Drives and dives in Thunder Bay, Ontario
A lucky taxi ride took me on a journey through a decades-long effort to clean...
"Alberta is very much a petrostate," says journalist and author Andrew Nikiforuk. "It gets about 30 per cent of its income from the oil and gas industry. So as a consequence, the government over time has tended more to represent this resource and the industry that produces it, than its citizens. This is very typical of a petrostate."
The flow of money, he says, is at the heart of the issue. "When governments run on petro dollars or petro revenue instead of taxes then they kind of sever the link between taxation and representation, and if you're not being taxed then you're not being represented. And that’s what happens in petrostates and as a consequence they come to represent the oil and gas industry. Albert is a classic example of this kind of relationship."
In this interview with DeSmog, Nikiforuk explains the basics of his petrostate thesis and asks why Canada, unlike any other democratic nation, hasn't had a meaningful public debate about the Alberta oilsands and how they've come to shape the Canadian landscape, physically as much as politically.
Get the inside scoop on The Narwhal’s environment and climate reporting by signing up for our free newsletter. Premier David Eby leaned heavily on nostalgia...
Continue readingA lucky taxi ride took me on a journey through a decades-long effort to clean...
Winnipeg says it could take until 2095 to fix its sewage woes. Other cities —...
As more people engage with posts about wildfires on social media, the government agency is...