Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Rex Murphy offers commentary weekly on CBC TV’s The National, and is host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.

I’m lucky to be going to Fort McMurray, Alta. this weekend with colleagues from CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup. I have a great wish to see what the green Jeremiahs deem to be the greatest blot on the visage of Mother Gaia, and to meet some of the soulless folk who work there. After all, environmentalists might ask: Who would take a job on a site that threatens the destiny of the planet, except people whose souls have been bought off with oil-company lucre?
 
Outside Fort McMurray, it is impossible to escape the furor over the Alberta oilsands. Its product is routinely described, lazily and slanderously, as the dirtiest on the planet. The Premier of Ontario, a province that owes much of its prosperity to its huge automobile industry shivers when he looks at Alberta, mutters about the dark forces of the “petro-dollar,” and implied (until he was scolded and half-recanted) that somehow Ontario’s fretful financial state is Alberta’s fault.
 
It’s almost a fantasy disconnect. Dalton Mcguinty can throw billions at General Motors and urge the feds to do the same, all to save the automobile industry. He ignores that four decades or more of Ontario’s prosperity wasn’t founded on windmills: It was based on gas-guzzling cars and trucks.

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EVERY so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?” I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.

Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women. I always tell my friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas — and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?”

 That, at least, was my gut instinct. But now we have proof.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

I’ll admit to sharing some British Columbians’ concerns about shipping oil from Alberta’s oilsands to Asia using tankers leaving from a port on that province’s north-central coast. The Pacific coast is a special place, with salmon, eagles and grizzlies. Befouling it with crude oil from a tanker spill would be a horrible ecological tragedy.
 
Still, it should be possible to build a port at Kitimat and run tankers in and out of the Douglas Channel without incident. The key is not merely devising the right rules for tanker operation, but also maintaining vigilant enforcement for as long as ships filled with oil navigate through the sensitive waterway.
 
The problem with the 1989 Exxon Valdez grounding was not that Alaska had too few safety regulations at the time, but rather that the company had become lax in following them and government enforcers had stopped monitoring company compliance.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

While Canadians seem more concerned than ever about the costs and risks of pipelines, the Far North is feeling the pain of not having one.
 
With the Mackenzie Gas Project on ice because of low natural-gas prices, the Northwest Territories is searching for other ways to fuel its economy, while dealing with the human toll resulting from lack of opportunity.
 
As N.W.T. leaders met in Calgary this week to take stock of Arctic oil and gas activity, or more precisely the lack of it, they had this advice for Northern B.C. communities trying to kill the proposed Northern Gateway project: Be careful what you wish for.
 
For decades, the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline from Inuvik to Alberta faced many of the hurdles that are troubling the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline today: unsettled aboriginal land claims, worries that development would alter traditional ways of life, warnings about the environmental impacts, concerns that the pipeline’s fuel would be used to support the growth of Alberta’s oil sands.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

COSIA is the latest oil sands initiative to enter a now-crowded field 

Last week, 12 leading oil sands producers came out of the gate at a big ceremony in Calgary, apologizin’ hard. The Dirty Dozen (as they want, under no circumstances, to be known) were announcing the formation of yet another environmental initiative, the Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, COSIA. Steve Williams, president and CEO-designate of oil sands pioneer Suncor, expressed a “genuine desire to do better.” Than what? Sure, the oil sands are big, but where are objective measures of their impact? Indeed, are objective measures even possible? Everybody knows that a flock of ducks died four years ago at Syncrude due to failure of a warning system, but more birds are mangled by wind farms every few minutes.
 
Nobody denies that the oil sands have potential problems with pollution and tailings ponds, but the new organization, which is headed by Dan Wicklum, a well-regarded former CFL linebacker, aquatic ecologist, and Environment Canada bureaucrat, will also look at greenhouse gas emissions. According to Mr. Wicklum, ­“COSIA is a science organization, run by scientists for scientists.” So will COSIA address the science of climate change? Not on your life.

Mr. Wicklum was also quoted as saying “We don’t see COSIA playing a role in a flashy media campaign, we want to stick to our knitting, which is accelerate the pace of improvement around environmental performance.”

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

OTTAWA— Ottawa is headed for a legal showdown with British Columbia first nations if it insists on proceeding with the Northern Gateway pipeline, the leader of the Yinka Dene Alliance warns.

