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Engage the activists
Opinion | The Globe and Mail | September 16, 2009
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How long before Brigitte Bardot turns up in Alberta’s oil sands, clutching an oil-soaked duck to her famous chest? This is a question political leaders in Edmonton and Ottawa need to start asking themselves now.
Even as you read this, international environmental organizations are arraying their public relations weaponry against the oil sands. Four of the largest American groups spent yesterday protesting the project outside the White House in advance of today’s meeting between Mr. Harper and President Barack Obama. The day before, Greenpeace Canada released a predictably dire assessment of the environmental impact of the oil sands. In Norway this month, the leader of the governing party promised to review his country’s investments in the oil sands after environmentalists turned it into an election issue.
Meanwhile, at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, cinema lovers can view a documentary produced by Greenpeace that is little more than a silent, 43-minute flyover of the gigantic open mines and slick lakes of waste water that are the telltale consequences of bitumen extraction.
Telltale and damning. There is no hiding that digging the bitumen out of the sand underneath Alberta’s boreal forest damages the ecosystem. It is a labour- and energy-intensive process that uses millions of gallons of fresh water and millions of cubic feet of natural gas. Environmental groups, never averse to exploiting sensationalized images (think seal hunt), have plenty to work with.
They also have a simple, two-pronged message that risks dominating December’s international climate-change conference in Copenhagen: oil sands projects are the greatest threat to the achievement of an international reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; and participation in them by other countries is irresponsible. As the protesters in Washington said yesterday, “Canada’s dirty oil will derail America’s clean energy future.”
So how has Canada responded? It has not, adequately.
Ottawa and Edmonton need to wake up and defend the oil sands. The environmentalists have powerful messages and images, but so does Canada. Michael Ignatieff gave voice to them earlier this year, pointing out the oil sands provide “employment for hundreds of thousands of Canadians, and not just in Alberta” and adding they are a key source of Canada’s geopolitical power going forward. More than that, they provide a stable and secure source of oil for Canada and the United States as the continent switches over to other fuel sources.
Mr. Harper’s government could continue to signal a willingness to fulfill its responsibilities relating to carbon emissions. And it could vow to spend royalties from oil sands production on the research and development of green technologies.
There are many options Ottawa can pursue, but obstinate silence in the face of a determined adversary with international reach is not one of them. The oil sands are too important to this country to have their fate decided by someone else.
Tagged with: obama, whoisharper, greenpeace canada, white house, activists
