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.

Former Calgary councillor thinks the unthinkable in the heart of oil country. The devastating flash floods that swamped much of southern Alberta — including Calgary’s downtown core — have suddenly made the projected effects of climate change quite tangible.

Climate change is no longer just a concept or a gaggle of statistics. It means soggy, smelly houses, apartment and office towers without working elevators, and shuttered restaurants.

The costs are also quite tangible. Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi estimates that restoring city infrastructure and facilities will cost between $250 million and $500 million. Estimates of the total damage in Calgary run between $3 billion and $5 billion. Premier Alison Redford has pledged $1 billion for immediate aid, cleanup and reconstruction throughout the province.

But where is this money going to come from? And if extreme weather events are to become more frequent, how are we going to pay for the damage from future disasters? This is the second major flood in Calgary in seven years. Bob Hawkesworth has an answer that seems obvious, especially in Alberta.

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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 Cushing logjam has broken, and with its opening, North American oil has lost the bargain-basement status it has sustained for the past two years.

Since early 2011, oil producers in the United States and Canada have suffered from large discounts in the market – the trendsetting West Texas intermediate (WTI) was priced well below international benchmark North Sea Brent, while a larger-than-normal gap opened up between WTI and Canadian heavy crude.

The boom in U.S. tight oil production, on top of growing oil sands volumes from Alberta, created a glut at Cushing, Okla., a terminus that served as a traditional pricing-point for WTI but had virtually no pipeline access to the massive refinery capacity at the Gulf Coast. As a result, companies invested heavily in new transportation – pipelines, rail cars, barges, even trucks – to move landlocked North American crude to coastal markets where it would fetch international prices.

Now, that investment in transportation is providing a big payoff. Along with the stronger economic news in the United States, the increased ability to get western oil to markets on the U.S. Gulf Coast and East Coast is credited for driving North American crude higher, even as Brent prices lag.

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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 – TransCanada Corp. is seeking to bolster its case with U.S. President Barack Obama for the long-delayed Keystone XL oil pipeline, firing off a laundry list of reasons the company says the contentious project will have minimal influence on rising North American greenhouse gas emissions.

TransCanada sent data from various studies on Canadian oil sands, carbon intensity and power used by pipelines to the U.S. State Department in response to Mr. Obama’s recent remarks that elevated climate impact to the top of the list of criteria for approving or rejecting the project.

The Calgary-based company remains intent on winning approval for the $5.3-billion (U.S.) pipeline in the face of opposition from environmental groups, though chief executive officer Russ Girling warned on Thursday that the slow pace of the regulatory process would make it hard to achieve the current start-up target of late 2015.

That would represent another in a string of delays since TransCanada first applied to build the export conduit to Texas refineries from Alberta nearly five years ago.

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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 — There is no denying the amount of fight still left in Farley Mowat. Just let him get going on the “evil forces” who are sacrificing the environment in their lust for oil.

The writer, conservationist and conversationalist, who completed what he declared to be his final book nearly three years ago at the age of 89, is irate. A proposal to put an offshore oil and gas well in the Gulf of St. Lawrence will not go away, and Mr. Mowat is aghast at the depths of human folly.

Back in 1984, he wrote a book called Sea of Slaughter that detailed a litany of environmental wrongs in the gulf and on the Atlantic seaboard. The looming development, known as the Old Harry Prospect, holds the potential to unleash more of the same, Mr. Mowat said this week in a telephone interview from Cape Breton, where he and his wife, Claire, spend their summers.

“I was so appalled by what I discovered when I wrote this book, I could hardly believe that human beings could be so thoughtless, so destructive, so devilish, just plain devilish, all in pursuit of money,” he said of Sea of Slaughter. “It took me five years to write the damn thing, and I have never been able to fully reread it since, I get so upset about it.”

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