Rethinking Alberta. Harper Set to Destroy His Adopted home

A media campaign has been underway in the United States, targeting the Alberta Oil Sands.

Stephen Harper should have never let it get to this stage. Instead of taking oil tycoons to Denmark to have lunch with the Queen, and winning a Colossal Fossil Award for sabotaging Climate Change talks, Stephen Harper should have done something to give Canada an environmental policy.

Instead, he is trying to revive the carbon tax bogey man, with nothing, absolutely nothing, to replace it. Now many U.S. Corporations are boycotting oil from Alberta.

Another four major U.S. companies are joining the move to either avoid or completely boycott fuel produced from Alberta's oilsands. Walgreens, which has 7,500 drugstores across America, is switching fuel suppliers for its delivery trucks to those that don't make gas from oilsands crude. "We found that it was a relatively simple process of surveying our vendors, seeing which ones may have tar sands oil sourcing and simply avoiding those vendors," said Walgreen's spokesman Michael Polzin. "We are in that process right now."

The Gap, Timberland and Levi Strauss have all told their transportation contractors that they will either give preference to those who avoid the oilsands or have asked them what they're doing to eliminate those fuels. The move adds to growing international economic pressure on the oilsands industry and the Alberta government to reduce its environmental impact. "What this signals is the beginning in earnest of the financial war over the tar sands," said Todd Paglia of the environmental group Forest Ethics, which is organizing the campaign. As well, courier company Federal Express has promised it will consider the environmental and social impacts of the fuels it uses, although it didn't specifically mention the oilsands.

Harper may have been a transplanted Albertan, but I think it's time they rode him out of town.