Environmentalists and Indigenous People Flex New Muscle In Canada's Resource Wars

Environmentalists and Indigenous People Flex New Muscle In Canada's Resource Wars
Thu, 2/11/2016 - by Derek Royden



015 was one of the worst years on record for oil and gas producers in Canada. First, the Keystone XL pipeline project was stopped through the tireless efforts of activists on both sides of the border. Then, unrelated to this, the price of oil dropped so much that the industry’s products, especially bitumen from tar sands, became increasingly unprofitable. The low price of crude brought at least 40,000 direct job losses to the Canadian oil industry and as many as 100,000 overall last year. This is a trend that industry insiders predict will continue through 2016.

For more than a generation, blue collar workers in economically depressed areas of the country have headed west to the country’s oil patch in search of hard but well paid work. Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper built his base on oil and other extractive industries when he first came to power in 2006, promising to make Canada an “energy superpower.” As long as prices remained high, his coalition of social conservatives, big business and working class voters seemed like an unstoppable force in the country’s politics.

However, ignoring the possibility that prices would at some point fall may have cost Harper’s Conservatives the last election. Before the federal election in October, Gil McGowan, President of the Alberta Federation of Labor [was quoted](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/16/canada-election-stephen-harper-fossil-fuel-backfires) saying, “It was a strategy that was bound to fail and it was bound to fail because it was inevitable that oil prices would eventually go down, which is something that anybody who has lived in Alberta for the past 30 or 40 years could have told you right from the beginning."

Pipeline Pipe Dreams

Despite all this, Canada's oil industry is still pushing two major pipeline projects to bring tar sands oil to both the east (Energy East) and west (TransMountain) coasts for export to international markets. The plan would give producers – who complain of being landlocked and forced to sell to the U.S. at discounted prices – the opportunity to ship their products via tankers out of North America. However, a fresh roadblock has been put in the way of both these pipelines by new interim rules announced by the federal government, pushing back any decision on either for at least six months.

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