Kickin’ Out The Jams On Canada’s Dirty Tar Sands – Neil Young Keeps On ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’

A Commentary by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper Unless you are a Canadian who completely avoids following the news, you probably know by now that one of Canada’s more famous human exports – rock legend Neil Young  was interviewed this past second week of January, making remarks considered blasphemous by many in a country that, by this point, might just as well be written off as Harper Land.

Canadian rock legend Neil Young slams the tar sands.

Those remarks focused on the Canadian/petroleum industry/Harper government’s tar sands enterprise or so-called ‘oil sands’, as the beaten-down mainstream media has been instructed by their corporate advertisers to call this strip-mined , God-forbidden wasteland that was once a rich diversity of life in lush boreal forests. 

Since that interview with Neil Young, the Harper government’s  cronies and its friends in the global petroleum syndicate and a mainstream media that has been beaten back from using the word “tar” to describe these so-called oil sands, slammed Young for comparing these forever gutted lands to Hiroshima after the atomic bomb dropped on that Japanese city, and for saying that the cancer rates among Native peoples living downwind are significantly higher than any national average in what we like to think is a Canada that is part of a developed world where environmental protection for all of our citizens is held in at least a bit of regard.

What Young has done is show some moral fortitude and courage to do an interview with CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi (which NAL will provide a video/audio link to here) and do a cross-country tour to raise funds for Native people fighting against the expansion of this tar sands abomination. He has also helped stimulate a  desperately needed debate on where Canada is going as a developed nation of this world with our energy and environmental programs.

It is clear  from the response to  the Young interview, that too many Canadians – unfortutanely, in my view – wish would just shut up  and sing, and give the tar sands and its corporate operators a free, non-regulatory hand on a belief that this is the only way this great country of ours can expect economic growth. After all, we’ve out-sourced most of our other industry and seem incapable of manufacturing much of anything else here.

Young has been vilified by many as a rock star who has no business engaging in a public debate on this important issue, as if to say that the only ones have a right to this discussion are public relations flaks for the petroleum industry and provincial and federal governments, made up of a disproportionate number of lawyers. Don’t even bother asking me if I would care less to listen to a member of the arts field over members of a legal profession with a record of making a case for the most vile among us if they get paid to do so.

Isn’t this tar sands landscape nice? Why don’t the rich bastards makinng money off of this monstrosity by a condo here insteal of some nice lakeshore land in Ontario?

Young has also been blasted by the Harper/petroleum industry cartel for getting his facts wrong during the interview with Ghomeshi. At one point, he says that the tar sends admit as much climate change carbon emissions to the atmosphere per day as every single car emits during a day across the country.

Tar sands proponents have fired back that the tar stands emit about half or a third that all cars fire out per day.  That’s as if to say that Neil Young is full of shit and we should be thankful that the tar sands operations only contribute a half or a third of the climate change gases. How comforting that is!

Critics of Young go on to argue that he is entitled to his opinions, but not his own facts. Well then where are the other facts, other than those coming from the Stephen Harper government/global petroleum corporate junta.

Harper’s government –  and let the country and world keep in mind that it was voted in by significantly less than half the eligible voters in Canada – has gutted what were once world-class environmental regulations around water and air protection, it has taken a meat axe to the budget of Environment Canada, and has muzzled the voices of any scientists and researchers left in that once-great department that might have something important to tell Canadians about the environmental impacts of operations like the tar sands. 

So where is Young or any of the rest of us going to go for facts, other than to go visit the tar sands themselves, which Young did. And he came away describing them as something resembling Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped on that Japanese city. 

For that Hiroshima remark, Young was accused of unfairly embellishing or using hyperbole to make his case. 

Really? Maybe all of us ought to do what Neil Young did and visit the tar sands or at least view  aerial photos of them. They look like landscape, once green with forest, scorched to coal on the planet Mercury.

I would like to ask this of the Harper/tar sands conglomerate that is slamming him for using the Hiroshima analogy. Did they not see the photos in a five-year-old edition of National Geographic (hardly a commie publication) on how awful what is left of this strip-minning horror looks?  

At least they were able to rebuild Hiroshima as a city. This tarry leftover shit hole may never see a tree again. Neil Young would have been just as right comparing this abomination to Dante’s Inferno. 

At the end of it all, we should be asking ourselves as Canadians where we want to go as a nation of nations in this world. Do we only want to support this tar sand enterprise or do we want to reach for higher ground, and join those who are leading the charge to develop sources of energy that will be healthier for our planet and for our children and grandchildren.

So if you haven’t seen the Neil Young interview, click on the following link, then please share your thoughts below on Niagara At Large. Here is the link –http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2014/01/13/neil-young-oilsands-occupation/ .

(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)