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Canada’s federal government plans to invest about $24 million in a two-year international ad campaign to counter “intense and sustained public relations” attacks against Alberta’s oil sands, Postmedia News reports Friday.
In a request for proposals issued by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), authorities make clear that they blame domestic and international campaigns against oil sands for proposed regulations that “unfairly target the oil sands,” and which are based on “preconceived notions about the oil sands that are not supported by science.”
Canada Association of Petroleum Producers’ ad.
In a related blog post this morning, New York-based group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) revealed that a “prominent delegation” of Canadians has traveled to Washington DC to urge U.S. law and policy makers note and stop the systematic attack on the country’s corresponding policies.
The writers go on to wonder how does the Canadian government plan to do that when, they say, the country has shown “weakened, ineffective, and missing environmental laws.”
Canada has quietly amended, delayed, and failed to enact environmental laws critical to mitigating the well-known risks of tar sands development. Along the way, Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol, claimed its spot as the eighth largest GHG emitter in the world, lobbied governments around the world to weaken their climate and environmental policies, and actively restrained the production and publication of scientific studies deemed damaging to Canada’s pro-tar sands interests.
NRCan’s PR campaign, the costliest the body has undertaken in recent years(*), comes at a time when the federal Conservatives are having a tough time selling the Keystone XL pipeline, both locally and in the U.S.
Image: Shell’s Athabasca oil sands project/Flickr
(*) NRCan spent only $5.25 million total in advertising for 2011-2012.
3 Comments
Chris Armstrong
Stephen Harper seems to be deeply in the pockets of Big Oil pussycats. Oil Sands/Tar Sands bitumen should be refined in Alberta, employing Canadians, and pipelined safely (compared to abrasive diluted bitumen in the proposed NGP) and sold at relative, premium prices. Timid Big Oil used to be risk takers!
KDM
For starters why do people refer to the oil sands as Tar sands? Just another way to make it sound bad. As for the Kyoto agreement its was a joke from the start. When Canada has some of the toughest regulations in the oil industry its pretty unfair to meet the targets of Kyoto. Look at the US oil industry and their well sites, you want to see an enviromental disaster look at them, and other countries like Russia with oil leaking all over. I can say in Canada its regulated and things done properly with employees and companies taking every precaution for a disaster
chris
Instead of wasting this money on a stupid ad, they should be using that money to actually address the environmental problems, advance technology, do a proper cumulative effects assessment or undertake a regional groundwater analysis. Oh wait……if you actually do the research (and not muzzle the scientists) then it will show that there ARE impacts!! There are countless other issues that this money would be better spent on. I’m disgusted that my tax dollars are going towards this.