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.
Council of Canadians blasts Alta. gov’t (over possible censorship of film productions)
By CAROL CHRISTIAN
Fort McMurray Today staff
The Council of Canadians is asking Albertans to say no to censorship after the province recently suggested rethinking the funding of productions critical of the oilsands.
NAFTA likely safe from oil-focused Obama administration: experts
The Canadian Press
November 5, 2008
OTTAWA — U.S. President Barack Obama may turn out to be far better for Canadian free trade and economic interests than candidate Barack Obama ever pretended to be, experts on both sides of the border agree.
Obama - triumphant Tuesday in his bid to become America's first-ever black president-elect - was far from neighbourly in his pronouncements impacting Canada during the campaign.
Sunoco set up the original endowment for the Pew Foundation, now called the Pew Charitable Trusts. They also began the corporation now known as Suncor.
Sunoco currently refines bitumen in Ohio and are planning to do so soon in their home turf of Philadelphia.
Sunoco has, through either Pew family members (J Howard Pew's heirs, J Howard started Sun Oil/Sunoco) or current board members and CEO's of Sunoco, a majority of the board of trustees of the Pew Charitable Trusts to this very day.
Stephen Harper: Mackenzie Gas now
December 12, 2008
Diane Francis // Financial Post
Ottawa need not sign a single check in order to kick start a gigantic $20-billion economic stimulus project that would also be in the national interest. The feds must short-circuit their dysfunctional system in order to start the Mackenzie Gas Project.
First Nation takes province to court over oilsands leasing
Thursday, December 11, 2008
CBC News
Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation speaks to reporters in Edmonton on Thursday.Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation speaks to reporters in Edmonton on Thursday. (CBC)
The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in northern Alberta announced Thursday it has filed a request asking a court to review how Alberta grants leases for oilsands developments.
The notice was filed Wednesday in Edmonton's Court of Queen's Bench.
Canada: Oil and Immigration
13/11/2008 by Gareth McConnell
It’s worth $1.5 trillion, is the largest in North America and for Canada and the world a potential source of petroleum energy and work in Canada for the next one hundred years.
Canada’s oil sands, situated in north-eastern Alberta in an area larger than the state of Florida and is about to become a major avenue to explore for migrants workers wishing to move to Canada.
TransCanada to issue shares to raise money to pay down debt
Argus Leader
November 24, 2008
TransCanada has announced that it will issue 30.5 million shares of common stock to raise about 41 billion Canadian, or $809 million America, to pay down short-term debt and fund its Keystone Pipeline projects.
TransCanada entered into an agreement with a syndicate of underwriters to buy shares from the company at $33 Canadian and sell them to the public in Canada and the U.S.
Midwest oil mining a crude idea to many
Minneapolis City Pages
December 3, 2008 // By Beth Walton
Some 1,500 miles northwest of Minneapolis, the luscious green boreal forests that once lined the banks of the Athabasca River have been flattened. All that's left is an empty, lonely, gray moonscape. That, and the drills.
Polluted tar sands ponds leaking, report indicates
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT / ENVIRONMENT REPORTER
December 9, 2008
The tailings ponds storing waste water left over from the processing of Alberta tar sands oil are leaking an estimated 11 million litres of contaminated water every day, according to a new report.
The figure, one of the first publicly available on the scale of the seepage from tailing ponds that dot the landscape in Northern Alberta, is being released today in a report by Environmental Defence, a Toronto-based conservation advocacy group.
15 undocumented workers arrested in BP raid
December 10, 2008
By Andy Grimm Post-Tribune staff writer
WHITING - Immigration authorities arrested 15 janitorial workers in an early morning raid at the BP plant.
The raid came after at two-year investigation of United Building Maintenance, a Carol Stream, Ill.,-based cleaning company that had been hired by BP. The cleaning crews had access to sensitive areas of the refinery, said Gary Hartwig, special agent-in-charge of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Office of Investigations in Chicago.
