Fraser Institute report digs up U.S. support for tar sands development

The two have probably never met, but the cover of an Alexander Moens report called What Congress Thinks of Canada, induces an involuntary Mike Reynolds moment in me.

Okay, I’ll explain that one later, but here’s the deal. Just today (May 10), the Fraser Institute released the report that Moens, SFU political science professor and Fraser Institute senior fellow, co-authored along with economist Nachum Gabler.

The title is curious enough, but as you scan the entire document (as I did) you see that considerable effort has gone into its 70 pages. Moens and Gabler are busy guys, I’m sure, yet they and their research team have spent hours and hours trolling congressional transcripts to pick up 1,830 isolated observations—comments made by U.S. legislators in reference to Canada on trade, energy, border security, war, and other topics.

Moens and Gabler state in the report that the findings should provide a “reliable assessment” of how U.S. legislators perceive Canada. Let’s just address one geopolitical time bomb: that cache of fossil fuels (mostly) beneath the ground in Alberta otherwise known as the tar sands.

“Canada enjoys goodwill in the Congress regarding energy and the environment, including further oil exploration in the oil sands, and most members of Congress are open to an even greater energy-trading relationship with Canada,” the report states.

No doubt Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be briefed on these findings. To give Moens credit, he and Gabler did state that views on the environment in general were “eclectic and mixed”, but that, in general, Canada is viewed in a positive light as a source of energy to the U.S.

The oil sands, as Moens calls them, got scant mention in the recent federal election. What is clear is what U.S. architect Mike Reynolds described in a documentary on his sustainable-building projects in New Mexico, Garbage Warrior. True to the title, Reynolds has experimented for three decades with sustainable building, often using old bottles and cans to build homes requiring no utility hook-ups or sewage outflows.

If you’ve seen Garbage Warrior, you’ll know what I mean, but even if not check it out at the 01:35 minute mark here.

“I feel like I’m in a herd of buffalo, and they’re all stampeding toward a 1,000-foot drop-off, and they’re just running over the edge,” Reynolds states in the documentary. “And I’m in that herd, and I’m like, ”˜I ain’t goin’ there. I’m not gonna go down that way.’ So I have to somehow affect the whole herd so that they take a left turn or a right turn, and not go off this edge. And so, if humanity takes the planet down the tubes, I’m dead.”

The question of whether to expand tar sands operations will come up at some point in the House of Commons. Moens’s report seems to indicate all roads are pointing that way. I’ll leave it up to you to conclude what a greater and greater ramping up of the tar sands means for Canada. Reynolds has already summed up the human dilemma quite succinctly.

Are we going to make a turn to the left or the right? And I mean that in the human sense, not the political sense.