Well said Ben, Thank you! Not everything MUST be about jobs and money. We need to STOP thinking in the here and now and START thinking about the future of our childrens children. BC was suppose to lead us out of our need for dirty oil. Every since the implementation of the CARBON TAX we have moved even more towards OIL. GREEN? Hardly!

How have we (B.C.) moved more towards oil if we build a pipeline and load the oil on tankers which will take it to another continent (Asia) where it will be refined and combusted producing carbon emissions?

I am not in favour of the pipeline and the tanker traffic. But the dirty oil is not for B.C. consumption...what gives?

Why don't we just leave this Tar Sand Oil for future Generation in the Ground, do we have to export it as fast as we can ??

Currently, we do have to "export it as fast as we can", Outwest. Same as with all our resources. The reason? Unless we do so our present financial system is even less fully self-liquidating than it already is.

We don't need another country's 'goods' in return for our oil, or other resource exports ~ at least not anywhere near in the amount of those exports in total. But we do need their 'money'. Credit, actually. Or at least we've convinced ourselves that we do. And that's a hard habit to break.

So they pay us, not in alternate imports for the exports we send them, but with a credit lodged with the Bank of Canada. Something we could only collect on by receiving THEIR goods, in the future, for our goods, now.

Only that's not quite what the folks at the Bank of Canada have in mind. Nor our government. For without these export credits, uncollectable by us in the goods of the country we're "trading" with, the Bank of Canada wouldn't have an excuse to issue sufficient credit domestically to close the ongoing gap between collective prices of goods and services for sale in Canada, and the collective amount of incomes needed to meet those prices. And they're convinced they 'need' such an excuse. So we push for a so-called "favourable Balance of Trade". Which means, physically, what it can only mean. We're really shipping more of our real wealth out than we're bringing alternate real wealth back in. But we're getting lots of 'money' doing so. Which is really only good for what it'll BUY, (so long as there is something to buy, and a willing seller who wants 'money' in exchange for it), but that little fact seems to escape those who see mere figures with a "$" in front of them as wealth itself.

Actually it is not even us (Canadians) who are exporting it! It's the foreign oil companies who dig up the tar sands and then extract the oil and ship it out to make super mega profits. We get very low royalties, some jobs and some taxes. And a friendly slap on the back!

I doubt we have much,if any, control over production targets and other internal company decisions and priorities.

PetroCanada, once Canadian owned, is now entirely foreign owned too. It was sold bit by bit by successive federal governments.

We own the oily sand until we sell the rights to exploit the resource. That's about all.

Mexico nationalized all its oil resources and industry in 1938. Since then Mexico is the sole owner and beneficiary of its oil. We chose a different path.

I have no doubt Richard Fadden (CSIS)has one eye directly on Colin Kinsley and his goings on. This project is all about getting China cheep oil and nothing about building Canada's long term economy or protecting our natural resources. It essentially represents subsidizing an economic competitor and taking on all the environmental risks for doing this. Canada needs a true national energy policy before we start talking about projects like this.

Also....
Turns out Obama's Chief of Staff Rehm Emanuel, the former IDF soldier, has been living in a mansion paid for by BP for the last 6-years.

Now we find out from Wayne Madson Reports that Obama, his Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Secretary of Energy Steve Chu, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were informed of the BP Macondo well over a year before the disaster happened and had not only first hand knowledge of this unprecedented well, but also had their hands all over its approval process.

The idea was BP would drill an unprecedented 35,000 foot well into a reserve larger than mount Everest called the Macondo formation and would have its safety regulations waved because of high level interest from those three men. The idea was this would be the reserve America would replace Middle Eastern oil from for up to 8-months in the event Iran cut off the Straight of Hormuz in an eventual attack on Iran... and so the decisions were made from a national security perspective to fast track the development of this formation.

The real scary thing is their back up plan was a well 40,000 feet below the ocean surface in the Liberty field off the North coast of Alaska (deep well pressure for a fast flowing well)... and this other well is full speed ahead now for the same reasons they cut corners on the Macondo BP well that is now a global catastrophe.

http://www.mainbags.com/

A solid agreement with this one, Ben, with some other reasons thrown in as well!!

Those others go along the lines of "Outwest" who said "why do we not just leave them for another day", to those, including you, who throw the whole jobs thing into the mix which can only identify a relative handful of permanent jobs compared to those on the other end of the supply line.

