The U.K. Gets a Taste of 'Ethical Oil'

In which 'Canadian' becomes a dirty word.

The United Kingdom has emerged as the latest front in the struggle to convince the rest of the world that Canada's oil sands are indeed "ethical." The Guardian reported yesterday that Canadian diplomats and oil lobbyists have been leaning hard on the U.K. to get them to prevent the European Union from branding crude taken from the oil sands as "dirty fuel," thus subjecting Canadian oil exports to higher taxes in the EU. Environmental activist Bill McKibben takes to the very same pages to ask why the U.K. has taken on the role of Canadian mouthpiece at the European Union. "Lingering colonial attachment? Kinship among Tory governments? The effect, however, is clear," says McKibben. "Any good that Britain's government does with new efficiency standards, runway halts, windmills, you name it; all that will be outweighed if it manages to broker a deal to bring this oil into Europe." McKibben goes on to portend that David Cameron is now likely to face the same pressure that led to his American counterpart delaying a decision on the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline. We're not quite so sure that Canadian lobbying is going to lead to months-long protests outside 10 Downing Street (a Canadian oil company isn't about to build a pipeline through, say, the Yorkshire Dales), but it surely has burned up a lot of goodwill that the U.K. extends to Canada.

So it hasn't exactly been a "good news day" for Canada in the U.K., and Doug Saunders performs a little media analysis in The Globe and Mail on just how poorly the tar, rrr, oil sands have fared in British newspapers. As Saunders notes, the Guardian story was published the day before international climate talks opened in Durban, South Africa, ostensibly with the purpose of shaming the Cameron government. "The fact that merely being associated with Canada is described in a newspaper as an embarrassment shows how far things have fallen," writes Saunders. Over the past year, the U.K.'s eight "quality" daily newspapers haven't exactly been too kind to Canada's "ethical oil." According to Saunders:

The word "Canada" appeared in the headlines of a total of six stories about Alberta oil. All of them presented the oil sands and their output in a negative light.

Looking more widely, there have been 129 stories in British papers this year containing the phrases “Athabasca oil,” “oil sands” or “tar sands” (the latter term is more popular in Britain). The largest share were about the large-scale public campaign, including many celebrities and arts figures, to get BP to end what the conservative Daily Telegraph calls its “controversial oil sands project in Canada.” Many of the rest were about the U.S. battle to stop Canada’s Keystone oil pipeline; regardless which paper, they tended to assume that the oil is an ecological threat.

About half of those 129 stories cast Canadian oil in a negative light (perhaps a quarter, appearing in the business pages, presented it as a promising investment). Interestingly, the negative stories appear equally distributed across the left-leaning papers (The Guardian, The Independent and the Observer) and the conservative ones (The Times, The Telegraph and their Sunday counterparts).

And what about the term "ethical oil," dreamt up by Ezra Levant, spun by recent PMO-appointee Alykhan Velshi, and adopted kit-and-kaboodle by the Conservative party? Saunders says it's never once been printed in British daily, "quality or otherwise." It's worth noting that the efforts of the Ethical Oil proselytizers have ticked off not only the government of Saudi Arabia, but now progressive (and apparently even some conservative-minded) folk across the U.K. and likely many more across the entire European Union. Slick work, guys!

As an aside, the Postmedia chain's Trish Audette wrote a lengthy feature on the genesis of the term "ethical oil" and its success (or lack thereof) so far. A telling quote: "When you start to say this particular country, it has issues around its oilpatch because of the regime, maybe they have human rights violations or other issues, and then to connect that to the global trade of oil, sometimes the lines are fairly straight. But other times, like anything in global politics or (the) international economy, it’s usually more complex than sound bites and the superficial discussion,” [Canada West Foundation VP Rob] Roach says. “I think it's an important debate, but it’s not something you want to jump into without knowing what you’re talking about.”* And that's coming from an Alberta-based thinktank dedicated to extolling the virtues of trade with Western Canada. If they're not exactly lining up behind the "ethical oil" banner, than good luck promoting the same concept at the just-opened climate talks in Durban. Reports suggesting Canada could divest itself from the Kyoto accord, even if the country was never really that set on following it in the first place, surely don't help either. We hope Environment Minister Peter Kent has prepared himself to know what it feels like to be the most hated man in the room.

*= An earlier version of this article had a shortened version of the quote from Rob Roach. The full quote has been included to provide better context for Mr. Roach's remarks.