Social Impacts. Overnight injections of migrant workers will not build healthy communities and can have severely adverse impacts on existing communities, especially those of indigenous nations on their traditional lands. Such development brings vices and long term displacement too often. Drugs, alcohol and associated violence spreads. Hunting becomes difficult when the land is threatened, leading to a further loss of culture and tradition. In towns like Fort McMurray there is no planning for the future, but merely consumption in the present. However transient the individuals may be, the populations will not leave, as “development” takes on a logic all its own. All levels of run away development are subordinate to that development, not social need.
Enbridge eyes Gulf route
Demand growing; Buying assets seen as better plan than building pipeline
Jon Harding, Financial Post
Published: Thursday, April 05, 2007
CALGARY - Enbridge Inc. is accelerating plans to satisfy a growing thirst for Canadian crude among refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast and would rather buy existing assets in the United States than build a $4-billion direct pipeline link between Alberta and Texas.
Oilsands committee told to halt development
Last Updated: Wednesday, April 4, 2007 | 12:28 PM MT
CBC News
A provincial government committee touring Alberta to hear what people have to say about the pace of development in the oilsands were told on their Edmonton stop to halt development.
Everyone who spoke to the panel Tuesday night made passionate arguments in favour of stalling new projects until a wide range of problems are addressed.
When these are the types of editorials written by those most sympathetic to the tarsand producers, we know the tide is slowly yet surely turning.
-M
Showdown With Big Oil
April 3, 2007
By NEIL WAUGH
http://www.edmontonsun.com/Business/Columnists/Waugh_Neil/2007/04/03/390...
There’s a battle brewing out there. People are getting right ticked off.
The boom-to-end-all-booms is starting to look like a bust for many. And they are getting mad.
Already Premier Ed Stelmach has three not-in-my-backyard movements going in his constituency alone.
Suspicious death at the oilsands
By CP
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2007/04/02/3897136-sun.html
FORT MCMURRAY -- RCMP are investigating the suspicious death of a man at the Suncor oilsands plant north of Fort McMurray.
A worker found the body yesterday morning and reported it to emergency services.
Several hundred tradesmen were sent home and security was tight at the plant while police investigate. Const. Tye Roddick-Ament said investigators are not ruling anything out, including the possibility of foul play.
Dehcho Process talks on hold
Last Updated: Monday, March 19, 2007 | 6:39 PM CT
CBC News
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2007/03/19/nwt-dehcho.html
Dehcho land-claim negotiations remained in limbo on Monday with the cancellation of the latest round of negotiations this week.
As well, the Dehcho First Nation announced it will not nominate any members to the two boards looking at Mackenzie Valley resource management. In the past, Grand Chief Herb Norwegian has claimed the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act does not apply to the Dehcho.
Tar sand proposal for locals at Shell Open House
Thu, March 29, 2007
The curious and the committed came to learn details of a proposed refinery.
By JOE MATYAS, SUN MEDIA
http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/CityandRegion/2007/03/29/3861392-sun.html
WALLACEBURG -- Shell Canada officials were anything but lonely here yesterday as they gave the public its first look at a proposed refinery that could cost between $6 billion and $8 billion.
Tree huggers, job seekers, property owners, politicians, the media and the just plain curious came to the Oaks Inn for a five-hour, show-and-tell.
The following article from Alberta Views Magazine also received an important letter to the editor follow up from Reinie Jobin, the Elder mentioned at the outset of the piece. His response is attached and appended at the conclusion of the original article below, on this same posting.
Thanks to the Ontario based solidarity organization, Friends of the Lubicon for providing these two articles:
http://www.tao.ca/~fol
ALBERTA VIEWS MAGAZINE
MARCH 2007
FEATURE REPORT
NO DEAL
Oil sands boom adds to worker shortage woes
BRIAN BAKER
staff writer
http://dcnonl.com/article/20070402300
In labour hungry Alberta, more oil sands production is predicted through to the year 2020, a portent that may compound the province’s construction industry woes.
A Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) study predicts the oil sands in Fort McMurray will triple production, pushing spending over $7.5 billion mark.
Limited time for training and demand in ICI sector construction will be pushed to the limits when the bitumen boom hits its full potential.
Does anyone remember when nuclear power was considered dangerous and of grave, permanent risk for millions of years at a time to all the lands in and around any nuclear plant?
Analysis: Nuclear-powered oil sands
By BEN LANDO
UPI Energy Correspondent
http://www.upi.com/Energy/analysis_nuclearpowered_oil_sands/20070330-063...
WASHINGTON, March 30 (UPI) -- Nuclear companies and those mining Canada's oil sands are poised to team up to separate crude from deep Earth and pump it to the surface.
Like the bulk of the proposed pipelines to head south after leaving the Tarsands, this pipeline project run by Enbridge is actually taking heavy bitumen to be refined in the southern 48. That isn't merely to keep the corporations in the southern US functioning, but as the rest of the world's capacity shrinks while demand grows, as it is wont to do, this is the only feasible way that the US Dep't of Energy's strategy of bleeding the Albertan tarsands as fast as possible can actually get refined, for there would be no way to construct the needed infrastructure fast enough.
