Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

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.

Gerald Butts is president and CEO of World Wildlife Fund Canada.

The hearings to decide the future of the Great Bear Sea and Rainforest got off to quite a start this week. Big oil, foreign intrigue, a grassroots uprising, duelling polls, angry ministers – this one has all the makings of a blockbuster. But the fervour obscures the heart of the matter: whether and under what conditions we should permit supertankers and a bitumen pipeline in one of the last intact temperate coastal rain forests on Earth.

I suspect most Canadians would be surprised that the proposed route of the Northern Gateway pipeline bisects this ecological treasure. Pipeline proponents would rather frame this issue around developing an Asian market for oil sands bitumen – and the allegedly nefarious U.S.-based interests who would prevent us from doing so – than have a science-based debate about the real risks associated with getting it there by this route.

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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.

It has been rich, even comic, to listen to the Harper government blasting away at “foreign money,” “radical groups” and Hollywood movie stars for interfering in the environmental review of the Northern Gateway pipeline that’s just starting.

Of course, such people and their money have entered the fray in Canada. It isn’t the first time (think of U.S. interventions against cutting old-growth forests in B.C.) and it won’t be the last. We live in a global world, and we share a continent with the U.S. (and Mexico) where one country’s decisions can affect the continent and planet.

Think back to last year, and the ones before that. TransCanada Pipelines sought U.S. approval for the Keystone XL pipeline to ship oil from Alberta’s tar sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Regulatory hearings were required. Ultimately, the State Department (read: President Barack Obama’s administration) had to decide.

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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.

KITAMAAT VILLAGE, B.C.— Not far from the dark waters that could one day carry supertankers of oil-sands crude to the Pacific Ocean, the pitched battle over the Northern Gateway pipeline took a very public stage as opponents called on God and salmon to fight a project they see as dangerous.

Over the next two years, the federal review panel assessing the $6.6-billion proposed Enbridge Inc. pipeline will travel to dozens of communities, on the route and off it, and hear from the thousands who have asked to speak.

On Tuesday, the first day of public hearings, the three-person panel arrived in Kitamaat Village, a Haisla community on the shores of Douglas Channel. Although Ottawa has invoked the spectre of foreign-funded radicals plotting to derail the project, the real fight was here, in coastal communities where the Exxon Valdez spill still resonates and many first nations communities fear the consequences of a pipeline on their traditional territory and local waters.

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

An open letter from the Honourable Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources, on Canada’s commitment to diversify our energy markets and the need to further streamline the regulatory process in order to advance Canada’s national economic interest.

Canada is on the edge of a historic choice: to diversify our energy markets away from our traditional trading partner in the United States or to continue with the status quo.

Virtually all our energy exports go to the United States. As a country, we must seek new markets for our products and services and the booming Asia-Pacific economies have shown great interest in our oil, gas, metals and minerals. For our government, the choice is clear: we need to diversify our markets in order to create jobs and economic growth for Canadians across this country. We must expand our trade with the fast-growing Asian economies. We know that increasing trade will help ensure the financial security of Canadians and their families.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. Terence Corcoran is the editor and columnist for the Financial Post section of the National Post.

Never before has a Canadian politician challenged the hitherto saintly protectors of the environment in such direct language

Through most of 2011, Canadian energy officials in politics and industry watched with bewildered helplessness and some shock as Washington allowed environmentalists to seize control of TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline issue. They stood by aghast as President Barack Obama, a captive of U.S. green activists and Hollywood movie stars, caved in to political pressure and postponed a decision to approve the project, a potential economic bonanza that promised to deliver thousands of jobs to Americans and billions of barrels of Canadian oil sands production to Texas.

No such green hijacking is going to take place in Canada, at least not without an official fight. On the eve of hearings, which begin Tuesday in Kitimat, B.C., into the $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline — to carry the same oil sands production from Alberta to the West Coast and on to China — the Harper government clearly aims to do what Barack Obama cannot or will not do in America, namely stand up to the growth-killing professional green movement.

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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— The Harper government has launched an all-out campaign against opponents of the controversial Northern Gateway pipeline as it seeks to blunt a global campaign by environmentalists to halt booming oil sands development.

With regulatory hearings set to begin in Kitimat, B.C., Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver singled out a Canadian charity, Tides Canada Inc., for channelling U.S. donor money to pipeline opponents, while the Prime Minister’s Office took aim at the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council.

In an interview Monday, Mr. Oliver deliver a blunt message – that the independent panel reviewing the Gateway pipeline should not allow foreign-backed opponents to hijack the hearings and kill the project through tactical delays.

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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.

OTTAWA—A biologist, an energy lawyer and an aboriginal geologist will sit down Tuesday in a recreation centre in the wilderness of northern British Columbia to initiate what could be the fiercest environmental standoff ever seen in Canada.

Before the hearings in B.C. and Alberta are completed next year, more than 4,000 people are expected to appear before the three-member panel vetting the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta through the Rockies to the B.C. coast.

