No lever left to use in promoting oil industry

By Letter to the Editor on March 18, 2020.

The former grand poo-bah of the now defunct Wildrose Party of Alberta, the otherwise estimable Brian Jean, is currently exhibiting the political acumen of a pocket gopher in his fevered pronouncements of righteous fury to do with Alberta’s place in the apparently grand shambles that is our national confederation.

The noise coming from him is perhaps made all the more puzzling by his sudden new-found bromance with Premier Jason Kenney – the very fellow who deked him out for the leadership of the new United Conservative Party of Alberta through a campaign of chicanery and Machiavellian subterfuge.

The thing is that the current affectation of so-called power politics by a noisy cadre of petroleum industry shills such as Mr. Jean, made manifest in delusional squawking about separation if certain “demands” are not met, is coming to a festering head at the exact moment when the Emperor Big Oil is revealed to be not only stark naked, but a horrible sight to boot. For it may be that Archimedes determined that with a long enough lever he could move the Earth, but you really have to wonder just what lever it is that Mr. Jean plans to deploy in his hard-ball game with Canada when the value of the very commodity upon which he bases this little tempest in a teapot has suddenly fallen off the global commodity radar as the value of a barrel of oil takes a Boeing Max 8 style nose-dive straight into oblivion thanks to the nasty spat just revealed between those two bastions of global citizenship, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Man, oh man. When will these guys ever learn? Even the most rapacious arch-capitalist hedge-fund managers and amoral stock market creeps are advising investors to flee oil options and speculation like it was the plague, which, in the deepest economic and environmental sense, it is. A burgeoning opportunity for economic diversification was just beginning to flower as of the last provincial election, but was subsequently cynically spurned in favour of a gross pandering to the very industry that is poised to gibble Alberta for several generations to come.

Somebody should give Brian Jean a wordfind puzzle to do – better use of his time.

Phil Burpee

Pincher Creek