Am I naiive in thinking that these kind of exports of raw materials should be going along with some negotiated conditions of developing this part of the province beyond just suppliers of "stuff" and transporters of "stuff" rather than including the development of becoming creators of "stuff".

I think it would only be fitting, for those who think we are too far removed from the users of the "stuff", for us to provide the energy and cost of transporting the created "stuff" from the income we get from selling the raw "stuff".

The royalties to the province and to the country are obviously far too low!!! Ah, for the days of Trudeau who had a much better understanding of that!!!! The rest of the nation has still not awakened to the fact that as a province and as a nation the benefits we derive from the good fortune of having such natural wealth is miniscule comapred to waht we could be getting.

As someone said, we continue too sell our children's future at a price that is much too low!!

BTW, not to give the pipeline a thumbs up, the major environmental damage is being created at the source, similar to the out of control oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico.

While pipelines and ships can be origins of relatively large disasters, they do have a limited quantity of materials which will spill. I do not in any way wish to diminish the worst case scenario in either case, or the many so called "minor" incidents which will occur frequently as they do with other systems today, but the oil sands and the existing and probable future out of control undersea well heads are many magnitudes greater than such events will ever be capable of.

So, by allowing the pipline, we are not only setting ourselves up for smaller destructive episodes, but we are complicit in prolonging the activity at the tar sands.

Maybe that needs to be part of the negotiation. No oil flows until the tar sands production end of things are cleaned up.

Gus:-"As someone said, we continue too sell our children's future at a price that is much too low!!"
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But not to us. To us, that price is much too high. Needlessly. If we sold to ourselves first, at the proper price we should be paying, there'd be no supposed necessity to sell so much 'more' abroad.

Yes, I agree totally. That is why NAFTA has to be scrapped or renegotiated. If a contract does not work for one party, and the conditions imposed are far too onerous in that partners opinion, the contract needs to be renegotiated.

Well, as I understand it, Gus, we can opt out of NAFTA by giving our 'partners' six months notice that it's our intention to do so. Same holds true for the USA and Mexico.

Who'll go first?

My guess is it'll be the USA.

And when it is, we'll see the same kind of mentality present here that we saw when the border restrictions were tightened post 9/11. Just short of our begging them to annex us.

Such is the power of mere figures with those "$" signs in front of them over the otherwise obvious physical reality that this country is undoubtedly one of the most favourably situated in the world in terms of complete self-sufficiency.

Prince George:-"Mexico nationalized all its oil resources and industry in 1938. Since then Mexico is the sole owner and beneficiary of its oil. We chose a different path."
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Many countries have gone down the same path as Mexico in regards to 'nationalisation' of oil or other key national resources.

The results haven't been particularly beneficial in terms of the well-being of the citizens of those countries, however. That, I believe, is what most of the available evidence show

There may be a certain smug satisfaction nationally that what used to be called the "Seven Sisters" of Big Oil have been dispossesed and driven out, (I think they're down to four or five "sisters" now, with mergers in our times that've created mega-corporations larger than the old Standard Oil Trust, and a level of 'co-operation' that could hardly be called 'competition' amongst these entities that old John D. Rockefeller could scarcely have imagined), but beyond that there hasn't been much national advantage. Mexicans might have cheaper gasoline, but how many can afford a car to fuel it with? Maybe with the pollution levels in Mexico City that's a 'good' thing. But seriously, their standard of living has hardly been greatly enhanced by having Petromex monopolise their oil industry, even if it does operate profitably.

Oil, today, is somewhat in the same position that coal was in early 20th century Britain, then still the "workshop of the world" ~ even though by that time the bloom was coming off the rose in regards to its main resource.

There was a great hue and cry post World War One to 'nationalise' the British coal industry. It didn't happen until after World War Two. What did it accomplish when it finally did come to pass? Did Britons get better coal, or cheaper coal, or cheaper products that were based on coal? Did they see their main energy resource retain its market share, or expand it? We're new coal based products forthcoming that hadn't been thought of before? Was the miner's lot materially improved? Efficiency increased? Did the standard of living rise faster than the cost of living? No? None of these things? Then where was the advantage in changing 'administration' of the collieries from private ownership to so called public?