On a trip to Canada in late June, I was saddened to hear of the tragic flooding in Alberta that led to at least four deaths, millions of dollars in damage and thousands of wrecked homes. Rain storms caused the worst flooding in living memory – in the Canadian province famous (or infamous) for its oil extraction from vast bitumen deposits known as tar sands.
One 90-year-old resident of the badly hit city of Calgary was quoted by the press as saying: “I have never seen it rain like this.” The country’s right-wing prime minister, Stephen Harper, the MP for Calgary south-west, was quoted as saying: “I don’t think any of us have ever seen anything like this. The magnitude is just extraordinary.”
However, the extensive national media coverage of the disaster was remarkable for its failure to focus on climate change as a possible cause. On the night that the flood in Calgary hit its peak, June 21, CBC’s “The National” TV news programme included not a single comment on climate change or extreme weather elsewhere in the world – despite this being Calgary’s second devastating deluge in eight years, with the previous, smaller one “supposed to have been the flood of the century”, according to one interviewee.
Then, in a supreme irony, a TV ad break during the news report included a “greenwash” promotion for Alberta’s tar sands. My jaw almost hit the floor with incredulity. This advert was sponsored by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Products. The government also spends taxpayers’ money on TV ads promoting the nation’s energy industry.
Of course, a direct local link cannot be proved, but evidence abounds that pumping fossilised carbon into the atmosphere causes global warming, increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events. The tar sands are particularly bad in this regard because of the huge amount of energy required to produce oil from them. The extraction process also causes great scars on the earth.
The flood reporting in the Canadian national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, the next day also ignored climate change. I wrote to the editor to complain about the omission, but the letter was not published. Follow-up reports on CBC TV and the Globe and Mail made only fleeting mentions of climate change, such as: “Scientists have said that the climate is changing and we can expect more of this.” But the angle was not expanded or highlighted. It was downplayed.
This self-censorship and failure of the national media is worrying. Powerful people may not wish to see links drawn between extreme weather and dirty fuel, but it is the media’s job to raise controversial issues. Harper and his Alberta chums represent the interests of Big Oil in national government. Sure, Canadian jobs may depend on the tar sands – and the Keystone XL pipeline is a red-hot issue in North American politics – but the biosphere suffers great harm. And many thousands of jobs can be created by focusing instead on developing cleaner, greener energy sources.
Canada’s ruling Conservatives are desperately trying to launder the tarnished national image. Besides the TV ads, they have sought to sanitise the tar sands by renaming them “oil sands”, because “tar” sounds too dirty. Their Ministry of Truth has made it clear to the media that references to “tar sands” – such as the recent one in a climate change speech by Barack Obama – are offensive and not in the national interest.
This week saw Canada Day (July 1), when the nation celebrated its founding in 1867. Over the years, the country has well-earned its reputation as a decent citizen of the world and a socially progressive nation. But now, despite all the propaganda of Harper’s Conservatives, that image is slipping, and it is fast becoming an environmental thug.
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