Cameron: Canada should “make it a national priority to ensure we have the capacity to export our energy products beyond the US, and specifically to Asia.” Agree?

By: /
6 February, 2012
By: Maxwell Cameron
Professor, Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia

Let me see if I’ve got this right. Our national priority should be to build a pipeline that is sure to leak across fragile ecosystems and ancestral lands of our First Nations to tankers that sooner or later will spill bitumen into a pristine coastline. The reason we are doing this is so that we can detonate the tar sands carbon bomb into the atmosphere over China, which we will reproach for failing to share the burden of climate change action thereby justifying our own abject failure to act. I can think of no policy more perverse, and no idea of the national interest more wrong-headed.

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