Environment Canada in a secret memo admits it will not meet pollution targets with its $50 carbon tax. Rates must rise up to $300 per tonne – the equivalent of 70¢ a litre on gasoline – to lower greenhouse gas emissions, said the Access To Information document: “Impacts obviously depend on tax rates.”
Canada should mandate computer skills training for kindergartners, says an Access To Information report by the industry department. Schools must be “brought up to date” to prepare children for an automated workplace, the report said. The Canadian Teachers’ Federation did not comment: “Educators are not aligned on what skills are important.”
The Commons agriculture committee is faulting federal regulators for proposing to ban a common pesticide. MPs claimed a Health Canada review was incomplete and should be reconsidered: “They’ve set a terrible precedent here.”
The fate of a Liberal bill to rewrite O Canada is uncertain after a senior Liberal senator opposed gender-neutral lyrics as unnecessary. “I am an ardent feminist but I do not support this bill,” said Senator Joan Fraser (Liberal-Que.).
A federal report rates U.S. President Donald Trump a greater threat to Canadian exports than war or terrorism. Export Development Canada in its latest Country Risk Quarterly warns of “high impact” from any serious renegotiation of continental trade pacts: “We should not assume the worst.”
Taxpayers are paying nearly $1 million a year to maintain an aging warship acquired by Parks Canada, records show. Ongoing funding for the vessel, one of the agency’s least popular attractions, totaled $15.6 million even as Parks Canada cut essential maintenance for historic sites: “She offers Canadians a unique opportunity.”
The Department of Agriculture is urging that Canada sell more fresh water to China – by the bottle. The market pitch follows Parliament’s 2013 passage of a bill outlawing bulk sales of fresh water under threat of imprisonment and $6 million fines: ‘This is a resource grab.’
A federal judge has upheld a complaint of racial profiling against the Canada Border Services Agency. Government attorneys tried four times to overturn the finding of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal: ‘The officer was held to a very high standard.’
One in four Canadians pay no attention to energy ratings when buying appliances though a federal program promoting conservation has been in place for decades, says in-house research by Natural Resources Canada. The findings are unsurprising, said the Consumers Council of Canada: “Some good old-fashioned promotion wouldn’t hurt.”
The only Canadian employer suspended from hiring migrant workers has won a Federal Court ruling to have regulators reconsider the case. Advocates said the decision pointed to weaknesses in federal enforcement of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, slated for revisions this year: “The government isn’t doing its job.”
Parliament should mandate sex education in schools nationwide, the Commons health committee has been told. MPs are conducting hearings on the health impact of pornography, the first federal review of its kind since 1985: “I don’t start from the place that pornography is a toxic medium.”
Steel executives are appealing to MPs to adopt a Buy Canadian policy. Mill operators complained of running at half capacity while foreign steel is used in subsidized public works like the $4 billion Champlain Bridge at Montréal: “The bridge is 25 minutes from our facility.”
Cabinet changes to the Statistics Act will ensure researchers’ independence, says Canada’s Chief Statistician. Two chiefs have resigned in the past seven years in protest over government policy: ‘The bill now removes any kind of doubt.”
Twenty dollars for lunch is plenty in claiming business tax deductions, a Tax Court judge has ruled. The decision came in the case of a St. John’s businessman who claimed the equivalent of $33 for business lunches: “Anything beyond $20 per day for lunch would be unreasonable.”
Alberta for generations was famous for mountains, rodeos, Mormonism, football, Ukrainian culture, meatpacking and Social Credit. Say “Alberta” today and any focus group replies, “oil”. That’s no accident, writes Prof. Geo Takach of Royal Roads University. From the 1947 oil strike at Leduc Number One, “resource extraction became heroic”. Alberta’s very identity was intertwined with oil sands production, for better and worse.
Tar Wars documents this modern cultural phenomenon. Takach calls it framing: “The concept of framing has roots in the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry. When we frame something, we make meaning of it as we locate, perceive, identify and label it.”
It need not be valid or even accurate, or distinguishable from crude propaganda. Tar Wars covers all angles. “Albertans transcend what one scholar aptly capsulized as ‘the ghoulish image of Alberta that haunts the imagination of many progressive Canadians’,” writes Takach.
Yet Albertans themselves framed the oil sands as the “engine of Canada’s economy”, a self-serving slogan that asserted the wellbeing of every family was linked to the stock price of Imperial Oil. Tell that to Goderich, Ont. when they closed the Volvo road grader factory, or Charlottetown when the $1 billion lobster fishery collapsed. Canada is a $2 trillion economy. We are bigger than Encana Corp.
“Beyond Alberta, the bit sands” – short for bitumen sands – “has become an escalating magnet for international interest and controversy,” writes Takach. Tar Wars bookends the thesis with two media spectacles.
One is a chirpy 2006 episode of CBS’ 60 Minutes that depicted Fort McMurray as a “boomtown” where “there is so much money to be made”. The TV story breathlessly chronicled billions in investment “bigger than a gold rush”, with throwaway quibbles from a Sierra Club naysayer.
The other bookend is Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives On The Alberta Tar Sands, an unnerving film featuring long, agonizing bird’s-eye views of open pit mines like gaping wounds in a pristine forest, accompanied “by a haunting, tonal soundscape with a rhythm suggesting a heartbeat.”
Somewhere between Boomtown and Black Death is a depiction of reality. Tar Wars looks for it. The search is compelling and clever. It dramatizes conflicting facts and imagery of the oil sands through familiar slogans: “Alberta is energy”; “Albertans are doing their best”; “Alberta is a safer, friendlier and more democratic source of oil than petro-dictatorships.”
Prof. Takach cites a 2013 documentary Oil Sands Karaoke that profiled community life in Fort McMurray, specifically to counter the “dark, disturbed, Hiroshima-like landscapes” outside of town. “We see karaoke singers, poured cocktails, a gargantuan warehouse interior, massive haul-trucks, rowdy pub dancers, a quiet residential street” – you get the picture.
Of course Alberta is more than the smell of jobs. Oil Sands Karaoke filmmaker Charles Wilkinson is quoted, “Raising issues like the science of climate change in Alberta is walking on eggshells all the time. It feels like you’ve walked onto the set of Fox News. As an Albertan myself, I’m really troubled by that. We should be able to talk about this stuff. We shouldn’t get angry at each other and label each other.”
By Holly Doan
Tar Wars: Oil, Environment and Alberta’s Image, by Geo Takach; University of Alberta Press; 256 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-1407; $34.95
