Touchdown: Ignatieff on oil sands, present & future

The National Post has been giving prominent play to the fact that National Geographic magazine is about to publish a damning, prominent feature on the environmental repercussions of the Alberta oil sands. As the world’s most widely read nature magazine, this article can have a massive impact on opinion right around the globe about what it calls our “dirty oil” operation. Officials in Alberta and Ottawa are buzzing and fretting about it. The challenge for communications people is, what do you do when you’re standing on the tracks staring at the headlight of an approaching train like this? The answer – painful as it might be – is to understand that you can’t stop the train. National Geographic is going to run the story, and it won’t be the last bit pretty. But what do you do afterward? Smart (and directly affected) spinners will get busy – quickly – on pointing to the future, and how steps can and should (and, potentially, “will”) be taken to remediate the environmental impacts (as much as can reasonably be done) of the oil sands operation in future. Which is precisely where Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has landed. He knows better than to denounce the oil sands, for both their political and economic importance, but he also knows there’s ground to be claimed here, and so he needed to balance his messages carefully. “This is a huge industry. It employs Canadians from coast to coast. We have oil reserves that are going to last for the whole of the 21st century. We are where we are. We've got to clean it up and we've got to make it a sustainable place to work and live, not only for the aboriginal population, but for the workers who live there," he said. "My concern is that, at the moment, it's barely environmentally sustainable, and it's barely socially sustainable … We need to move forward. But am I proud of this industry? You bet. It's a world leader. We just need to make it better. But I don't take lessons from the National Geographic." Well played, Iggy.