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.

Given the untapped energy potential in the Arctic, an increase in offshore exploration and production is inevitable. It is also in many respects welcome, benefiting the region’s economy. However, it is crucial that it occur in a way that is sensitive to an extremely fragile ecosystem. Canada, as incoming chair of the Arctic Council, can help ensure that necessary safeguards are in place.

Anxieties over the ability to access oil in the region were stoked by recent events, including Shell’s decision last fall to postpone its $4.5-billion effort to drill in Arctic waters off Alaska following problems with sea ice, accidents on its two Arctic drilling rigs, and a malfunction of its environmental-protection equipment. That was in the summer. Imagine what could go wrong in winter, with ice floes and fierce and unpredictable winds.

Meanwhile, Total SA, the French oil producer, recently halted work in the Arctic. Christophe de Margerie, Total’s chief executive, said the risk of an oil spill was too great for the environmentally sensitive area. “Oil on Greenland would be a disaster,” he told the Financial Times, expressing concern a leak would damage the company’s reputation.

The Arctic Council has a unique opportunity to establish best practices and manage the complex risks of drilling in the North. It should consider putting more teeth in its draft agreement on oil-spill preparedness and response, which members are expected to sign in May.

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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.

Here are President Barack Obama’s words from his second inaugural address: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” Thence followed 10 sentences about climate change.

In Edmonton and Ottawa, where governments had grown confident that Mr. Obama, once re-elected, would give the green light to the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta’s bitumen oil deposits to the Gulf of Mexico, those sentences were at least worrisome, if not menacing.

Why did Mr. Obama do it? Climate change was scarcely raised in the election campaign. A Republican-controlled House of Representatives will block any cap-and-trade system for greenhouse-gas emissions, plus just about anything else to reduce emissions.

With so many other priorities – the budget deficit, gun control, immigration – why did the President spend so much of his inaugural speech on an issue the Alberta and Canadian governments figured had disappeared from his radar screen. Maybe he was just playing to history, in which case the sentences will disappear into the political ether. Or maybe he actually believes what he said.

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

On the main floor of Capitol Hill’s stately Russell building, down the white-marbled hall that leads to the offices of some of the most powerful men and women in the United States, Senator Lindsey Graham is batting for Canada and for the Keystone XL pipeline.

“I have been to the oil sands,” the Republican from South Carolina, a big producer of Earthmover tires used in Alberta’s oil sands trucks, said in an interview this week.

“To not make this decision, to deny this partnership, to stop the pipeline, would be one of the most illogical and irrational decisions any president has ever made in modern times. I don’t think he can do that.”

On the other side of the Capitol, in the bustling Rayburn building that houses the offices of the lower house, Congressman Gene Green, a Democrat and a lifetime member of the Sierra Club, said the environmental lobby’s campaign is more politics than substance and wants Keystone XL to be approved.

Three refineries in his district are eagerly awaiting Canada’s secure oil so they can reduce reliance on imports from abroad. He, too, has visited the oil sands.

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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.

VANCOUVER and CALGARY — A squared-off concrete shell sits in a frozen field, a short distance from Highway 63 north of Fort McMurray. It was to be the first building block of the $11.6-billion Voyageur oil sands upgrader, which was taking shape in 2008 as the latest megaproject to inject adrenalin into an Alberta economy that was already riding high on its good fortune.

A half decade later, the concrete shell is still there, but the ebullience is long gone. This week, Suncor Energy Inc. , the oil sands giant that has partnered with Total SA to build Voyageur, took a $1.5-billion writedown on the project – now at imminent risk of cancellation.

The grey slab has all the subtlety of a giant tombstone. “It has been a depressing derelict standing there for years now,” says Wayne Prins, provincial director for the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC), representing vast numbers of oil sands workers, who once saw Voyageur as the next ticket on the endless train of long-term prosperous employment.

The forlorn shell symbolizes the hollowing out of Alberta’s hopes and dreams, as it confronts an energy market that has turned dramatically against it. It is a signal of how fast Alberta has fallen, as it tumbles back to the pack of provinces with severe fiscal challenges. The provincial government has just seen $6-billion wiped off its revenues as a result of declining resource income – equivalent to the province’s annual education budget.

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