by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Question: What do Alberta and Saudi Arabia have in common?

Answer: They’re both ruled by hard-core conservatives drunk (literally, in Alberta’s case) on oil money.

What don’t they have in common? Well, a lot, actually, but in this case, let’s focus on the fact that the Saudis can (for now) access their vast reserves fairly easily, while Albertans have to dig up thousands of hectares of boreal forest to get theirs.

For Elizabeth May, the head of the Sierra Club of Canada and a federal Green Party leadership candidate, the Athabasca tar sands boom in northern Alberta is nothing short of “disastrous.” May, who spoke to the Mirror from Ottawa prior to a speaking engagement at Concordia earlier this week, says Canada’s commitment to tar sands development needs to be seriously re-evaluated in the light of Canadians’ growing concern about greenhouse gases and our failure to rein them in.

Klein’s claims debunked

May says things took a turn for the worse, environmentally speaking, in 1996, after several years of positive steps by Canadian governments—beginning, ironically enough, with the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, who held one of the first political conferences on climate change. “In 1996, [Alberta Premier] Ralph Klein set the tar sands royalties at one per cent, which was the lowest on the planet,” she says (royalties are now around 25 per cent). Both the federal and provincial governments tripped over each other offering oil companies billions of dollars in subsidies to develop the tar sands, putting lie to Alberta’s claim that the rest of Canada wants to steal their oil money. “They’ve been stealing [all Canadians’] money for years,” she says.

The tar sands represent big money. The Athabasca, Peace River and Cold Lake deposits collectively represent some 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen, a type of semi-solid crude oil, of which about 10 per cent—an estimated 175 billion barrels—

is considered economically extractable. The problem is, the bitumen is often buried under dozens of metres of peat bog, clay and sand, and is spread over 141,000 square-kilometres of wilderness. Extraction means massive strip mining operations, and two to four barrels of water waste for every barrel of oil produced. May estimates that current actual and planned tar sand investment, which she pegs at $54-billion until 2011, will lead to production of some three million barrels a day by 2020. It has also raised Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by 24.9 per cent, casting serious doubt on Canada’s commitment to reducing emissions by six per cent below 1990 levels, as required by the Kyoto Accord. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Environment Minister Rona Ambrose have already said they don’t plan to adhere to Kyoto targets.

Getting it

But May says all hope isn’t lost. She points to several encouraging signs, including the recent documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the April 3, 2006 Time cover story (“Be Worried. Be Very Worried”) and Vanity Fair’s May 2006 “green” issue as signs that the general population is finally waking up to the climate change problem.

“In my 30-plus years of being involved, I’ve noticed that when the popular mainstream media pick up on an issue it’s because the public is at a tipping point of anger,” she says.

With a majority of Canadians—and a vast majority of Quebecers—supporting the Kyoto Accord, says May, and even 86 per cent of Albertans believing that tar sand expansion should be conditional on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it’s clear that, “The public is fed up. We need to convince Harper and Ambrose that the vast majority of Canadians get it.”