Jeremy J Schmidt

I have been interested lately in how the Canadian government has completely lost control of the discourse over its oil resources. It started with a very tightly scripted campaign for “ethical oil” a few years back, but today both the script and the actors involved (i.e. Canadian ministers at the provincial and federal levels) appear as so many industry touts. So it is a double loss. On the one side it is a loss because any long-term viability for developing oil resources is now in jeopardy as all sides converge to wage war against “dirty oil”. On the other, the development that is proceeding is under less and less scrutiny internally, and so the government (and by extension the public) are in a much weaker position than they were just a few short years ago.