After the shoot-out at the Edmonton Corral last weekend, one of the participants was left bleeding in the dust. After the NDP delegates left town, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley is in critical condition and the wolves of the province’s right and further right wing parties are baying for her corpse.
But that seems so unfair! She did her best. She set aside all her better instincts and tried to sell pipelines. And the consensus on Saturday was that she did a fine job. It was hardly her fault that the federal New Democratic Party convention had other fish to fry.
Not that Notley’s position in her speech was tenable. She was trying to commit doublespeak in a manner that the human tongue was never designed to handle. She was lying to herself.
When she spoke of sending Alberta oil sands output to tidewater, she was admitting that the pollution caused by turning it into synthetic oil was too much for Alberta to handle. And how could she justify the seismic damage being done by pumping hot water underground to bring up the deep layers of bitumen sand? The steady growth of settling ponds in Northern Alberta must be outpacing the growth in provincial agriculture.
Actually, Notley might have one small win. She can take solace that the twinning of the American-owned Kinder-Morgan pipeline over the Rockies might still happen. While the environmentalists will fight it every step of the way, they could be fighting the Alberta and B.C. governments as well as the Trudeau government in Ottawa. Trudeau might be better at doublespeak than Notley. And B.C. politicians will sell their souls for a loonie.
But in all of this, nobody seems willing to sell Premier Notley insurance on the longevity of her NDP government. There could even be a shotgun marriage between the province’s Conservatives and the ultra-conservative Wildrose Party.
It seems to this writer that Rachel Notley deserves at least a ‘thank you’ from those Albertans whom she tried to help. Her ranting at the Leap Manifesto will do no good. A manifesto is an ideal, not reality. Notley is training her guns on a puff of smoke.
But frankly folks, bitumen is disgusting stuff that pollutes every step of the way to polluting more when it is used. Our warming world needs to have tar sands left in the ground. It will still take decades more to wean the world off the need for real oil.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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