By trying to protect and promote the oil sector, the Harper government effectively shackled Canada’s pipelines in purgatory
It was nine years ago that Neil Camarta first realized an image crisis loomed over Canada’s oil sands. He and his daughter were browsing inside a small shop on London’s trendy Carnaby Street when they spotted a row of “Stop the Tar Sands” T-shirts hanging on the wall.
Camarta, a longtime industry executive who’s held senior positions at Shell, Petro Canada and Suncor, braced for the inevitable as his daughter chatted with the 20-year-olds behind the counter. “She said, ‘You know, my dad works in the oil sands,’ ” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ So, all of a sudden we’re in it. I’m arguing with all these young people.”
These days Camarta runs a smaller company that makes upgrading equipment for the oil sands. He was happy to defend the industry’s record, he says, but he still wonders how Fort McMurray emerged as ground zero in the race to save the planet from climate change. After all, the energy-intensive oil sands sector accounts for less than half a per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, although one would hardly know that based on all the attention it gets.
“Literally everyone now knows what the oil sands are and they don’t think well of us,” Camarta says of the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves. “We had our heads down building these big projects. We weren’t spending enough time managing our reputation.”
Unfortunately for Canada, the oil sands’ poor image isn’t just a question of bad PR. It’s threatening the future of Canada’s economy. Anti-oil sands sentiment has made it nearly impossible to build the necessary pipeline connections producers need to get all that oil to market. TransCanada Corp.’s crossborder Keystone XL pipeline is in danger of being axed by U.S. President Barack Obama.
The industry’s backup plan, Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway pipeline to shipping terminals on the B.C. coast, has become bogged down in political and environmental controversy. Even TransCanada’s Energy East proposal, a sort of backup for the backup, has encountered unexpected political resistance in Ontario and Quebec—two provinces the diluted bitumen must transit through on its way to refineries in New Brunswick. Without the necessary infrastructure, Canada risks missing out on a vast opportunity for wealth and job creation.
How was this allowed to happen? The pipeline companies’ tin ears are partly to blame, but, ironically, so is Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s relentless oil and gas boosterism. Instead of convincing critics Canada could be trusted to develop a carbon-intensive resource in a sustainable fashion, Ottawa instead boasted about Canada’s “emerging energy superpower” status, lashed out at environmentalists and thumbed its nose at international climate change efforts, painting a target on the industry’s back in the process.
Just a few weeks ago, Harper stood in the House of Commons and called the idea of federal emissions regulations for the oil and gas sector “crazy” when crude prices are falling (not that he was a fan when they were soaring). This while Canada and other countries were supposed to be laying groundwork for a global emissions deal during a climate change conference in Lima, Peru.
“I can’t understand how he could be so careless with the oil industry, particularly the oil sands,” says David Anderson, a former Liberal environment minister. He argues that, in the case of Keystone XL, the federal government has allowed the project to become a poster child for climate change just as Obama is “trying to create an environmental legacy for himself in his last two years.”
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