Like the now-stalled Keystone XL project in the United States, the planned pipeline to carry tarsands-derived crude oil across the mountains to a new supertanker port in northern B.C. is shaping up as a titanic clash of economic and environmental imperatives.

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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.

KITIMAAT VILLAGE, B.C.— The struggle to transport the harvest of Alberta’s vast oil sands enters a new arena this week – a village on the rugged British Columbia coast where the hopes of Canada’s biggest pipeline operator will meet a business-savvy first nation with little appetite for black gold.

Public vetting of Enbridge’s proposed $6.6-billion Northern Gateway oil-sands pipeline begins Tuesday. The arguments concerning aboriginal land rights and environmental impact promise a regulatory fight that could travel all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Reflecting the high stakes, the Harper government prepared a new warning, to be made public on Monday, that regulatory reviews for major energy projects should be accelerated and protected from interference by “radical environmental groups financed from the United States.”

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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 – The Conservative government will bring forward new rules to greatly shorten environmental reviews of pipelines and other major projects, arguing that “radical groups” are exploiting the reviews to block proposals vital to Canada’s economic future.

On the eve of hearings into the proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific coast, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver released a strongly-worded open letter Monday condemning some opponents of the pipeline. A copy of the letter was provided in advance to The Globe and Mail.

The letter warns of “environmental and other radical groups” including “jet-setting celebrities” funded by foreign special interest groups who “threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological ends.”

They system “is broken,” Mr. Oliver concludes in the letter. “It’s time to take a look at it.”

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

Then we’re agreed. Canada needs a national energy strategy, says the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. Canada needs a national energy strategy, the Council of Canadians concurs. What this country needs is a national energy strategy, asserts the Energy Policy Institute of Canada, an industry group. Or what about a national energy strategy, counters the Alberta Federation of Labour, not an industry group. The country’s energy ministers discussed the need for a national energy strategy at their meeting last summer, since which time not a week has passed without someone demanding to know why we have not yet got one.

Given the idea has such universal support across the land, it might seem strange to find the prime minister, of all people, in some uncertainty as to its meaning. Asked his views on a Calgary radio show, Stephen Harper confessed, “the honest truth is I don’t know precisely what it means. I’m looking forward to having some discussions with some provinces to find out what they have in mind.” But in fact the prime minister’s confusion is entirely appropriate.

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

CALGARY — In a remote Aboriginal recreation centre on the shore of the Douglas Channel in British Columbia’s North Coast, Canadian regulators are kicking off historic hearings on Tuesday on the proposed $5.5-billion Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline. By the time they are finished in two years, thousands of Canadians will have had their say on the giant project.

The three-member Joint Review Panel will travel across Western Canada on behalf of the National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency to hear views about the environmental impact of the 1,172-kilometre project, starting with oral testimony from the elders of the Haisla Nation.

The 700-member community hosting the event’s high profile first days is located 12 km south of the city of Kitimat, the end point of the Enbridge Inc. project that would carry 550,000 barrels of oil a day from the Alberta oil sands to markets around the Pacific coast.

The region’s few hotels are stretched to the limit to accommodate the influx of visitors, including observers for the green lobby and the energy industry, the media, and the usual coterie of lawyers.

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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.

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.— The Davis family has owned ranchland on the high-desert prairie of El Paso County in Colorado for the past century. Family lore recalls a prophecy of wealth from the Depression years. A geologist came through the desolate region, nestled on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and told the family there might be oil under their land.

In the seven decades since the 1930s, there hasn’t been a single successful oil well on the Davis land – or anywhere else in all of El Paso County, a mostly rural region located south of Denver.

Now, however, subsurface fracturing – or fracking – technology so widely used in natural gas drilling is beginning to unlock oil reserves long considered impossible to tap successfully, like the suddenly prolific Bakken play in North Dakota.

In Colorado, the target is the tight oil of the Niobrara formation. Houston-based Ultra Petroleum Corp. is on the fringe of the formation in El Paso County and believes it can unearth 150 million barrels of oil.

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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.

CALGARY— Five oil sands companies have revealed themselves as supporters of the controversial Northern Gateway pipeline, lending their names to a massive infrastructure proposal that has stirred intense opposition in Western Canada.

Cenovus Energy Inc., MEG Energy Corp., Nexen Inc. Suncor Energy Marketing Inc., a subsidiary of Suncor Energy Inc. and Total E&P Canada, the domestic arm of French giant Total SA, have each spent money to help develop the $6.6-billion pipeline, which if built will funnel massive volumes of oil sands crude to the West Coast for export to California and Asia.

Each has signed up as a “funding participant,” joining the others in buying some of the 10 units that make up a $100-million fund Enbridge Inc. (ENB-T37.910.611.64%) sold in 2007 and 2008. The money was used to fund preconstruction development and engineering of the project.

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