Excerpt: ‘Tar Sands’, by Andrew Nikiforuk

Declaration of a Political Emergency

The world’s oil party is coming to a dramatic close, and Canada has adopted a new geodestiny: providing the United States with bitumen, a low-quality, high-cost substitute.

Northern Alberta’s bituminous sands, a national treasure, are the globe’s last great remaining oil field. This strategic boreal resource has attracted nearly 60 per cent of all global oil investments. Every major multinational and nationally owned oil company has staked a claim in the tar sands.


Neither Canada nor Alberta has a rational plan for the tar sands other than full-scale liquidation. Although the tar sands could fund Canada’s transition to a low-carbon economy, government has surrendered the fate of the resource to irrational global demands. At forecast rates of production, the richest deposits of bitumen will be exhausted in forty years.

Nations become what they produce. Bitumen, the new national staple, is redefining the character and destiny of Canada. Rapid development of the tar sands has created a foreign policy that favours the export of bitumen to the United States and lax immigration standards that champion the import of global bitumen workers. Inadequate environmental rules and monitoring have allowed unsustainable mining to accelerate. Feeble fiscal regimes have enriched multinationals and given Canada a petrodollar that hides the inflationary pressures of peak oil. Canada now calls itself an “emerging energy superpower.” In reality, it is nothing more than a Third World energy supermarket.

Investment in the tar sands, including pipelines and upgraders, now totals approximately $200 billion. The tar sands boom has become the world’s largest energy project, the world’s largest construction project, and the world’s largest capital project. No comprehensive assessment of the megaproject’s environmental, economic, or social impact has been done.

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