So, perceptive readers, you may have noticed that a brief break in your regularly scheduled programming is at foot, and we have the explanation for it: it’s summer, and we’re on vacation.

Yes, its true, even bloggers need breaks sometimes – and because our bloggers are those exceptionally busy types who are always doing many things at once (while writing from locations all over the world), we felt that it was important to give them a bit of ‘time off’ too.

No fears however, as we will be continuing as a team in the fall, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and full of new international issues to debate with you about. We thank you for your continued support (and always-interesting comments and discussion) and look forward to seeing you again in the fall! In the meantime, feel free to share topics you’d like us to cover in the comments section.

So, perceptive readers, you may have noticed that a brief break in your regularly scheduled programming is at foot, and we have the explanation for it: it’s summer, and we’re on vacation.

Yes, its true, even bloggers need breaks sometimes – and because our bloggers are those exceptionally busy types who are always doing many things at once (while writing from locations all over the world), we felt that it was important to give them a bit of ‘time off’ too.

No fears however, as we will be continuing as a team in the fall, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and full of new international issues to debate with you about. We thank you for your continued support (and always-interesting comments and discussion) and look forward to seeing you again in the fall! In the meantime, feel free to share topics you’d like us to cover in the comments section.

As oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico from a well owned by the multinational oil company BP, albeit at a reduced rate now that some of the outflow from the well is being captured, an odd transatlantic spat has developed around the fact that the initials BP used to stand for “British Petroleum” but now stand for nothing at all. US President Barack Obama referred to BP as “British Petroleum” at one point, and this left his ambassador to the UK scrambling to explain that this was not intended as a slight against Britain. Nevertheless, some UK commentators – notably Peter Hitchens, brother of Christopher – were quick to take offense, and even to suggest that some deeply rooted hostility towards Britain was coming to the surface.

Although it’s true that Obama has displayed few signs of wanting to maintain a “special relationship” with Britain, I tend to agree with Mary Ellen Foley that his administration’s outrage over BP’s incontinent well has little to do with the company’s national origins. However, I do find it a little unsettling that BP has become a meaningless acronym, as if to epitomise the idea of a nebulous corporate entity that comes from nowhere, is accountable to no one, and is interested in nothing apart from the bottom line. A meaningless acronym is also, of course, a blank canvas onto which people are free to project their own impressions. In the wake of the accident in the Gulf of Mexico, BP might as well stand for Bloody Prats, Betrayed Principles, Bountiful Profits, Bungled Penetration, Barracuda Patrol, Big Problems, Bringing Pain or Better Pray.

I’m being unfair, of course. While it’s true that BP has a poor safety record and a reputation for rushing in where many oil companies would fear to tread, it’s also true that the corporation has been fairly cooperative with respect to the necessary steps of capping the well and arranging a compensation fund for the people whose livelihoods have been affected. Though I hesitate to put too much faith in anything written by Lawrence Solomon of the National Post, his suggestion that US government protectionism has been excluding European (and especially Dutch) resources and expertise that could help the clean-up effort certainly deserves a careful hearing.

The chorus of condemnation that has been directed at BP in recent weeks also strikes me as unreasonable in three respects. First, it seems more than likely that Obama and his lackeys have been levelling unpersuasive threats of ass-kicking at BP as much because the company makes what one article called “a useful political foil” as because of any genuine sense of outrage over the damage to the environment. Second, the media have been quick to condemn BP chief executive Tony Hayward’s “PR gaffes” – the infamous quote about wanting his life back, for example – almost as if correct PR were virtuous and praiseworthy in itself. This strikes me as an incredibly sinister development.

The third and most important point, though, is that BP has in a sense become a scapegoat for a much larger problem: the fact that we really are starting to run out of easily obtainable oil. However severe BP’s deviations from whatever “best practices” are normal in the industry, they are superimposed on the inherent risks of deepwater drilling. And if demand for oil cannot be drastically reduced, deepwater drilling is one of a rather limited range of options for keeping the stuff flowing as more easily accessible oil fields come to produce less and less. At least in the near future, the world’s economies may have to rely on oil extracted from places like the Gulf of Mexico, with an inevitable risk of begrimed seabirds and immolated turtles.

