz, Schröder’s Social Democratic Party successor after Russia-friendly Angela Merkel’s interregnum, insisted that the German-Russian gas deal should remain untouched. problems.

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With 100,000 Russian troops concentrated on Ukraine’s eastern border, Scholz was still muttering about some vague threat of “consequences” if Moscow invaded Ukraine. Still in the throes of anti-war action, all Scholz was willing to send Ukraine was 5,000 helmets, and furthermore he refused to allow Estonia to send President Zelenskyy some Cold War-era German howitzers he had on hand in Tallinn.

Just weeks before the invasion, Scholz’s Green Party foreign minister Baerbock was in Kyiv bullying Zelenskyy about Germany’s proper role in the calamity as a “mediator” and explaining why no German military equipment would come. . “We are prepared to have a serious dialogue with Russia to defuse the highly dangerous situation at the moment because diplomacy is the only viable way.”

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Two full weeks after the invasion, our own Minister Joly was insisting that Canada’s role, like Germany’s, should involve only aid and diplomacy. “Canada is not a nuclear power, it is not a military power. We are a mid-sized power and what we are good at is convening and making sure that diplomacy takes place and at the same time convincing other countries to do more.”

It was only after the invasion that Germany, the heaviest millstone around Europe’s neck, was forced to face facts. More than half a million outraged Germans were in the streets. In the Reichstag, Scholz announced that it had turned out that geopolitical power politics and wars were strangely not a thing of the past after all, and diplomacy is not the only way, and Germany would spend an additional $111 billion on its military budget. and he would be siding with the Ukraine in the war, after all.

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It was not until April that Germany approved the delivery of 30 decommissioned Gepard tanks, equipped with anti-aircraft weapons, to Ukraine. Earlier this month, 15 of the tanks were finally on their way to Kyiv. The final 15 are supposed to arrive sometime next month. There have been some shipments of Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons and Fliegerfaust anti-aircraft missiles, but not much else.

It wasn’t until May 30 that Schröder was forced to step down from Gazprom’s board, and only after the Bundestag threatened to take away his lavish offices and taxpayer-funded staff if he didn’t.

Canada’s defense minister, Anita Anand, has gone to great lengths to provide the ramshackle Ukrainian resistance with military equipment: combat support vehicles, drones, howitzers, ammunition, that sort of thing. But it is worse than embarrassing that, at the same time, we are facilitating Putin’s natural gas blackmail of Germany that anyone paying attention was warning would happen, a decade ago, and we are being written off as warmongers for doing so.

Terry Glavin He is an author and journalist.