U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney will make a visit to Canada in early September. His itinerary, though, isn’t likely to take him near the nation’s capital in Ottawa, as he plans to stick to the more familiar territory of oil-rich Alberta. Cheney’s trip highlights once again the priorities of the U.S. administration. Dick will be here to size up the vaunted tar sands of Alberta which, despite still difficult and costly extraction, some tout as the world’s largest reserve of hydrocarbons.

On September 8, Cheney will have a high-level “invitation-only” dinner in Calgary with western premiers Ralph Klein and Gordon Campbell, with the evening’s host being none other than the “non-partisan” Fraser Institute, an influential right-wing “think-tank. ”

The Fraser Institute is a familiar source for dissemination of conservative ideas, particularly for those on Canada’s West Coast. Its press releases are all too often run as news stories — especially in CanWest-Global productions — no matter how recycled their latest “findings,” such as their tiresome annual school “rankings” aimed at discrediting public education. Nevertheless the swagger that the Institute’s long-time mouthpiece Michael Walker displayed in announcing the V.P.’s dinner is worth noting.

“It’s a private dinner for a few friends of ours with the vice-president. It’s by invitation-only,” Walker told the Edmonton Sun.

In an interview with The Georgia Straight, Walker was at pains to avoid the perception that members of the federal government might deserve some credit for the Veep’s impending visit:

“We invited Vice-President Cheney to come to Canada, although I heard yesterday, now, the deputy prime minister [Anne McLellan] is claiming she invited him. He is coming up for a private visit with myself and another friend of his up in Alberta, where we’ll go off up in a lodge for a variety of purposes. ”

Michael Walker’s bombast, though, shouldn’t come as a surprise. You might recall him from his delightful cameo in the documentary The Corporation. Playing himself, a right-winger amongst a cast of left-wing talking-heads, Walker delivers at once perhaps the film’s most frightening and comic moment, declaring that “every square inch” of the world’s air, water and land ought to be privatized.

No one should be surprised, either, by this free market zealot’s loyalty and devotion to Dick Cheney. They work for the same people, after all. George W. Bush picked Cheney to draft the vaunted Energy Policy that was one of the Administration’s first orders of business in 2001. Then, along with the war in Iraq, Bush and Cheney ignored the Kyoto Accord on climate change at the urging of oil giants like Exxon. The world’s largest oil company just happened to contribute $60,000 to the Fraser Institute in both 2003 and 2004.

No company, of course, has profited as notoriously in Iraq as Halliburton, securing billions worth of no bid “reconstruction” contracts from the U.S. government. Dick Cheney’s last visit to Alberta, in fact, came in 2000, speaking to the World Petroleum Congress in Calgary as CEO of Halliburton, from which he still receives hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of deferred payments and dividends from millions in stock options. This September’s visit, then, will see Cheney on very familiar ground indeed.

In recent weeks, the growing unpopularity of the war in the United States and the closely related crisis of legitimacy of the Bush Administration have become more evident, as the cross-country solidarity with protester Cindy Sheehan has shown.

Here in Canada, we should greet Cheney as a war criminal, as his (nominal) boss Bush was greeted last year. We should also, into the future, pay close attention to the machinations of the “think tanks” and political forces and leaders who line up to dine with and join in Cheney’s destructive feast of oil, militarism and Empire.

Derrick O'Keefe

Derrick O'Keefe

Derrick O'Keefe is a writer in Vancouver, B.C. He served as rabble.ca's editor from 2012 to 2013 and from 2008 to 2009.