One obvious alternative source of energy, though, is Canada’s tar sands. While extracting oil from the tar sands is an inefficient process, energy-intensive in itself, there’s at least no inherent risk of spewing vast quantities of oil into the ocean. The world will eventually need to become far less dependent on oil in general, because of global warming and because even “alternative” sources like deepwater drilling and the tar sands will only keep us going for so long, but we (as a species) have no realistic option other than to keep finding and exploiting oil deposits in order to keep our economies going during the early stages of the transition.

Right now, the tar sands look like they may be a somewhat better bet than deepwater drilling. In the short term, Canada’s political leaders should encourage development of the tar sands, and Michael Ignatieff in particular should stop agitating against plans to export tar sands oil on tankers from Kitimat, B.C. In the long term, the government should be promoting construction of environmentally friendly infrastructure and research into alternative energy sources.

Tagged: Barack Obama, BP, British Petroleum, deepwater drilling, fossil fuels, global warming, Gulf of Mexico, Kitimat, Lawrence Solomon, Mary Ellen Foley, Michael Ignatieff, oil, Peter Hitchens, tar sands, Tony Hayward, United Kingdom, United States

Just a quick vignette from Beijing, where I live and work. Yesterday evening I was walking to my usual Mexican restaurant, through streets that were a little busier than usual because it was the first day of a three-day holiday marking the festival of Duānwŭ Jié. Duānwŭ Jié is sometimes known as the Dragonboat Festival, and indeed dragonboat racing is one of the traditional activities associated with the festival; another is eating zòngzi, which are sticky rice dumplings that are normally pyramidal in shape and wrapped in bamboo leaves.

Anyway, I was on my way to the Mexican restaurant when I heard a strange, prolonged, foghorn-like blast of noise very different from the automotive honking that you hear all the time in Beijing. Looking around, I realised that the sound was coming from two or three people wielding what I recognised from descriptions in news reports as vuvuzelas, the uniquely loud and obnoxious plastic horns that are driving some people to distraction at the World Cup in South Africa. Inside the Mexican restaurant, the Netherlands were handily beating Denmark live from Johannesburg as the occasional vuvuzela-groan wafted in from the street. So there I was, eating a burrito in China as two European soccer teams battled it out to a distinctly African soundtrack.

The standard response to cultural juxtapositions like this is to extol them as characteristic of our wonderfully vibrant emerging global civilisation. They’re supposed to represent the positive side of globalisation, as opposed to the negative side that involves factory workers being driven to suicide by the demands of faceless corporations. The juxtapositions can certainly be amusing and intriguing, but you have to wonder if we’re in the early stages of a fundamentally destructive process that will eventually turn the whole world into an incoherent, geographically homogeneous, and ultimately dishwater-dull blur of vuvuzelas, burritos and dragonboat races. The biggest Canadian cities have probably gone as far down this road as anywhere in the world, and to me it seems shallow to regard the change as entirely for the better.

I don’t want to see either burritos or vuvuzelas banned from the streets of Beijing, or anywhere else. But I’m rather glad that, for the moment at least, not all of China or even Beijing is a plausible setting for experiences like the one I had yesterday night. The Mexican restaurant is over in Sānlĭtún, the expatriate-friendly part of the city where most of the embassies (including Canada’s) are concentrated and where there are lots of establishments that cater to foreigners. Just a few blocks away, despite the near-universality of Western dress and the ubiquity of Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken, the evolving fabric of Chinese culture seems very much intact.

