Northern Man
By
Neil Young kicked off his four-date “Honour the Treaties” tour of Canada on Sunday with some fighting words about the rapid expansion of oilsands development in northern Alberta, saying the Canadian government is ignoring hard science because it’s “inconvenient.”
“To me, it’s a basic matter of integrity on the part of Canada. Canada is trading integrity for money,” said Young. “That’s what’s happening under the current leadership in Canada, which is a very poor imitation of the George Bush administration in the United States. It’s lagging behind on the world stage and it’s an embarrassment to Canadians. So, as a Canadian, I felt like I had a chance to do something by bringing this together.”
Young didn’t pull any punches, either, labelling the oilsands a “devastating environmental catastrophe” and accusing Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012, of selling out their grandchildren’s future for the sake of short-term financial gain.
A recent visit to the Alberta oilsands left an indelible impression as “the greediest, most destructive and disrespectful demonstration of something run amok that you could ever see” and left Young pessimistic about the petroleum industry’s promises of environmental “reclamation” once the land has been bled dry of oil.
“It’s like turning the moon into Eden,” he quipped. “It’s just not possible.”
It’s worth noting that for all the often deserved progressive reputation Canada has compared to the United States, when it comes to natural resources, not only oil but forestry and wilderness protection, Canada is woefully behind its neighbor to the South. And that’s not saying the U.S. is any great shakes either. But Canadian natural resource policy is really, really irresponsible to the planet.