Like many of you I am eagerly awaiting the new James Bond film Skyfall, especially Javier Bardem’s star turn as Raoul Silva, the classic Bond villain with his outlandish plot to pay 60% over market price for a Canadian oil company.
No, wait, that’s from the business pages, isn’t it? You’ll forgive me: the stories sound so similar — or at any rate they’ve been made to sound similar. The casual reader would be convinced the $15.2-billion bid from China’s CNOOC for Canada’s Nexen, far from enriching Nexen’s shareholders and indirectly other Canadians, posed some dire threat to the country, if not the planet: part of some fiendish Chinese plan for world domination, possibly involving lasers.
looking beyond borders 