Tagged: Beijing, China, Denmark, Dragonboat Festival, Duanwu Jie, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa, Vuvuzela, World Cup, zongzi

I haven’t been following the debate over reforms to Canada’s refugee system with any particular closeness, but it’s encouraging to see Immigration Minister Jason Kenney at least attempting to do something about the issue. Any reasonable policy for processing refugee claimants would aim to balance two opposite risks: that genuine victims might be rebuffed and sent away to face persecution or worse, and that opportunists might slip through and succeed in taking up residence in Canada. Unfortunately, Canada’s system appears to have been designed by people who lay awake worrying that we might accidentally send away a deserving claimant, but didn’t much care how many undeserving ones made it through. As a result, the balance has been upset in spades.

The problem is a long-standing one, and is perfectly well-documented. Back in 1992, the Liberal politician and former Immigration Appeal Board member David Anderson called a newly constituted version of the board “a wretched monster that’s out of control”, and commented acidly that the rule of law was being “subverted” by acceptance of false claims. He also noted that Canada’s acceptance rate for refugee claims was 64% – more than triple Britain’s, and more than nine times Australia’s. Since then our acceptance rate has dropped off to some extent, but remains relatively high. Data provided by the Canadian Council for Refugees imply a rate of 54.8% in 2008.

The real scandal, however, is that a negative decision does not necessarily lead to deportation. The Fraser Institute put it rather delicately in a 2004 study:

Even failed refugee applicants have a significant possibility of securing permanent residence and citizenship through various immigration categories. At the end of the process, relative to other countries, Canada’s effort to remove failed refugee applicants appears to have been given a low priority.

The Montreal Gazette was more precise:

We have a backlog of 60,000 claimants waiting for decisions. It now takes on average 19 months for a claimant to get a first hearing. When refugee status is not granted, final resolution of a case can take five years. Some 15,000 rejected claimants are “awaiting removal” from Canada. Another 38,000 have simply vanished. The average case costs taxpayers about $50,000 to resolve. It’s a shambles.

Canada’s traditional refugee policy could almost be described as a non-policy: just show up, make a claim, and you’ll probably be able to stay, without the government’s having much of a meaningful say in the matter. The practical consequences of this situation are mixed. Canada is not exactly being flooded by spurious refugees: the annual number of claimants has varied from about 20,000 to about 44,000 over the past decade. However, surges of claimants from specific countries represent a perennial concern, and one that the government generally deals with by imposing a visa requirement on the country in question.  After all, the thinking presumably goes, they can’t claim asylum if they can’t get to Canada in the first place. It’s an extraordinarily passive-aggressive approach – in effect, we’re so dysfunctionally incapable of saying “no” to a refugee claimant that we go to great lengths to avoid being asked in the first place. And because foreign governments are understandably annoyed when Canada decides that their citizens need visas, our bilateral relationships suffer.

Against this background, Uncle Jason’s efforts to reform the refugee processing system have been laudable. The thrust of his original plan was to take the obvious steps of speeding up decisions and improving deportation enforcement. The general idea clearly enjoyed broad political support, but one detail – a plan to deny refugees from designated “safe” countries access to a new Refugee Appeal Division if their claims were rejected – aroused the ire of the opposition parties.

A compromise has now emerged, but in my opinion the politicians who dug in their heels over the safe country list were being little short of perfidious. It’s perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that some foreign countries protect their citizens at least as well as we protect ours, and accordingly that claims of asylum originating from those countries are likely to be unfounded. In fact, I would prefer a bill that went even further and did not permit claims arising from safe countries to be heard in Canada at all. While persecution can happen anywhere, many potential victims have ample recourse to their own governments, and it’s silly for Canada to try to take up slack that barely exists. Uncle Jason should be commended on a good start, but our refugee system still has some way to go before that vital sense of balance is restored. Meanwhile, it would be nice if the opposition parties would stop behaving as if the amiable little custom of admitting refugees were some kind of sacred duty or vital national interest.

Tagged: Australia, David Anderson, deportation, Fraser Institute, immigration, Jason Kenney, persecution, refugees, safe countries, Uncle Jason, United Kingdom