My response to an article in: The Calgary Herald — January 12, 2012
By: Don Braid
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/alberta/Braid+Redford
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The Premier of Alberta, Alison Redford is barely on the job 100 days.
We should cut her some slack, don’t you think? Would you accept judgement after your first 100 days at a new job? Really?
Ideologue politicians are just as bad for their province as good for their province, it seems. This Premier doesn’t strike me as on of those, refreshingly, she seems to be a pragmatist.
Give her a fair chance to succeed and she will.
Now, what about those oil sands?
Do you agree we should highly-refine the oil sands in Alberta keeping all those jobs in western Canada?
Or should we just extract oil sands, and then just pipeline it away? “Look fast – there goes all the jobs!”
If we keep those thousands of permanent jobs here, (jobs which are not temporary pipeline construction jobs) it helps Alberta and BC in three important ways;
1) Many value-added products are created in western Canada, translating into thousands of jobs for Albertan’s.
2) The problem of pipeline or supertanker spills are completely eliminated.
3) Environmentalist’s will better accept modern, world-class refineries producing low-toxicity products relatively near the oil sands site – in exchange for eliminating toxic crude oil pipeline and supertanker spills. (Not all environmentalist’s, but most)
The world’s largest petroleum exporter, Saudi Arabia, is already doing this and creating thousands of permanent jobs:
http://arabnews.com/economy/article514179.ece
It’s your call. Whatsay?
