Action on Tar Sands

I have had close connections with Canada all my life, first through familial links; later as a student and translator of French in Quebec City, the enchanting capital of the country's largest province, where I met my partner, a Quebecois; and afew years ago, as a media officer at the country's High Commission in the UK.

Canada is an amazing and beautiful country of wide open spaces, with rich indigenous heritage, an important history of feminism, and clean, multicultural cities. It was the birthplace of Greenpeace, and is home to the pre-eminent west-coast scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki.

But for a country with such natural beauty and progressive movements, its environmental credentials have been cut to shreds thanks to its government's disdain for the Kyoto Protocol and to its cultivation of the highly-polluting oil sands, aka tar sands, industry in the province of Alberta, now Canada's richest province - a northern Dallas.

The tar sands consist of a mixture of silica sand, minerals, clay, water, and most importantly, crude bitumen, converted into what is described as the dirtiest energy source ever conceived.

Dr. Suzuki likens the massive and mushrooming open-cast mining operations in his country to a 'horror movie' that has wrought ecological devastation, with the landscape scarred by hundreds of square kilometres of toxic waste pools and mines hundreds of feet deep; the razing of forests; soaring greenhouse gas emissions; and reports of high rates of cancer in the surrounding area.

Canada's First Nations communities, whose health and lands have been heavily polluted as a result of the industry, are raising the issue at Copenhagen. Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, a First Nations activist from Northern Alberta, points out that British taxpayers are helping to fund the pollution through majority ownership of Royal Bank of Scotland, which she says, in the past year, has underwritten more than £1.6bn in debt for companies operating in the tar sands.

Lobbying against tar sands is currently taking place at Copenhagen and the UK. The UK Tar Sands Network, which includes New Internationalist magazine and People & Planet, will stage a protest in Trafalgar Square, outside the Canadian High Commission on Monday, December 14.