Sand Branding

At the time, the truck probably seemed a good idea. It was July 2006, and Alberta was the subject of the Smithsonian Institution’s annual Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. For 10 days, the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument shared space on the National Mall with Alberta musicians, artists and chefs, with exhibitions and demonstrations featuring aboriginal dancers, hockey, dinosaur bones and, of course, horses and cowboys. But also squeezed onto the Mall was a 180-tonne oilsands hauler, polished to a gleaming yellow, almost as if mimicking a sun around which everything Albertan irresistibly revolved.

And it made sense. The truck stood for the industry that has supported, enriched and, yes, defined this province, bringing it worldwide socio-economic relevance. But, critics protested, the festival was a showcase for culture, not industry. Moreover, they added, the truck was an agent of environmental disruption. The Alberta government’s response, a picture of either admirable transparency or utter emotional detachment, ran along the lines of, Well, yes, but that’s part of who we are. With that, one might argue, the seeds of what would blossom into a far-reaching sentiment of “Stop the tarsands” were coaxed easily into germination, not to be stunted by government insistence that the stuff in question was a naturally occurring mix of water, sand and bitumen, and thus more accurately referred to as “oilsands.”

Today, these semantics represent a polarization that has borne much fruit. Last April’s news of the 500 tailings pond ducks, for example, spread worldwide, and well beyond the animal activists’ circuit. Closer to home, Montreal journalist William Marsden won the $20,000 National Business Book Award in 2008 for Stupid to the Last Drop, accusing Alberta of wilful environmental destruction, a viewpoint much of the national press also adopted. Locally (apart from various Greenpeace activities), Calgary writer Andrew Nikiforuk took a similar view with his book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. Our biggest customer, the U.S., also took note. National Geographic magazine, for one, covered the oilsands in a feature article this March, dourly likening upgraders to poet William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” and reminding of unusual cancers in nearby Fort Chipewyan. Perhaps most importantly, though, President Barack Obama has promised to lessen U.S. dependence on “dirty, dwindling and dangerously expensive oil.” He didn’t name names, but he probably didn’t need to.

The result: Mobilization of the rusty gears of the oil sector’s PR machine to carefully craft a message to unite the industry and rebuild public trust. On its side is a premier-cum-missionary eager to change minds everywhere for the good of the province. And to back him up is a new $25-million campaign to rebrand the province and, as the effort’s online one-pager quotes him, to “tell the world about the promise of Alberta.” But whether it continues to offer that much to the oil industry depends, right now, on one thing: whether its message will resonate with a public currently more inclined to think “tarsands” than “oilsands” when confronted with the latest images of well-laden heavy haulers, worse for wear than that Smithsonian specimen, but still the brightest spots in a vast, grey pit.

What more, if anything, do you believe industry and government could be doing to help Alberta shed its reputation for producing “dirty” oil?

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