Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Dear Americans: Don't Approve Keystone XL Because Of US
Because, try as they might, our government has failed to convince the majority of Canadians outside Alberta that we need a pipeline to the Gulf (or to the West Coast, for that matter):
Astounding, really, most polls of Americans show a mirror image of this result. Mind you, their pipeline boosters are probably a little more talented than ours.
It doesn't surprise me. The oil industry could not have hired a worse salesman than Harper. The Albertans have also screwed up.
ReplyDeleteAlberta has also watched dumbly as billion dollar investments like the Voyager upgrader are destroyed. They have no answers for this policy disaster. They probably think it's great: the free market in action. Peter Lougheed's spinning in his grave.
I think the federal government has very belatedly tried to push the idea of west to east pipelines like line9, recognizing that Ontarians need something good from the oil sands other than an uncompetitive dollar and kick in the head.
Canadian might welcome something like an oil industry, if it were a true industry, that benefited people across the country.
But it's hard to sell what's being offered: a sludge extraction zone, from which companies will extract bitumen as cheaply as possible, before shipping it out of the country for value added processing in the right-to-work US states.
It's a disaster. But it's what you'd expect from the batch of pseudo-conservatives in the Harper party, most of whom have never run a business, and wouldn't be hired to shine a CEO's shoes.