Iggy and the Oilsands’ National Geographic Moment

When Michael Ignatieff spoke to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce on Feb. 27 he got an unusually warm reception for a federal Liberal leader. And the speech didn’t disappoint, with Ignatieff forcefully declaring his support for Alberta, its energy industry and specifically oilsands development.

“The oilsands are an integral part of the future of Canada,” he said. “We’ve got to keep things going,” rather than call for a moratorium on oilsands expansion as a way to improve the industry’s environmental performance. Not such a stretch, considering it was a Liberal government that help orchestrate a new deal for the industry in 1996, but it was somehow more heartening than the Harper government’s endorsement-by-default, and a comfort to know that the only other man likely to lead the country in the foreseeable future is prepared to defend Alberta’s economic interests against detractors both within and outside this country.

And they will need defending. The publication this month of a feature story in National Geographic focusing on the environmental and social costs of oilsands development could mark a tipping point in international awareness. This wasn’t some CBC Doc Zone treatment but rather the kind of publication you might find on the coffee table of Ed Stelmach himself. It reminded me of the pilot episode of Mad Men, where the chain-smoking Madison Avenue ad executives of 1960 are all atwitter over an article in Reader’s Digest that suggests tobacco could be bad for your health. (As a magazine editor, I could at least take solace in the fact that our medium still matters.)

That the Alberta government knew about the story weeks ahead of time begins to explain why it rushed out an oilsands strategy that was long on benchmark-free objectives and short on actual measures meant to achieve those goals, and perhaps also the government’s sudden push to retire the Alberta Advantage slogan (which at heart is a “bargain” sign and has lost much of its initial truth) and replace it with a more nuanced, value-added brand.

But back to Ignatieff, who actually sounds as if he’s put that famously big brain of his to the oilsands file and wants to go big with it: big growth, big sustainability push, a national energy strategy that unites rather than divides the country. “[The oil] companies don’t need lectures. They need partnership,” he said. No kidding. I was a business journalist in B.C. through that province’s forest industry’s own National Geographic moment in the 1990s and can attest to a few things: that the oilsands’ image problem can get much, much worse; that it will start to affect companies’ bottom lines; and that you can only counter an “image” problem by treating it as a reality problem and changing practices.

If you want more on this topic, check out the Oil and Gas Industry Report in our April issue.

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