Saturday, June 28, 2014

The Terry Glavin Column You Didn't Read This Week.

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MattersVille


The Ottawa Citizen column of Mr. Glavin's that you might have (or, if you haven't, should) read is the one on the historical underpinnings of this week's Supreme Court of Canada decision on the Tsilhqot'in v Canada case.

The column you probably haven't (and, if you haven't, must) read is the one on pipelines. It puts a whole lot of things in perspective, including the recent OpEd in Nature from bunch of pretty well-informed and knowledgeable scientists, including SFU's Wendy Palen, who are calling for a moratorium on all (i.e. not just Alberta's) further Tarsands development.

Here's just one bit from that piece from Mr. Glavin, but I really recommend you carve out a few minutes to read the entire thing:

...“A key step is a moratorium on new oilsands development and transportation projects until better processes and policies are in place,” the scientists who co-authored this week’s paper in Nature modestly assert. “Reform is needed now: decisions made in North America will reverberate internationally, as plans for the development of similar unconventional reserves are considered worldwide.”

This has been absurdly obvious all along, and it is heartening to see it spelled out so clearly and unambiguously. Nothing has been allowed to restrain the expansion of Alberta’s oilsands, and now, all the conventional sources of international capital have been tapped out. This is why the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party has had to be courted so passionately. Canada’s labour supply has been all but tapped out. This is why the Temporary Foreign Workers’ program has been exploited as a conduit to bring 85,000 indentured labourers into Alberta...



A whole lotta punch packed into those two paragraphs, I reckon. And not much of the left/right combination in that last paragraph would appear to be 'ethical'.

OK?

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Canada’s labour supply has been all but tapped out. This is why the Temporary Foreign Workers’ program has been exploited as a conduit to bring 85,000 indentured labourers into Alberta...

W R O N G

There is nothing wrong with Canada's labour supply.

TFWs are the pseudo capitalists way of avoiding apprentice training for trades and artificially keeping wages down.

Remember: BC Liberal Rick Thorpe murdered the BC skills training program and let the corpse publicly rot for years.

Lew said...

Mr. Harper apparently hasn’t read the applicable Aesop's Fable.

Hugh said...

The twin Northern Gateway pipelines would presumably use electric pumps to move the diluted bitumen and diluent. The electricity would likely come from BC Hydro, which is 95% renewable, non-CO2-emitting hydro power.

Why not, instead, use BC Hydro power for electric cars, electric trains etc. I'd say it would be better to use BC Hydro to develop electric transport systems in BC, than using it to enable more oil sands development.

RossK said...

Anon-At-The-Top--

I think, if you read Mr. Glavin's entire piece you will get his drfit on this...(i.e. if there wasn't a 'shortage' they would invent one).

Spot on re: the rotting corpse that now they are pretending to gussy up.

Thanks.

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Lew--

Ha!

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Hugh--

Absoultely.

Heckfire, even the World Bank is now saying that fighting climate change will be a boon, not a drag, on 'the economy'.


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