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A minimum 70,000 meter drill program is now planned for 2025.
Thomas Mulcair, a leading light in Canada’s New Democratic Party and the man most likely to become the Opposition Leader when the party votes next Saturday, appears to be moderating his stance on the Alberta oilsands.
“You’ll never hear me speaking against the development of the oil sands,” The National Post reports Mulcair telling a media outlet last week.
But Mulcair is a staunch critic of the oilsands, and in leadership debates, “has crowed about the ‘billions’ of dollars his proposed carbon pricing policy will rake from companies mining Western Canada’s black gold, a declaration sure to send a chill through Albertans with bitter memories of the confiscatory National Energy Program of a generation ago,” states The Post. Mulcair has also called Prime Minister Harper’s support for the industry “immoral” and frequently uses the perjorative term “tarsands” when referring to the Alberta oilsands industry:
“We know that it is impossible to maintain the current manner of tar sands development without seriously affecting the health of human beings — and without destroying important ecosystems forever,” he wrote in an essay this month for Policy Options magazine, provocatively titled Tarsands: Dirty oil and the future of a country.
Mulcair also once compared temporary foreign oilsands workers to Chinese “coolies” hired to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, and has as one of his closest advisors UBC professor Michael Byers, who declared while running for election in 2008, “We need to shut the tar sands down.”
Photo of Thomas Mulcair is by Asclepias on Wikimedia Commons
