Update 12 JAN: Hervorragende Richtigstellung in “The Ottawa Citizen“, numbers and all:
“If there were a global competition for the most brazen and preposterously transparent attempt by a ruling political party to change a necessary subject of national debate with alarmist distractions and hubbub, the Conservative escapade engineered in Ottawa these past few days really deserves some kind of grand prize.”
Update 11 JAN: The Toronto Star calls a Cabinet Minister using that rhetoric “nuts”. This passage contains a more realistic assessment: “The parody lies with the fact that Canada’s oil industry is dominated by multinationals. That means there will indeed be a lot of big-money foreign interests pushing the three-person federal review panel to okay a pipeline from Alberta’s oilsands to a tanker port at Kitimat on the British Columbia coast.
Haisla First Nation Hereditary Chiefs Clifford Smith, left, Rod Bolton, centre, and Sam Robinson address a review panel during the opening day of hearings for the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project in Kitimaat Village, B.C., on Tuesday.
America’s Exxon Mobil, Britain’s BP, France’s Total E&P, China’s SinoCanada Petroleum Corp. and Japan Canada Oil Sands Ltd. have all asked for intervenor status at the hearings. So has the South Korean conglomerate Daewoo.
But foreigners who support the pipeline aren’t the outsiders that Prime Minister Stephen Harper claims to be worried about. As Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver explained to CBC television on Monday, these are the good foreign interests.”
Update 10 JAN: As It Happens (CBC) hat ein sehr informatives Stück anlässlich der Anschuldigungen des kanadischen Ministers für Natürliche Ressourcen, Joe Oliver genau hier.
Update JAN 9: A reaction from Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada and MP for Saanich-Gulf-Islands in British Columbia, to Joe Oliver, Canada’s Minister For Natural Resources, a response to his open letter, ranting in never known ways and demeaning First Nations and other critics of the pipeline, as well as the democratic environmental assessment as a whole required in the process.
“Most fundamentally, shipping unprocessed bitumen crude out of Canada has been attacked by the biggest of Canada’s energy labour unions, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, as a bad idea. The CEP estimates it means exporting 40,000 jobs out of Canada (figure based on jobs lost through the Keystone Pipeline). They prefer refining the crude here in Canada. (The CEP is also not a group to which your allegation that opponents of Gateway also oppose all forestry, mining, oil, gas, etc is anything but absurd.)”
Temporary jobs, not more than 4000 over the course of two years, and gas is expected to be more expensive, as dirty Canadian tarsands oil will go toward EXPORT. Check out what is really going to happen, coz the oil barons scheming this up will tell you anything but this: