Alberta has a problem right now. It’s Mr. Stelmach, a leader with less charisma than the sell-by date stamp on a tin of Aylmer soup. Ever so plainly put, Ed Stelmach is neither the voice nor the face to make the case for Alberta’s number one industry, at a time when that industry is the black-circled target du jour of every Gaia-stoked enviro in the world — along with the more hysterical of the global warming brigade that are blazoning Alberta and the oil sands as the No.1 Horror of the Cosmos.
There’s nothing personal in this. This is a time at which his province and its industry needs a champion, someone who can talk the track off a D-12 dozer, and has the courage and skill to take on everyone from Hollywood satraps to the NGO militias that are at work day and night to brand Alberta as the environmental bad boy of the entire planet.
Think Quebec has a PR problem? It’s only got a snowman on the cover of Maclean’s. Alberta is being trashed continuously from continent to continent by bands of the most savvy publicists and propagandists — from Al Gore to Greenpeace to the IPCC itself — that play the game of cause politics.
Well, I have a solution, or at least a modest proposal.
We’ve got to get some Danny Williams transplanted into Ed Stelmach — and, for more pacific reasons, some Ed Stelmach to cool down the vapour in Danny’s jets. But the latter can wait. It’s the Williams transplant into Stelmach that’s urgent. Alberta needs to translate some of the relentless fighting spirit, the ability to fly into volcanic outrage on the drop of a hat, the remorseless scourging of opponents that are Mr. Williams’ defining gifts into the more quiescent bosom of Mr. Stelmach.
Now I know this is technically avant garde and will require at the very least a magnificently equipped science facility, or better yet, a cutting edge Hollywood studio. Maybe Jim Cameron can help. But short of some such drastic intervention there is no way Alberta can defend her interest or her honour against the troop of ruthless, even fanatic opponents that are banded against her.
Perhaps, while we’re waiting for projet The Avalon Avatar, as I’m coming to call it, to ripen we might organize a few more mundane backups. It would be good to see other regions of the country, and the federal authorities, make themselves much more present and supportive in the defence of the oil sands than they have been. Every province, directly or indirectly, has a stake in the great high-tech endeavour of the oil sands. Let me take again the familiar example of the East Coast after the cod moratorium of the early ’90s. It is almost beyond measurement how much misery and economic distress was forestalled because the oil patch offered thousands of jobs, at just the right time, to those displaced from the fishery. The social good provided by the oil sands belongs in the equation at least as much as its environmental downside.
Nor is it just just the East Coast that has benefited. The whole country has been shielded from the sharpest edges of the current recession in large part because of the industry in Alberta. The federal government and Ontario wouldn’t perhaps as easily have bailed out GM with $13-billion of tax money were there not an Alberta oil patch. Nor is it for those in all our high-energy big cities — with their office towers and vast parkways, hospitals and universities, commerce and industry, hotels and stadiums — to turn up their refined noses at the “dirty site” that feeds their voracious need for energy.
There’s one other point I think is worth making. Why aren’t we proud of the oil sands? The question shouldn’t strike anyone as strange. But why, then, is the default response to a mention of the oil sands too often a metaphorical shuffling of the feet and a hangdog look of shame? Properly understood, the work of investigating, mining, processing and building the infrastructure to extract the oil — the whole complex of engineering and techological achievement represented by the oil sands — should be a story of Canadian triumph. It’s as singular an achievement in its way as a genuine masterwork of literature or art. This is some of the most sophisticated, pioneering work of its kind in the entire world.
You know, if the folks in Parliament were looking for one clear, shining moment of unanimity this week, they might well have considered — instead of the shameless blast at freedom of the press over something as trivial as a magazine cover — expressing in a motion a sense of national solidarity and pride in one of the great industrial projects in the history of Canada. They could have come out foursquare and unamimous in support of the beleagured oil sands.
But maybe that’s too much to hope for. Such a motion, after all, would inevitably be contaminated by elements of political courage.
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/10/02/rex-murphy-danny-williams-and-ed-stelmach-desperately-need-a-dose-of-each-other/#ixzz11K4m4yGV
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