Chief Jackie Thomas, of the Saik’uz First Nation, was part of a delegation in Ottawa Tuesday meeting with opposition members of Parliament to build support for their anti-pipeline stand. She said her group will pursue a legal challenge if Ottawa approves the pipeline over their objections.

Along with other first-nation communities, the Dene alliance has taken a firm stand against Enbridge Inc.’s plan to build a crude oil pipeline across their land to transport oil-sands bitumen to the B.C. coast for export to Asia.

“We will defend our rights, no matter what bully tactics the federal government throws at us,” she said. “Our decision has been made: Enbridge will never be allowed in our lands.”

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

OTTAWA— Japan has rebuilt the highways, but villages and towns swept away by an earthquake and tsunami a year ago are harder to re-establish. And the wider effects will continue to be felt across the country for years.

Among them is a Canadian link. The nuclear-plant meltdown caused by the disaster has Japan rethinking nuclear energy, and that makes the country more keenly interested in Western Canadian pipelines that might one day bring natural gas to be shipped overseas to Asia.

The disaster killed 19,000, devastated towns in eastern Japan, and caused meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that kept the island nation on tenterhooks – and have made its people wary of relying on nuclear energy in the future.

Japan’s ambassador to Canada, Kaoru Ishikawa, said the highways have been rebuilt, and major companies have been able to repair and restart factories in the affected zones of eastern Japan. The government has offered tax incentives for companies to invest and financial assistance to individuals, but there is still a struggle to rebuild lives in many communities.

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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.

The federal and Alberta governments struck up a secret, high-level committee in early 2010 to coordinate the promotion of the oilsands with Canada’s most powerful industry lobby group, a document obtained through an access to information request reveals.
 
The committee brought together the president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) with deputy ministers from Natural Resources, Environment Canada, Alberta Energy and Alberta Environment to synchronize their lobbying offensive in the face of mounting protest and looming international regulations targeting the Alberta crude.
 
Environmental organizations criticized the existence of a committee they said they were hearing about for the first time.
 
“I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that there should be a separation between oil and state, but with these types of secret committees it’s hard to see any daylight between them,” said Keith Stewart, a climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

BOWDEN, ALTA., AND OTTAWA— Chad Winters keeps his hand on his radio, politely giving orders to co-workers toiling at an oil property in a stretch of Alberta farmland.

“One tonne of 40/70,” Mr. Winters requests over the radio. “Three thirty-three, then hold till I tell you otherwise.”

Mr. Winters speaks a language few understand. He runs the show in the field when Trican Well Service Ltd. (TCW-T17.350.150.87%)is called in to perform a controversial technique used to gather oil and natural gas from impermeable rocks.

On this day, Trican is working for NAL Energy Corp. (NAE-T7.810.182.36%)near Bowden, about 100 kilometres north of Calgary. Trican is there to pump water, chemical and natural additives, and nitrogen down a well at frighteningly high pressure, with hopes of forcing fissures in the rocks thousands of metres below the surface. Sand will follow, propping open the cracks, allowing trapped oil to escape. The process is called hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking.

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OTTAWA — Wildrose Alliance leader Danielle Smith, sounding an alarm about the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to the B.C. coast, argued Thursday that an oil sands pipeline should instead go to Atlantic Canada.
 
Ms. Smith, expected to give Alberta Premier Alison Redford a serious challenge in the upcoming spring election, advanced the idea publicly for the first time at a speech in Ottawa.
 
She offered what she described as a solution to the problems faced by land-locked Alberta given the Obama administration’s rejection of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico, and the aggressive environmentalist-aboriginal campaign against the Enbridge Inc.’s $5.5-billion Gateway project to Kitimat, B.C.
 
“As we look to move our oil sands to market in the face of resistance to the south and west coast, an all-Canadian solution is looking increasingly attractive,” Ms. Smith said in a speech to the Economic Club of Canada that was attended by several Alberta Tory MPs and former political staffers who worked under Reform party founder Preston Manning.

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From a speech by Jim Prentice, senior executive vice-president and vice-chairman of CIBC, to the Toronto Board of Trade Thursday.

