The corporate cock-up that's refuelled the Canadian tar sands debate

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/enbridge-canada-tar-sands-alberta


A tar sands mine in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photograph: Orjan F Ellingvag / Dagens Naringsliv / Corbis

Let's say you want to convince an entire province that the pipeline you're planning to run through some of its most treasured natural areas is a great idea. Probably the last thing you'd want to do is suggest that you didn't know what those treasured natural areas look like. And, the chances are, if you did, you'd probably hope not many people heard about it or, say, spread it around on Facebook. Unfortunately for Enbridge, the company that hopes to run the Northern Gateway pipeline from northern Alberta to the Pacific coast of British Columbia, all of those things have happened. But it's just the latest misstep in the increasingly complicated domestic debate over Canada's oil sands.

The 17 hours it took for someone to notice oil gushing from Enbridge's pipeline in Michigan last year was, along with everything else, a ticking PR time bomb. Now the company's due a geography lesson, as Facebookers in Canada will tell you, given the way its newest cock-up is trending. Everyone's sharing the corporate drawing of the Douglas Channel leading from the Pacific ocean to Kitimat, BC. A waterway packed with 1,000 sq km of pointy islands was shown in an Enbridge presentation to be open water. Enbridge says it was only for "illustrative purposes". Illustrative indeed. Five thousand people shared it from LeadNow. Another couple thousand from activist David Suzuki. Even before this, one cabinet minister was already wary of Enbridge. Now? Who knows. But that oil still needs to go somewhere.

It was never supposed to be this way for the Conservatives, the jobs-and-growth crew from out west – the team that's never been afraid to extol the benefits of Alberta's oil, or encourage their political foes to go and see for themselves the progress being made up there. And why shouldn't they? That's their bag. The natural resources minister even went so far as to claim that soon you might just be able to drink from tailings ponds. We'll have to see about that. For now, there are pressing matters beyond just the fact that the oil sands are an eyesore, and beyond the charges about greenhouse gases, and allegations of increased disease floating downriver. A government can handle that, out-manoeuvering environmental concerns with political rhetoric. Now, though?