Just this once, OK?

That sums up Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s terrified assent to China’s $15-billion CNOCC takeover of Calgary-based petroleum producer Nexen. From now on, he promises, he’ll only say yes under “exceptional” circumstances.

Harper had offered himself up to NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair on a platter, and Mulcair set the platter on fire during question period. It was fun to watch but that’s little comfort. Nexen’s an awful deal for Canadians.

But Harper couldn’t say no to China because he wants quick money for a tarsands industry that’s starting to look weak and because he’s an ideologue who thinks all business deals are good ones. Are the markets happy? Gosh, yes. Are Canadians of all political stripes pleased by increased foreign ownership of Alberta’s precious innards? Irrelevant.

Harper’s a bully at home, a wimp overseas. He happily torments environmentalists, refugee claimants, women, unions, public servants, you know, the locals. He ignores Parliament or prorogues it, and treats the Investment Canada Act — which states that foreign investment must benefit Canada — as a joke.

That’s his shtick and to be fair, it plays well, at least in the West. But when Harper the bully is faced with the biggest bully of them all, the power colossus that is China, he hands over our jewels, our natural resources.

Here, have some bitumen, he tells China, and laughs weakly.

The Harper government knows that approving the sale of Nexen — as well as the $6-billion sale of Progress Energy to Malaysian-owned Petronas — angers Canadians. Most of us could not map Malaysia’s industrial strategy nor indeed Malaysia. But we know China well because everything we own was made there and, frankly, it’s starting to grate.

I don’t blame Harper for fearing Communist China’s wrath. It’s a monstrous place with a vast peasantry working for slave wages, a startling lack of interest in global warming, a North Korean level of tolerance for free speech and an admittedly brilliant use of debt used as a club against shrinking giants like the U.S.

China is implacable and the tarsands are wobbly. As the journalist Andrew Nikiforuk wrote recently in thetyee.ca, China’s funding of unbridled bitumen extraction will make the building of pipelines like Northern Gateway and Keystone financially necessary and therefore almost inevitable. It will turn Canada into “a bitumen plantation economy of oil, for oil, and by oil.”

As the U.S. (unwisely, I say) fracks for huge reserves of shale gas and Chinese economic growth inevitably slows, Alberta’s expensively refined oil-out-of-tar will be unsaleable. So let’s haul it out now, let fancy foreigners — not us — refine it and sell it cheaply. That’s Harper’s plan.

It’s a tragedy for Alberta and for Canada. Thanks to climate change, we have entered the most difficult and conflict-ridden century of human history. Fast cash from China won’t help. Chinese cash isn’t going into a sovereign fund, not even in Alberta. It will vanish.

I hesitate to bring up human rights because I don’t believe the Conservative government has a genuine interest in backing them in Canada or overseas. But in 2006, Harper said this about relations with China: “I don’t think Canadians want us to sell out important Canadian values — our belief in democracy, freedom, human rights. They don’t want us to sell that out to the almighty dollar.”

But this is what Harper just did. He may even believe that the Nexen deal will make China think of Canada as a friend at the table, which is absurd. Would China like water with its Nexen? Some spruce pine as a side dish? Sorry, Canada. China’s just not that into you.

Economist Jim Stanford has pointed out that the sorrow of the Nexen and Petronas deals is that Canada didn’t even need foreign investment. It has enough capital of its own, as the Bank of Canada’s Mark Carney has said of $600 billion currently playing dead, to invest in its own interests.

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Why was Harper such a poor negotiator, such an international dolt? We need not have handed our birthright to a corrupt and unassailable foreign country. We are China’s trampoline.

hmallick@thestar.ca

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