No room for ‘ideological purity’ on government
 
My objective is to knit together my views on the structural changes taking place within the Canadian economy, with a particular focus on the impact of planned energy megaprojects, the dawn of the Asian century and the accelerating erosion of Canada’s industrial and manufacturing base in Ontario.

Given these forces and their complex implications, how best can we spur economic development and create prosperity for today, tomorrow and for generations of Canadians to come?
 
The days of nation-building are not at an end. In response to domestic and external demand, you will find no other G8 country — in fact no other country in the world — that is bringing on infrastructure projects at the pace and relative scale of Canada. The investment is significant. Close to $290-billion of investments over the next 20 years. And the list of projects on the drawing board is astounding.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Former minister’s demand for state intervention revives ideas Adam Smith exploded centuries ago
 
There has been a good deal of talk recently about a national energy strategy, which, for the Harper Conservatives, means market-orientation, and less red tape and politics. For others, however, it seems to mean something a little more dirigiste, something bigger, grander and all-encompassing. Surprisingly, this group includes former Harper government minister Jim Prentice, who is now senior executive vice-president and vice-chairman of CIBC.

A speech Mr. Prentice gave to the Toronto Board of Trade on Thursday was a jaw-dropper. It was the kind of mushy mixed economics that is regurgitated with tedious regularity every decade or two by those who have forgotten, or never understood, the lessons of economic history. Mr. Prentice appears to reject market orientation as unaffordable “ideological purity.”
 
Twenty years ago, Paul Tsongas, a Democratic U.S. presidential candidate, declared that “American companies need the United States government as a full partner if they are to have any hope of competing internationally. That means an industrial policy. Take a deep breath, my Republican friends. It’s a brave new world out there. Adam Smith was a marvelous man, but he wouldn’t know a superconductor or memory chip if he tripped over one.”

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Some will say it’s about time, others that it doesn’t stop expansion plans, still others that they want to see results before getting too excited, but Canada’s oil sands sector deserves recognition for launching the world’s biggest collaborative effort by any industry to do better by the environment.
 
In a ceremony in Calgary Thursday, the top executives of 12 major oil sands companies came together to sign a founding charter in which they committed to accelerate improvement in four major areas: tailings ponds, greenhouse gas emissions, land disturbance and water use.
 
They are doing it as part of a new group, Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), representing 80% of oil sands production: BP PLC, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Cenovus Energy Inc., ConocoPhillips, Devon Energy Corp., Imperial Oil Ltd., Nexen Inc., Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Statoil ASA, Suncor Energy Inc., Teck Resources Ltd. and Total S.A.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

TORONTO, CALGARY AND OTTAWA— Dalton McGuinty concedes he never should have blamed his province’s economic woes on the “petro dollar,” marking a rare climbdown for a political leader not known for speaking off the cuff. Alison Redford insists he still owes her an apology, rebuffing him once again in favour of a tried-and-true Alberta strategy of picking a fight with Ontario.

The he-said, she-said exchange between the two provincial leaders was supposed to end on Wednesday morning, when Mr. McGuinty, Premier of Ontario, blamed the perils of working in “real time” for making a comment he now regrets – that he would prefer to have a low Canadian dollar instead of a booming oil-and-gas sector in Western Canada.

Instead, Ms. Redford, the Alberta Premier, suggested Mr. McGuinty still owes her province an apology for his earlier refusal to support the oil sands.

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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.

Ontario gets such substantial benefits from the oil sands that we should all be advocates for their speedy development. That’s Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s view of the world. Premier Dalton McGuinty’s version is that Ontarians would be better off without the high “petro dollar” that hurts our manufacturing sector.

It’s a she-said, he-said that has pundits across the nation weighing in on everything from the merits of the oil sands to the supposedly pathetic state of Ontario’s economy.

McGuinty has acknowledged that he should have “self-edited.” There was no benefit to sounding ungracious about Alberta’s success or defensive about Ontario’s economic challenges. But the premier was not wrong to make clear the Ontario perspective on Redford’s demand that everyone jump onboard the oil sands train.

The facts are irrefutable: the vast majority – an estimated 94 per cent – of economic benefits from the oil sands remain in Alberta. The booming oil and gas sector has contributed mightily to the high Canadian dollar. That has damaged Ontario’s traditional strength in manufacturing.

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