Let Canada's oil flow (through Keystone XL)

There has been good, as well as disappointing, economic news for Canada in recent days.

On the positive side: All indications are that the impenetrable mysteries of the American political and regulatory process will finally overcome ecological hysteria and approve the transmission of oil from the Alberta oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico through the yet-to-be-completed Keystone XL pipeline.

It is nonsense, of course, that this project has been so long delayed, a fact that is due to the pitched, hand-to-hand combat necessary to win the heart and mind of the U.S. President and administration over to its national interest from tired environmental pieties. Apart from being good news in itself, it is good to have Canada on the side of the adults on such an issue.

This has been a more complicated process than it should have been, as the usual suspects, led by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, signed the inevitable petition against the oil sands. One more time we see the inadvisability of clergymen, like opinionated actors and legitimate cultural figures, meddling in matters they know nothing of. How a South African Anglican minister and a Tibetan national religious leader in exile imagine this is any concern of theirs, or that they have any standing to express an opinion about it, fortunately has finally escaped the comprehension of those who have the responsibility to decide the issue.

One of the most outrageous blunders of Canadian provincial premiers in recent times was the attack on the oil sands by Ontario's Dalton McGuinty and Quebec's Jean Charest at the Copenhagen Environmental Conference in 2009. Elsewhere at the same misguided conference, Barack Obama padded around trying to raise a $100-billion annual slush fund paid for with advanced countries' conscience money for the benefit of such worthies as Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez. Second prize to Obama for inanity at Copenhagen went to the Prince of Wales for his assertion that we had exactly 96 months to save the planet. McGuinty and Charest were just also-rans in a world-class competition, but they should be ashamed of their involvement nonetheless: No Canadian political leader should denounce another Canadian jurisdiction outside the country.

With oil at any price over $50 a barrel, Canada's economically viable oil reserves are greater than Saudi Arabia's and Canada could be reasonably relied upon not to lead an exploitive oil cartel, as Saudi Arabia has, raising oil prices to extort money from the West and Japan; rolling prices back only on the rare occasions when the United States made purposeful noises about emerging from its flaccid torpor and increasing domestic oil production and reducing demand for foreign oil. Fortunately, Canada has supplanted Saudi Arabia — soon by a margin of two million barrels per day to one million — as the largest foreign supplier of oil to the United States.

The promoters of the oil sands have played a brilliant and imaginative card with their advertisements for "ethical oil" — a campaign devised by Alykhan Velshi at EthicalOil.org and assisted by the pioneering Alberta journalist and television news network commentator Ezra Levant. Here were Canadians emerging from their customary reticence and saying it straight in a way that the United States, and the West generally, has failed to do. Canada, unlike Saudi Arabia (the target of the ethical oil campaign) does not finance 95% of the world's Jihadist madrassas and the rest of the cultural matrix that support Wahhabist and other extreme Islamist activity. Canada doesn't prevent women from driving, require them to dress like mummified corpses in public, has never championed the extermination of Israel and has not been a breeding ground for al-Qaeda.

That the ethical oil advertising campaign struck home was well demonstrated by Saudi complaints to the Television Review Bureau of Canada. The Saudis, generally fairly dismissive of heavy oil, have intervened through their embassy, although the advertisements could not be directly linked to Canadian oil producers.

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Less bracing than the progress of the oil sands is the news from the World Economic Forum that Canada, unlike Israel, India, the United States and a number of venerable European countries, is not among the world's 10 most innovative countries.

The World Economic Forum must be treated with caution, as the bowsprit of the globalization movement. It grew from a few internationalist Swiss hustlers and dreamers into a gigantic bazaar for "networking," in which all manner of government officials attended for the publicity back home and to hobnob with their counterparts, and the whole spectacle was paid for by prosperous people from all over the world crowding into the "plenary sessions" at great expense to themselves, to be cheek by jowl with the great and the good in the ghastly, remote, piercingly cold, Swiss Alpine town of Davos. Inferior hotels, redolent of the unsmiling hospitality of the Swiss, and festivals such as the annual sacking of McDonald's by the anti-globalization protesters, made visits an unforgettable experience.

But it is plausible that Canada is not especially innovative; it is not in the category of countries that are heavily challenged but have high educational standards (such as Israel, with barely a fifth of Canada's population) and are to some extent responding to necessity. If Canada is in fact lagging, there are certainly the fiscal resources to incentivize practical research and to promote competing models in many cutting edge activities.

The official forecast of 2.5% Canadian economic growth in 2012 is also disappointing. The recent rise in unemployment must be connected to the fizzling U.S. market. But as India and China are still putting up impressive growth numbers, and Canada's share of GDP going to them is increasing, Canada should in these circumstances have a more swiftly growing economy.

Canada should, in any case, show a greater ambition to lift itself clear of the branch-plant mentality that so afflicted it for more than a century. A return of the spirit and sagacity of C.D. Howe would always be welcome. I have argued here before that Canada should have taken advantage of the 2008 economic crisis to join Italy in control of Fiat-Chrysler. As upward pressure on the Canadian dollar continues, a joint public-private sector patriation of some of Canada's most strategic natural resources should be possible.

There should certainly not be any invasion of the private sector by the governments, only the official facilitation of the wisest elements of an industrial strategy proposed by some of the country's most innovative industrialists, appropriate to a rich country of expanding influence. Canadians seem to understand that the country has added a cubit to its stature, but it is time to do more than feel good about it, and seize the opportunities, as Alykhan Velshi is doing at EthicalOil.org; more power to him.