Click here for the The Bitumen Cliff: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/National%20Office/2013/02/Bitumen%20Cliff.pdf
Summary
The enormous bitumen developments taking place in northern Alberta today are collectively considered to be the largest industrial project on the planet. These projects will have dramatic impacts on the economy and the environment; they are also affecting the nature of the Canadian federation, and the structure of society itself. While the booming bitumen extraction and export industry supports important jobs and incomes, it is having a range of complex effects on other economic and social variables—both direct and indirect, intended and unintended. The full range of these effects has not
been adequately analyzed or debated by Canadians.
To help understand the broader economic consequences of the bitumen boom, this report applies the staples theory of resource extraction and export (as developed by Harold Innis and other Canadian writers). Viewed through a historical lens, the bitumen industry both reflects and reinforces Canada’s traditional role as a supplier of raw materials (fish, fur, wheat, timber, minerals, etc.) to more developed and powerful industrial centres (e.g. France, Britain, the U.S., and today China) in the global economy.
A risk of any staples development strategy is what Innis called the “staples trap.” Staplesbased economies must make enormous fixed-cost investments in production and transportation infrastructure, generally undertaken by large, often foreign-owned companies. To pay off these overhead costs and reward investors, staples industries face an enormous motivation to produce and export their staple faster.