Lame duck Chrétien might as well be Chicken Little
How can we expect to be taken seriously when he behaves like this?
Paul Kedrosky
Financial Post
nationalpost.com
Saturday, August 16, 2003
If only this week's power outage had blacked out the Prime Minister's Office. It might have kept the office from doing additional damage to U.S.-Canada relations.
The week started with the release of a NAFTA panel decision on the ongoing softwood lumber dispute. The only thing certain about this never-ending dispute is that it is like something out of Dickens, a trade Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. It is a twisted and gnarled argument, less reliant on facts than on case-hardened loathing, a disagreement that does little other than entrench enmities and enrich lawyers. Both sides claimed a win this week, and if that constitutes a success for the Canada lumber industry -- or the U.S. one, for the matter -- then a pox on both their bleak houses. They are welcome to it.
But U.S.-Canada relations slid further downhill late in the week. Late on Thursday, there was a media and governmental feeding frenzy going as a massive power blackout spread through the northeast of North America. Who did it? How did it happen? Where did it start? Confusion was everywhere, with initial worries that the blackout might have been an act of terrorist sabotage, perhaps someone taking down a major trunk line or blowing up a plant.
Suddenly, however, a Reuters story had the Canadian Prime Minister's Office weighing in on the issue. "We have been informed that lightning struck a power plant in the Niagara [N.Y.] region on the U.S. side," said Jim Munson of Jean Chrétien's PMO. The comment was immediately everywhere, with CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times all running the "Chrétien says" comment within minutes.
My initial reaction was the same as if Mr. Munson had said Mr. Chrétien thought I had a thyroid problem: I wanted a second opinion. To anyone familiar with the muddled workings of "intelligence" at the PMO, the idea that somehow it had figured out the U.S. grid failure first was improbable, at best.
Some U.S. officials wanted a second opinion, too. Brian Warner of the New York Power Authority said its Niagara facilities were not hit by lightning and never stopped operating. Even Matt Drudge of the famously anti-Clinton Drudge Report weighed in, quickly pointing out that the U.S. Weather Service showed there had been no lightning strikes in the Niagara area during the period in question.
But rather than clamming up, we got more nutty behavior from Canadian officials. Having apparently been informed there was no lightning in the area, the PMO changed its blackout explanation to there being a fire at the Niagara plant in New York.
That explanation didn't fly, either. An Associated Press reporter in Niagara said the plant was running and the lights were on. Apparently the PMO, having cut it intelligence services to the bone, was now relying on a dusty Ouija Board and pemmican scent to suss out global issues. It had no idea what it was talking about.
That should have been the end, but it wasn't. Besieged by calls from U.S. media, Canada dug deeper with another hare-brained explanation. The PMO had mercifully decided to keep quiet, so late on Thursday, it was Defence Minister John McCallum's spokesperson Shaw Diaczuk who weighed in. He blamed a fire at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant.
Luckily, media outlets were beginning to catch on that the Canadians were just making this stuff up. If not, this would have been big news. Because a nuclear power plant problem in the northeast is exactly the sort of thing many people feared, and the news would likely have sent a flood of emergency officials off to solve the problem.
But it hadn't happened. There was no nuclear plant fire, as Minister McCallum's office later conceded. Why did they think there had been one? Why had they never checked with Pennsylvania officials (who immediately denied any fire)? Why were they even talking about it? Who knows?
What fun. Look at those crazy Canadians, changing their explanation all the time, doing their best to make sure -- "No way, uh-uh, not us; I didn't drive the speeding car" -- no one thought it had been the Canadian power grid failing.
The trouble is, irresponsible Canadian comments got wide play. They almost certainly distracted U.S. officials from the real cause, which now seems more or less certain to have been an Ohio power plant on the fritz and fluctuating wildly. Meanwhile, at a crucial time, the PMO and Defence Minister's offices had U.S. investigators scurrying off on errant chases, worrying over nonexistent causes.
How is the PMO to be taken seriously in trade matters, or others, if it acts in such silly and irresponsible ways? Far from seeing lame-duck Chrétien as a peer, U.S. President George W. Bush could understandably decide he is a crackpot, an irresponsible leader who doesn't know how to keep his own officials quiet during emergencies. And so in addition to the myriad economic costs imposed by this blackout, we have this unnecessary extra one: further strained relations between Canada and the United States.
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