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tune—“Syncrude in Hot Water over Duck Disaster” (Windsor Star) —to provincial gov-
ernment headache—“Duck Disaster Sinks Alberta Government's Credibility” (Calgary
Herald) —to a matter of national import that demanded the prime minister's atten-
tion—“Harper Promises to Investigate Dead Ducks in Northern Alberta” (CBC).
This, then, is Canada—perhaps the only country where ducks have national, even geo-
political, significance.
But this isn't because the Canadian character is somehow uniquely sensitive to the wel-
fare of its waterfowl. It's because the sixteen hundred—long may their memory live—had,
with their deaths, scratched a festering sore on the Canadian national psyche. They had
landed—and died—in something larger than a lake. Larger than a tailings pond. They had
hit a grim bull's-eye in the world's largest and most controversial energy project, in the
Middle East of the Great White North, in the cauldron of our energy future. They had
landed in oil sands country.
Canada lives in the imagination of the United States as a benign, continent-size footnote,
the brunt of conservative jokes about invasion and annexation, and the object of liberal day-
dreams about socialized medicine and sensible bank regulation. If there is an overarching
consensus among Americans about their cousins to the north, it is that they are like Amer-
icans but nicer, probably smarter, and more loving of hockey.
Less well known is that Canada is a towering, earth-shaking, CO 2 -belching petroleum
giant. Let us keep our stereotype that Canadians are mild-mannered, but in terms of oil
there is nothing moderate about them. They have it. With something like 175 billion bar-
rels' worth hidden under the ground up there, the country is second in the world only to
Saudi Arabia in proven petroleum reserves. The United States' number-one single provider
of foreign oil isn't someplace in the Middle East. It's Canada.
A secret joy must surge through the heart of the US economy at this fact. Here on
our very doorstep is a Persian Gulf without the Persians. A Saudi Arabia without the
Saudis—or the Arabians. And Canada literally advertises this fact. In 2010, the Alberta
government bought time on the huge screens of Manhattan's Times Square. “A good neigh-
bour lends you a cup of sugar,” one ad read. “A great neighbour supplies you with 1.4 mil-
lion barrels of oil per day.” It's enough to make modest, climate-change-fearing Democrats
want to build pipelines.
Those 175 million barrels, though, come with a 170-billion catch. Most of Canada's
oil—half of what it produces today and 97 percent of what it expects to produce in the fu-
ture—isn't in the form of liquid petroleum, ready to be pumped out. It's oil sand, a thick,
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