Michael Ignatieff has tempered his enthusiastic support for the Athabasca Tar Sands by calling for some sort of miraculous environmental remediation.
“It’s not just a matter of getting better publicity, we’ve got to get the water use down; we’ve got to get the tailing ponds problems sorted out, the CO2 down. These are real problems for a great industry.”
Um yeah, that's right Iggy and if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle! "Real problems for a great industry" indeed. Isn't that the rhetorical equivalent of wiping your backside with wax paper? And, in case you missed it, Iggy wants you, or at least your tax dollars to fix it.
Ignatieff said Ottawa must do more to clean up the oilsands so it can sell it to the world, adding the industry and national energy policy are “a national unity issue,” and an economic dynamo.
I don't want Ottawa backing itself into some sort of obligation to clean up Athabasca. The people who made the mess are the multi-trillion dollar combine called Big Oil. It's their mess and they should damned well clean it up just as they've been promising, over and over and over again, for the past two decades.
It surely doesn't sound remotely Liberal to me that the Canadian taxpayers should be on the hook to mop up after Big Oil.
What's implicit in Ignatieff's lame Tar Sands position is that he doesn't understand or doesn't believe all that scientific business about anthropogenic global warming. He wants to build the future of Canada on the fossil fuel industry, and the dirtiest form of it to boot, at the very time we need to be working to decarbonize our economy, to decarbonize our society. Unfortunately Iggy reveals a truly "Thelma and Louise" vision of Canada.
In the best case scenario, Ignatieff is just pandering, being disingenuous, lying his Ivy League ass off. In the worst case scenario he actually means what he's saying. Either way, this is not the guy to lead Canada anywhere.
2 comments:
Probably Iggy believes what he says because the man is absolutely clueless when it comes to public vs. private corporate responsibility. Governments regulate so that disasters don't happened and not pay to clean up the mess created by profit driven corporations.
Seems to me Ignatieff believes what he says at the moment he says it, but then he thinks a bit more and comes to another conclusion. He can pontificate all he wants about cleaning up the Tar Sands. I don't trust a word he says anymore.
Also, he couldn't have picked a worse time to support the Tar Sands, as images of thick oil creeping into the Louisiana wetlands are reminding everyone just how deadly oil is to all living creatures. As you've said previously MoS, very poor political instincts.
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