The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.
CALGARY—NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair might as well have declared war on the West. That’s the way it sounded from this end of the country when a couple of weeks ago he told a CBC radio program that something needs to be done about rapid oilsands development.
According to Mulcair, it has artificially inflated the Canadian dollar and thereby delivered a bruising blow to central Canada’s export-dependent manufacturing sector.
Mulcair might as well have said that the western resource-based economy is the enemy of the eastern-based manufacturing sector and must be stamped out at all costs.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s team and the western premiers were quick to defend the West’s right to profit from its resource wealth. But the ensuing war of words created such a fog it obscured much more fundamental issues.
Westerners do indeed have a right to determine their own economic destiny. But if westerners and other Canadians are to prosper from the oilsands, we’d better heed what our customers are saying or there won’t be much of a market for what we have to sell.
There is already strong opposition to Canada’s “dirty oil” in the U.S. and Europe. Harper has made bold statements about selling our oil to China if those customers don’t want it and Alberta Premier Alison Redford is following suit. She will be going to Beijing next month to attend a Canada-China investors conference.
Right after the recent election, Redford said she was going to attend the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. The Alberta environment minister will be going to Rio instead.
But betting on oil exports to China is risky business.
The tarry oil in question is so thick it will have to be diluted before it can flow through a proposed pipeline that would stretch from northern Alberta to the northern reaches of the B.C. coast. The oil would be then be loaded onto supertankers, which would have to navigate waters that are home to whales, sea lions and other wildlife.
There is plenty of opposition to this vast undertaking from B.C. First Nations and environmentalists. If it ever does become a reality, it won’t be any time soon.
It is concerns about environmental damage and high greenhouse gas emissions from oilsands projects that are causing some of our customers to balk. They don’t care about the shifting sands of the Canadian economy.
For the rest of this article, please go to the Toronto Star website: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1181151–thomas-mulcair-s-ill-conceived-war-on-the-west