Corey Pierce

U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Ottawa may have been lightning quick, but he sure had an impact on the Alberta government. Even before the first green president set foot on Canadian soil, Premier Ed Stelmach and his cabinet were busy gussying up the oilsands. Would you believe that in the recent provincial throne speech the word “environment” appeared as many times as the word “energy”?

Word counts aside, there was also a flurry of activity on the environmental front that seemed designed to convince Obama and his green friends in the U.S that oil extracted from the tarsands and shipped south is about to be cleaned up.

Of course, Stelmach would never concede that this oil is dirty oil — that it requires too much carbon to be emitted into the atmosphere, and poisons water, forests and wildlife. However, the label has stuck despite concerted efforts by government and industry officials to present the oilsands as a victim of unscrupulous and self-serving environmentalists.

Obama didn’t refer to it as “dirty” either when he was interviewed by the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge the day before he arrived in Ottawa. However, Obama sure knew what Mansbridge was talking about when he asked a question about the tarsands and referred to “dirty oil.”

This in itself is quite remarkable. For Alberta politicians and CEOs have travelled far and wide and spent a lot of money in an effort to buff up the tarnished image of Alberta’s most important industrial project. Despite their best efforts, they simply couldn’t counter the image of the 500 ducks that glided onto a Syncrude tailings pond last spring and promptly drowned in the thick, toxic soup.

Who knows exactly when Stelmach and his inner circle realized their grand PR scheme wasn’t working. Just two weeks before Obama’s arrival, the Energy Resources Conservation Board introduced stricter regulations for the management of oilsands tailings ponds. A few days later, the government released a report that showed that the incidence of a rare cancer was higher in Fort Chipewyan, a community downstream from the oilsands, than in the rest of the province. No direct connection has been made to contaminated water, but Alberta Health agrees that the findings warrant further investigation.

Next, Syncrude was informed that it had been charged with failing to protect the hapless ducks from the hazards of its tailings ponds. The charges came almost a year after the ducks died and about a month after Jeh Custer, an energy campaigner with Sierra Club Canada, announced he was launching a private prosecution because the provincial and federal governments had failed to enforce their own environmental laws.

There was still more to come. Less than a week before Obama’s much anticipated visit, the Alberta government released a comprehensive 20-year plan for oilsands development that promises to take into account the environmental, social and economic impacts. It’s short on specifics, but environmental stewardship is listed as the first priority. Yes… the first priority. Hard to believe, but that’s what it says in the glossy booklet produced just in time for Obama’s visit.

A comprehensive plan for reducing the environmental footprint of the oilsands sounds like a good thing. It also begs the question: why wasn’t this done earlier? Oilsands projects have sprouted as fast as weeds in the last 10 years. While they created a lot of wealth for Albertans and other Canadians, the Alberta and federal governments could have done much more to ensure orderly, sustainable development.

The best spin was yet to come and occurred after Obama left. Stelmach told the media he was happy to hear that Obama was “clearly speaking Alberta’s language.” Stelmach seemed to think that he and his spinners had convinced Obama that carbon capture and storage is the key to cleaning up dirty oil, something the Alberta government has been betting on for awhile.

And it’s true, Obama did publicly talk about the advantages of carbon capture and storage (CCS) for both the oilsands and the many coal-fired electricity generators in the U.S. However, Obama has also made it clear that he wants hard caps on carbon emissions, something the Alberta government and the federal government are dead set against. Perhaps Obama was just too polite to mention it during his first visit. Might as well butter up your hosts and then deliver the bad news when you are safely back in Washington.

Stelmach must have been delirious when he said Obama sounded like an Albertan when he talked about the oilsands. Or perhaps he’s simply been sucked in by his own spin. Or perhaps he really is out of touch with the world beyond Alberta.

Not surprisingly, most environmentalists are deeply suspicious that the Alberta government is merely putting lipstick on a filthy pig in hopes of convincing Obama that the oilsands should be exempted from tougher environmental and climate-change policies. Policies that could lead to the restriction of imports of “dirty oil” to the U.S. I suspect that Obama is too smart, and too green, to be fooled by something as superficial as lipstick.