Obama Ruined Relations w/Canada over Keystone

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/obama-ruined-relations-wcanada-over-keystone/

March 23, 2015 by Daniel Greenfield 4 Comments

689

 Print This Post

Obama ran on a platform of improving relations with the world. Instead he ruined relations with countries that the US always had good relations with. He’s currently barking at Netanyahu. And Canada hates him. And Canadians are a polite people.

U.S.-Israeli relations are strained, and with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu winning reelection after a very public rebuke of the Obama White House, they could be worsening.
But Israel isn’t the only U.S. ally at odds with the Obama administration.
Seems U.S. Ambassador to Canada Bruce Heyman, a major Obama campaign bundler, is having a hard time getting in good with Canadian government officials, Canada’s the Globe and Mail wrote last week.
Why?
“The cold shoulder turned to the ambassador was part of a chilly year for U.S.-Canada relations, which have become unusually discordant at the top,” wrote Campbell Clark, the newspaper’s chief political reporter.

Obama has the corrupt habit of appointing his dirty little campaign bundlers as ambassadors to major countries. That’s already an insult. And bagmen for your dirty money don’t necessarily make the best diplomats.

New U.S. ambassadors are usually courted assiduously by those in power in Ottawa. Not so Mr. Heyman, who arrived in Ottawa last April, at a time when Stephen Harper’s government was already cool to the Obama administration over such issues as the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, and he was put in the diplomatic freezer. His initial meetings with Canadian cabinet ministers were uncomfortable, even testy. Then for months senior figures in the Conservative government refused to even see him…
After Mr. Jacobson left in July, 2013, the ambassador’s chair sat vacant for nine months while frustrations bubbled…

For Mr. Heyman, it’s telling that since the day he presented his credentials nearly a year ago, when he and his wife Vicki had a 15-minute meet-and-greet with Mr. Harper and his wife Laureen, the U.S. ambassador has never had a one-on-one with the PM.

Keystone is very much the central issue. Obama has said privately there’s nothing wrong with Keystone, but he’s pandering to the corrupt Green lobby which makes money by promoting subsidies for its own eco-energy while raising energy prices.
The Democratic Party is in hock to billionaires that are lobbying hard against Keystone. And the relationship with Canada is collateral damage for the Green lobby.

At the heart of the rift is disagreement over building the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Harper has lobbied for it.  Obama has declined to move on it.
Last month, Allan Gotlieb, who was a Canadian ambassador to the United States through the 1980s, described the relationship between the two countries as “as cool as I ever remember.”
“The Keystone project has been handled with considerable insensitivity. Our history has been characterized by . . . a sensitivity to each other’s interests,” he told the Globe and Mail in late February. He said he thinks Obama is prioritizing a desire to “stand up to big oil” over “Canada’s interests.”’
A longtime diplomat told the Loop on Saturday that although the United States and Canada work together in dozens of areas, “the Keystone issue has hijacked the dialogue.”

And Obama’s bagman/ambassador’s diplomatic skills were also somewhat lacking for a lackey.

In public, Mr. Heyman rubbed the wrong way, too. In his first big speech in June, at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, he did what many U.S.ambassadors have often done, stressing the positives of the relationship. But he didn’t mention Keystone. And when Frank McKenna, the former New Brunswick premier and ambassador to Washington, pressed him in an after-speech Q &A about the pipeline and the customs plaza, Mr. Heyman chided him for being negative. “I’m sorry you’re all bummed out here,” he said.
Bummed out? It rang in the ears of his Canadian government hosts, who complained Mr. Heyman had arrogantly told Canada to get over it.
A week later, three Conservative ministers trooped to an energy summit in New York, organized by Mr. Heyman’s former employer, Goldman Sachs – and behind closed doors and in public, excoriated the Obama administration for mistreating a friend with its handling of Keystone. Natural Resources Minister Greg Rickford called it “an affront in no uncertain terms.”

Is there any country Obama hasn’t ruined America’s relations with?

Filed Under: The Point

About Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.