Saving the Canadians From Themselves

Oh Canada, why are you destroying northern Alberta? When Americans think of Canadians, they think of a friendly, easy going neighbor who likes ice hockey, beer, the great outdoors, and someone who turns a declarative sentence into an interrogatory with a monosyllable, as in, "It's beer time, eh?" But Canadians can be just as indifferent to the environment as their notoriously materialistic southern brethren. Case in point: the digging up of Alberta's boreal forest for the dirtiest of dirty fossil fuels, bitumen. America's addiction to petroleum has been rightly criticized for fueling the destruction of northern Alberta but why are Canadians, who have such a green image world wide, lobbying furiously in the halls of Washington for the Keystone XL pipeline that is planned to supply even more bitumen for processing into petroleum products? The Canadian government in a moment of soul-searching said in 2008, there was a "lack of will" to enforce its Environmental Protection Act resulting in a long term degradation of Canadian water, quality air quality, and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. 58 percent of 176 long-term monitoring stations reported water quality as fair or worse. Even an independent business research group rated Canada 15 out of 17 industrial nations for its environmental protection performance. It was bottom for release of hazardous organic compounds, and its greenhouse gas emissions were double the seventeen nation average. The green image Canada earned in the 1970's with clean water initiatives is rapidly being disabused. "Greenwashing" is now the norm.

The answer for the policy volte-face lies in the fact that Canada is still a natural resource based economy much like Russia. Mining is big business up north. Canada has 75 percent of the world's exploration and mining companies. It is the number one producer of potash, number two for sulfur and uranium, and the third largest exporter of diamonds. Mining is in Canada's blood at home and abroad. The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada reported 171 major incidents abroad since 1999 involving Canadian companies. In 2010 Parliament voted down a responsible mining law which would have established standards for Canadian overseas mining. In June Canada stunned the world when it was the only developed nation to object to listing asbestos as a hazardous substance. Forty percent related to environmental degradation. An official of Imperial Oil called the tar sands project, "the engine of the Canadian economy". The open pit bitumen mines and waste reservoirs along the Athabasca River are so large that, yes, they can be seen from space. The scale of the operation is simply stupendous. Over the next 30 years the Canadian bitumen miners will excavate 1,850 square miles of virgin forest to depths of 250 feet to extract bitumen at tremendous cost in terms of energy and destruction of a natural ecosystem. Only a devastated, poisoned wasteland is left behind*. Despite being a profitable industry, the Canadian government subsidizes the operations by 1.4 billion a year, while the province of Alberta throws in another $1.1billion.

Now, aggressive Canadians are in America's heartland pressuring land owners to give them right of ways for the pipeline from Hell formerly known as Alberta. According to Andre Nikiforuk writing in OnEarth, a Canadian Company, TransCanada, threatened a Nebraska farmer who owns eighty acres in the path of the pipeline with eminent domain proceedings if he did not sign up, now. The company does not yet have a federal permit to do anything. After being told off, the Canadians had the arrogance to send a bouquet of flowers to his mother's funeral signed, "Keystone Pipeline". You don't treat a Nebraska farmer that way, not if you want to still be considered the friendly northern neighbors. The Keystone XL Pipeline is not just bad for America, its bad for Canada too. Only a friend would tell you so.

*unsurprisingly, the tar sands are producing elevated levels of toxins in the local environment.A study by lead author David Schindler found higher than normal levels of heavy metals including lead and mercury. The region's cancer rate is 30% above the provincial average. Tumors and deformities are appearing in wildlife.