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Ottawa Requests An Expert Panel To Study Green Technologies For Use In Oilsands
Green Technology Featured Articles
November 29, 2013

Ottawa Requests An Expert Panel To Study Green Technologies For Use In Oilsands

By Tammy Marie Rose
TMCnet Contributing Writer

On Wednesday, Canada’s Natural Resource Minister, Joe Oliver, revealed that the conservative government is spending a whopping $40 million this year alone to advertise Canada's natural resource sector. The advertising is mainly based around oil and gas.


Oliver and his department are seeking another $12.9 million for the international campaign that was created to make Canada appear a stable and environmentally responsible source of energy resources.

Oliver said, "The government has a responsibility to provide Canadians with facts to assist them in making informed decisions," Oliver, under opposition questioning, told a Commons committee.This engagement and outreach campaign will raise awareness in key international markets that Canada is an environmentally responsible and reliable supplier of natural resources."

Canada’s entire government budget for advertising last year was around $65 million with $9 million allocated to promoting natural resources. In 2010-11 $237,000 was spent on advertising. Oliver stated that the spending was justified. He linked the spending directly to winning over American opinion so they could get approval of the highly protested and controversial TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.

"Let's understand what is at stake here," Oliver said. "When we're looking at Keystone, for example, we're talking about tens of thousands of jobs." When speaking about justifying the funds spent Oliver said, "You justify it by what it's going to achieve and there are billions, tens of billions of dollars, in play."

"I don't see how the Harper government can justify spending tens of millions of taxpayers' money to do something that the private sector could choose to do," Peter Julian, a NDP natural resource critic said. Rather than investing millions in ads Julian says, "the way the Harper government can start to gain back the social license is by starting to make better decisions on the environment, on the economy and on the whole process of approving these new projects."

Natural Resources has asked a panel of experts to help both catalogue and chart a way for technologies to move forward and help to reduce the damaging environmental footprint left by oilsands development.

.Oliver wants the Council of Canadian Academies put its attention on new technologies for extracting bitumen from Alberta's oilsands.

The new study will be done by a 13-member panel. It will study what is now working and has been asked to identify both economic and regulatory hurdles that slow down the spread of new technologies.

"There's a lot of rhetoric, there's a lot of exaggeration," Oliver said about the study. "People can come to different conclusions based on the facts, but let's start all together. We should all start with the facts."




Edited by Cassandra Tucker


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