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The Greatest Show on Earth
By Richard Bronstein
That was some feat of daring by Greenpeace to scale the Calgary Tower and hang their anti-oilsands banner. But I have to join all the other true-and-blue citizens of Calgary to smack down these irresponsible stunt artists.
Energy development and climate change are complex subjects that can’t be properly addressed with slogans, stunts and sound bites. What we need is serious reflection and sober second thought.
Kind of like the time when the Alberta government set up one of those giant bitumen hauling trucks on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. several years ago in order to promote development of the oilsands.
Sorry, Murray Smith, but that wasn’t one of your better ideas, to sell the world that the best way to get at Alberta’s huge oilsands resource was through digging giant holes in the earth, consuming vast amounts of natural gas to stew up huge amounts of water to free the oil, and then building lakes to hold the contaminated sludge.
But that was the vision that Alberta was peddling at the time, and that was only a few short years ago.
Back then we used stunts to sell the oilsands. When stunts are used against the oilsands we cry foul. My, how sensitive we have become.
But we better get used to this kind of stuff because like it or not, the oilsands are part of a larger gong show now. And we are facing off against some pretty savvy media operators. They have basically killed off the traditional seal hunt already, they forced huge changes in British Columbia’s forest industry and now the oilsands are in their sights.
Is Alberta up for the challenge – both the government and the oil industry?
I don’t know how many people are following the CBC Radio series about the oilsands with Dr. David Suzuki. I know, I know, Suzuki can sometimes be an aggravating little pest. But . . . the man is informed and you can’t question the sincerity of his commitment to the environment.
In one recent episode of the series, Dr. Suzuki had a pretty good dialogue going with John Abbot, a vice president of Shell Canada in Calgary. It was good give-and-take and I learned from both of them. But I felt a twinge of embarrassment when the program announced that representatives of oilsands giants Syncrude and Suncor refused to participate in the program.
C’mon folks, if you have good news to tell us about the oilsands, don’t duck out on Dr. Suzuki. He may be a gadfly but he’s a much more honest interlocutor than Greenpeace or those who’ve taken out ads against Alberta tourism.
It seems that neither the Alberta government nor the industry have a handle on how to tell the oilsands story. I kind of expect that from the industry because their expertise is resource development and not public relations. Oil companies work for their shareholders, not the public.
The provincial government, however, does have a responsibility to communicate policy because that is who we elected to manage this resource on behalf of all Albertans.
This government and the government before have not been doing a very good job. It’s as if the government and its civil servants believe the oilsands are a private preserve; that the citizens of this province have no right to public information on how this resource is being developed; that we should know nothing but what is contained in the recent spate of slick government advertising.
Unfortunately, most mainstream media in Alberta have bought this line and the government and industry have been given a free pass to ramp up oilsands production with as few questions as possible.
But now questions are being asked – in Canada, the U.S., around the world and even in Alberta. Do we have a real strategy to talk back? Do we have a credible story to tell about responsible development of the oilsands?
Or do we keep hiding what is going on up north and react only when extremists such as Greenpeace stage another theatrical coup and we act all offended and aggrieved by their tactics?
This is a serious issue that is not going to go away any time soon. So this government better take the time to get its oilsands policies and communication strategy in line. The future of billions of dollars of investment rests on the shoulders of Premier Ed Stelmach. Can this government deliver?
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