The protests in Ottawa and Washington over the Keystone XL pipeline project are more about capturing hearts and minds than the merits of the pipeline itself, or expanding oilsands development. If they were, they wouldn’t be hiring D-list actors as spokespersons.
If Greenpeace and other organizations wanted a debate on these technologies in Canada, they wouldn’t have made actress Tantoo Cardinal their go-to person for interviews.
On paper, Cardinal appears perfect to put in front of cameras when interviewers line up to ask their shallow, unresearched questions for the daily sound or video bite. Order of Canada, erudite and comfortable in her role (and able to correct interviewers on-air when they get the chronology and facts of the events wrong), accomplished actress, native and born in Fort McMurray. If you want appearances of credibility, look no further.
But on camera in numerous interviews during Monday’s protest on Parliament Hill, Cardinal lost the hearts and minds of the majority of Canadians who have not yet made up their minds on this project. And she provided no real ammunition against the pipeline.
Cardinal referred again and again to native peoples as “the keepers of the earth.” Really? Is this to say everyone else is not, or that natives have a superior right to judge?
That would be news to the 1,600 aboriginal people working in the industry in Fort McMurray, people who have gained real skills, have real careers and real futures for their children.
Cardinal probably has relatives in Northern Alberta who would be quite opposed to shutting down or limiting investment in their futures.
Cardinal rightly pointed out that the bitumen to flow through Keystone has corrosive qualities, implying the statistical certainty that every pipeline will eventually leak, if you operate it long enough.
True on its face. But there are already many thousands of kilometres of pipeline criss-crossing North America. They carry bitumen, sweet oil, sour gas, gasoline, diesel, sweet gas, distillates and many other products, without whose existence Cardinal herself would appear on TV naked and starving — if TV could even exist. That we all live comfortably is proof of how well these pipelines work.
Our entire economy rests on consuming fossil fuels. Almost all the easy, “non-dirty” fuel has been used. We in North America can no more abandon the oilsands than we can abandon tourism, produce in the stores, clothing, electronics — and our jobs, whatever they are (including those in the entertainment industry). Certainly, without the oilsands, many protesters would never have been able to afford to go to Ottawa in the first place. They’d be long-term unemployed.
Cardinal said that if half the energy and resources being put into oilsands development were put into green technology, we wouldn’t need to strip mine a huge portion of Northern Alberta. Really? We’re talking many billions in potential profits here. Can Cardinal prove a conspiracy to neglect those obvious profits?
If protesters want to capture hearts and minds, they should embrace development, but demand a more visible partnership. A seat at the same table, reading from the same menu as the big energy players. Demand that if all of us share the risk of the downside equally, we should share the benefits more equally as well.
Oilsands development has become vastly “greener” over the decades, just as the auto industry has. It’s more profitable to be efficient. Environmental groups should abandon being simply protesters and become partners in this progress.
But don’t tell me I’m not a “keeper” of this earth because I’m not native. Or that my children have less of a stake in her alleged choice between a polluted world or a collapsed economy.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.