Stephen Harper: Oil’s worst enemy
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.
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