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Currently viewing articles tagged with Alberta.
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When Will Alberta Stop Giving Away its Oil?
For too many years, successive Alberta governments have sold off Alberta’s oil at fire sale rates. In doing so, they have let the vast potential of our resource gifts slip through our fingers. Consider only the following: In 1978, Albertans received 40 percent of revenues from the oil patch, but by 2009, this had fallen to 10 percent.
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Does Anyone in Government Really Care About Canadian Jobs?
The Canadian government has promoted the pipeline as creating thousands of jobs. But this is only during the construction phase. Enbridge’s own submission to the Joint Review Panel on the Northern Gateway pipeline suggests that the operations phase would create perhaps as few as 104 permanent jobs, and only 26 directly in Alberta. Give or take some other jobs involving regular maintenance and, sadly enough, dealing with environmental damages, Canada’s net benefit in shipping its raw bitumen seems negligible.
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Taking on the Tar Sands
In his first speech to a business audience after his election in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s announcement that Canada was an “emerging energy superpower” signaled his government’s commitment to unflinching support for the relentless expansion of Alberta’s tar sands, primarily to supply synthetic crude oil to the United States. Since then, the tar sands have been the subject of extensive national and international media reporting, even receiving attention in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, where his staff disparaged the tar sands as “dirty oil.”
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The Alberta Disadvantage in Higher Education
In Alberta an attack is gathering force on the most fundamental principles essential to the academic viability of universities. This attack has implications that go far beyond the jurisdiction most stereotypically associated with cowboy culture and the lucrative vastness of this province’s oil-and-gas resources.
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Scouring Scum and Tar from the Bottom of the Pit
Faced with the undeniable reality of “Hubbard’s Peak” in global conventional oil supplies, the world’s largest multinational energy corporations are now hell-bent on squeezing oil out of tar in northern Alberta, like junkies desperately conniving for one last giant fix in a futile attempt to quench America’s insatiable “addiction to oil” (described so eloquently by President George Bush II). Along the Athabasca River near Fort McMurray, a sub-arctic town almost 1,000 kilometres north of the U.S. border, tar literally seeps out of the riverbanks where Aboriginal peoples once used it to patch their birch-bark canoes. But most of the tar sands lie hidden below northern Alberta’s boreal forest, in an area larger than the state of Florida.
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The Gap Between Rhetoric and Action
Exactly one year ago, during the coldest months of 2005, Canada had its second major climate-change debate of the millennium. The first one, on whether Canada should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, occurred in the fall of 2002. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was at an environmental conference in South Africa when he announced, seemingly out of the blue, that Canada would ratify the protocol before the end of the year.
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The Parkland Institute: Alberta’s Unofficial Opposition
In an oil-rich province with a seemingly undefeatable Progressive Conservative government, it can seem more than a little difficult to challenge the status quo. Gordon Laxer knows this, but it didn’t stop him from creating the Parkland Institute, a left-wing think tank he describes as Alberta’s “lone alternative voice.”
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