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Oilsands ‘much worse’ than BP spill: U.S. campaign
News Articles | The Montreal Gazette | Trish Audette | July 14, 2010
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EDMONTON — Billboard ads urging Americans not to visit Alberta this summer are only the start of a heavy-duty campaign to highlight the environmental impact of the oilsands, a San Francisco-based organization said Wednesday.
“In many ways, Alberta is . . . spending a lot of money to put a beautiful environmental wrapper around a very destructive environmental package,” said Michael Marx, director of Corporate Ethics International. “Our job is to get people to look past the cover, to unwrap the cover and see what’s really inside.”
On Wednesday morning, billboards in Denver, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis described Alberta as “the other oil disaster.” Under the message was a picture of a dead duck in a Syncrude tailings pond beside a picture of a oil-slicked pelican in the Gulf of Mexico.
Marx said the ad speaks to American anger about the BP oil spill in the gulf, but, “We think that actually, in the end, there’s no comparison. The tarsands are much worse.”
Corporate Ethics was also behind an ad backing an Oscar for director James Cameron for his move Avatar by linking the resource exploitation of the movie’s fictional world to oilsands production in Alberta.
Canadian representatives were dismayed with the ads, as well as a video posted on YouTube that contrasted idyllic scenes of the Rockies with images of dead ducks in Syncrude Canada’s tailing ponds in northern Alberta. The oilsands giant was recently found guilty in court of failing to take appropriate steps to prevent the deaths of more than 1,600 birds.
Buying the billboards cost Corporate Ethics as much as $50,000, but Marx would not reveal the organization’s total budget for its “Rethink Alberta” anti-tourism campaign.
“I can tell you it’s substantial. We have major funding for this effort and a commitment for multiple years,” he said.
He would not identify the private or institutional organizations funding the campaign.
In the next couple of weeks, similar billboards are expected to go up in the United Kingdom, Marx said. The organization plans an online ad campaign that would ensure people outside Canada who use Google to find out more about Alberta’s tourism destinations would come across the Rethink Alberta ads.
Alberta Tourism Minister Cindy Ady said she was disappointed by the advertising campaign, but she said it is difficult to guess what impact the ads will have on the industry.
“Obviously you never want somebody to strike at you like this. That being said, will it really work? We’ve had it before, and . . . we’ve just gone on, done the right things in our industry with the research, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do,” Ady said.
Travel Alberta spokesman Don Boynton said that, historically, attempts to tie tourism to political issues have failed.
It isn’t like boycotting a brand of tissue paper, he said, only to reach down the shelf for another. People want to vacation where they please, and they will choose to go wherever they want, he said.
Travis Davies, a spokesman with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the country’s largest industry lobby group, said the ads distort basic perceptions of the oilsands industry by claiming that an area twice the size of the United Kingdom is being strip-mined when in fact mining is limited to an area smaller than most U.S. cities.
Instead of staying away from the province, he suggested Americans should come to Alberta to see for themselves the steps the oilsands industry is taking to try to improve its image.
“These kinds of groups thrive on providing a small piece of the picture claiming it represents the whole when clearly it does not.”
Tagged with: corporate ethics international, rethink alberta
