Thank you for all the kind emails about last week’s edition of The Thursday Question, which marked an important centenary for the Brodie family.
Until this year, I don’t think I had ever been invited to Politics and the Pen, the annual gala celebration of the Writers’ Trust. Then this year I had two generous invitations. I regretted having to decline since I expected – assumed – John Ibbitson would win the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for The Duel, his fantastic telling of the Diefenbaker-Pearson battles. I would have been happy to celebrate its success. But somehow Ibbitson’s book was not even shortlisted by the jury. That made me feel a bit better that At the Centre of Government wasn’t shortlisted a few years ago either. Perhaps the Writers’ Trust needs a second prize to recognize books dealing with conservatives. Anyone willing to donate to a Myron Thompson Prize at the Trust?
Instead, this year’s Cohen Prize went to John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. This well-written volume is a compelling account of the 2016 wildfire that destroyed part of Fort McMurray. It comes highly recommended by the New York Times, an American newspaper, and has been shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction.
These days, stories about Canadian wildfires are reflexively linked to climate change and a morality tale about Canada’s carbon dioxide emissions. Vaillant juxtaposes the damage of the Fort McMurray fire with the city’s reliance on the oil sands. Any reader who has a passing familiarity with the news will be aware of the “carbon bomb” that the oil sands are alleged to have unleashed on the world’s climate – misinformation though that it is. (1)
So, the first part of Fire Weather gives the reader a history of the oil sands. And it’s a pretty negative history in Vaillant’s telling. The oil produced from bitumen isn’t as valuable as other oil deposits in North America or the rest of the world. Oil is very hard to extract from bitumen. The industry that manages this feat is marked by brutal working conditions and accidental deaths. The launch of one oil sands project is bluntly compared to the Nazi rallies of Nuremberg. The evangelical Christian side of the culture that developed the industry gets dragged into the story. Vaillant even complains that that the blue-collar workers who commute to oil sands complexes drink and fart too much on airplanes. Fort McMurray is beset by crack cocaine, violence, and inequality. The entire sector is massively subsidized by government and benefits from under regulation.
The core part of the book, the story of the fire, the heroic response of firefighters and the residents of Fort Mac and the aftermath of the destruction, is well worth reading. Vaillant’s history of the oil sands is misleading and would leave a good reader wondering why global oil companies have invested so much in the play, or why oil sands product has been so successful in international markets.
The morality tale he wants to tell is nothing news. For years, US activists have targeted Fort McMurray’s economic lifeblood as a unique threat to the world’s climate and to the survival of humanity itself. The only problem is that this narrative is not born out by the facts on where carbon dioxide production has grown since 1990. If the 2016 wildfire really was driven by increased carbon dioxide emissions, it’s not Canada that bears the blame.
But let’s not underestimate the cultural impact of a book that’s recommended by the New York Times and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Vaillant’s telling of the oil sands story will have a global impact. And its impact will far outweigh the work done by the Alberta government’s energy war room. (Speaking of which, did Jason Kenney push back on the narrative of Fire Weather while he was co-emcee of Politics and the Pen?)
The book will also outweigh all the excellent policy analysis that has been done of late on the economic, social and environmental potential of the Canadian energy sector. The Hub recently highlighted the good work done by Jack Mintz and Philip Cross under the sponsorship of the Macdonald Laurier Institute. MLI and the CD Howe Institute co-hosted a conference on the subject earlier this month. That followed on great work by Heather Exner-Pirot, also for MLI. And the roundtables and podcasts from my part-time employer, the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. And the excellent report prepared for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce by Eric Miller on the future of Canadian LNG. All of which was buttressed by the analysis of Daniel Yergin, the godfather of global energy strategists, for CGAI where he advised Canadians there is not much we can contribute to the global effort on carbon dioxide emissions, but a lot we can do for the global effort on energy security (listen to this excellent interview he gave to Kelly Ogle and Joe Calnan -https://www.cgai.ca/a_conversation_on_energy_geopolitics_with_daniel_yergin). (2)
We have lots of good policy analysis. But we’re not just waiting for a federal government prepared to act on it. Governments come and go. To get long-term investment in long-term development, we need a long-term shift in public opinion.
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