Gordon Laxer: Best way to forge unity is to get Canada to post-carbon future
Kenney portrays himself as Albertans’ champion. He isn’t. His
government is spending $32 million on a war room and public inquiry to
combat what he calls a foreign environmentalist conspiracy against
Alberta. Kenney is right about a foreign campaign, if not quite a
conspiracy. And it harms Albertans.
government is spending $32 million on a war room and public inquiry to
combat what he calls a foreign environmentalist conspiracy against
Alberta. Kenney is right about a foreign campaign, if not quite a
conspiracy. And it harms Albertans.
But Kenney gets the culprits
wrong. Big Foreign Oil, not foreign environmentalists, have harmed
Albertans by locking Alberta into narrowly exporting oil derived from
oilsands bitumen, one of the world’s most toxic, high carbon-emitting
resources.
Since the 1970s and ’80s, Shell and Exxon knew their
business plan caused climate change. Yet they and other Big Oil
corporations talked Alberta and Ottawa in the 1990s into giving them a
sweetheart, next-to-zero royalty regime and low corporate taxes. It left
Alberta’s finances in a lurch and an undiversified economy.