Alta. cabinet ministers: Oilsands a 'Canadian jewel'

Seriously? A Canadian Jewel? Must be high on fumes or something...

Just for the hell of it Artie, why don't you paint us a picture of Canada without the tar sands!

Fumes from your gas tank maybe? In Saskatchewan we already got hostile takeovers of Potash and Uranium. They should thank their lucky stars they still have that industry.

Alberta's clearly become a major part of the Canadian economic engine over the last decade. It was continued Western oilpatch activity that to a large degree kept Canada from statistically performing worse than we did at the worst stages of the recent recession. Saying that Alberta's contribution is negligible is obviously false and patently laughable.

Tell that to the East. Shift of power is not easily let go of.

All myths die hard but thet still die in the end. With the collapse of the export market to the US and the hollowing-out of the manufacturing sector, it'll be hard to see Ontario and Quebec really ever returning to their old levels of total economic dominance.

Well, I for one wouldn't call the oil sands a Canadian Jewel per se but it's certainly a welcome source of income despite my reservations of its environmental impact. Then again, I have to point out the moral of the environmental lobby who would rather buy petroleum from Islamist-supporting Monarchs or Tin-Pot Bolivarian Dictators whose human rights records are atrocious (and their environmental records aren't much better.) While Ezra Levant may be bombastic (to say the least) he has a point as Peter Foster illustrates in the link I provided.