In late May, Canada’s “energy leaders” met in Toronto for the Energy Council of Canada's Canadian Energy Summit.

The theme of the summit? “Telling the Energy Story.”

“The aim is to raise awareness and improve understanding of the many ways that the energy sector influences the economy, regional development, innovation and aboriginal partnerships across Canada,” a press release proclaimed. “We believe that improved understanding will lead to better-informed energy dialogue and energy decisions.”

Sounds nice and all, but there’s a catch: the various players in Canada’s energy debate are telling very different stories.

While industry emphasizes jobs and economic growth, environmentalists and First Nations focus on air and water contamination, climate change and aboriginal rights.

The problem for the energy sector isn’t “telling the story” — it’s the massive logic gap between their story and the very real concerns of the Canadian public.

Right now, Canada’s energy debate is like a dysfunctional family dinner, with drunk Uncle Ed blowing a gasket on one end, Aunty Hilda screaming back and everyone else staring down at their dinner plates wishing they’d stayed home.

On the one hand, you hear rhetoric about oilsands destroying the planet and needing to be “shut down” and on the other hand you hear oil execs talking about extracting as much bitumen as possible out of the ground ASAP.

“Those extreme arguments are the ones that make everybody roll their eyes,” says Ken Chapman, former director of the Oil Sands Developers Group and proponent of triple-bottom line resource development.

“And there’s about 20 per cent on one side and about 20 per cent on the other side and neither one of them will ever bridge that gap.”

Left watching the shouting match are the 60 per cent of Canadians who aren’t on either extreme, Chapman says.

“The 60 per cent in the middle don’t know who to believe, don’t know who to trust and don’t know who to rely on,” he told DeSmog Canada.

Canada’s energy debate is stuck in what’s known as a “logic schism,” in which two sides talk past each other, impeding meaningful dialogue.

“In a logic schism, a contest emerges in which opposing sides are debating different issues, seeking only information that supports their position and disconfirms their opponents’ arguments,” describes Andy Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan.

“Each side views the other with suspicion, even demonizing the other, leading to a strong resistance to any form of engagement, much less negotiation and concession.”

Instead of leading the way, the federal government has been part of the problem.

In October, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Greg Rickford spoke to a closed-door meeting of about 40 to 50 oil and gas executives, urging them to get outside the board room and pitch projects to the public to win the public relations battle over energy.

“Enhance and expand your outreach. Communicate more effectively and clearly to Canadians with solid facts and evidence,” Rickford said, according to the documents revealed through an Access to Information Request.

Notably, Rickford mentioned nothing about improving performance in the oilsands — Canada’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.

CAPP spokeswoman Chelsie Klassen told The Guardian that industry is taking Rickford’s advice and “embarking on a different level of engagement,” including “moving to a ground campaign model to activate industry supporters.”

Since then CAPP has opened an office in Vancouver to bolster its “Canada’s Energy Citizens” campaign.

CAPP is trying to spread the message that oilsands producers share values around developing the resource sustainably and transporting it safely, CAPP’s CEO Tim McMillan told the Vancouver Sun.

While there’s no doubt some truth in that statement, it overlooks the fact that CAPP has fought new greenhouse gas regulations and successfully lobbied to weaken Canada’s environmental laws — preventing Canada from “acting responsibly.”

It’s little wonder that a poll by Alberta  Oil Magazine found that fewer than one in 10 post-secondary graduates find oil and gas industry associations credible when it comes to carbon emissions.

So who can Canadians trust and how can we move beyond the dysfunctional dinner debate?

“Everbody is trying to prove each other wrong on the facts and quite frankly this is now like religious belief. And it doesn’t matter what the facts are; it’s the belief systems that are dominating,” Chapman says.

“What is open yet is the adult conversation, as opposed to the elementary school recess conversation.”

This week, well-known environmentalist Tzeporah Berman stepped into that “adult conversation” space with an op-ed in the Toronto Star:

It’s time for a new, honest conversation in Canada. It’s time to recognize that the oilsands are, in fact, a technological marvel that took great Canadian ingenuity and acumen. It’s also time to acknowledge that when we began the exploration of the oilsands we did not know what we know today.

Finally, something most Canadians can actually agree on.

 “We’re going to be in the fossil fuel business for a while,” Chapman said. “We have a responsibility to do it better. [The leadership] will have to emerge, but the leadership isn’t in two extremes.”

With the new NDP government in Alberta, Chapman sees an opportunity for a significant change.  

“There are calmer heads, cooler heads, deeper thinkers and people who understand complexity now dealing with the issue at the political level,” he said.

The first step is acknowledging that the issues in the oilsands can’t be solved with public relations. No advertising campaign, faux grassroots outreach effort or multi-million dollar messaging exercise is going to address growing greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction, air and water contamination and treaty violations.

Demonizing the oilsands as a planet-killing monstrosity also isn’t going to move us any closer to a responsible management regime.

The first step to recovery is acknowledging you have a problem — and what we have in in the oilsands is not a PR problem, it’s a performance problem due to a lack of regulation. And it’s high time Canadians got the conversation they deserve about how to do better.

Image: CAPP

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Neil Young’s Honour the Treaties tour kicked off with a bang on Sunday when the ex-pat Canadian rocker ripped into the Conservative government’s management of the oilsands.

Calling the oilsands a “disaster” and a “devastating environmental catastrophe” at a press conference at Massey Hall in Toronto, Young stood by his earlier statement that the oilsands region resembles Hiroshima.

It wasn’t long before a war of words with the Prime Minister’s Office broke out. Young’s comments provoked a particularly fierce reaction in Calgary, the corporate headquarters of Canada’s oilpatch.

By Tuesday, the Globe and Mail had posted a cartoon depicting the House of Commons divided into two camps: “pro Neil Young” and “anti Neil Young.”

Talk about turning a complex issue into black and white. The more important question here is whether celebrity awareness-raising efforts like this one serve a valuable role in generating discussion or whether Young’s inflammatory language further divides the country into two opposite camps — moving Canadians further away from the solutions we so desperately need on the energy and climate file.

In an editorial on Wednesday, the Hamilton Spectator wrote:

“If there's a downside to Young's comments … it’s that the kerfuffle around Young might detract from the substance of his remarks. Some — including comparing the area to Hiroshima — are over-the-top silly. But about the pace of oilsands development and lack of environmental oversight, he's not wrong. The question isn’t whether or not oilsands development should take place. It should, responsibly. The question is how fast growth should happen, and whether the regulatory and monitoring infrastructure is in place to make sure environmental damage is mitigated.”

Agreed. You might not know it from reading the news headlines, but the vast majority of Canadians strongly believe the country needs an integrated approach to climate change and energy. In July, Clean Energy Canada released the results of a Harris-Decima poll, which found 87 per cent of Canadians surveyed agreed: “The nation needs a Canadian climate and energy strategy to plan its energy future.”

Canadians were asked to indicate to what degree they would prioritize a series of objectives for a potential Canadian energy strategy. What did Canadians most frequently rank as “high” or “top” priorities? Improving energy efficiency (80 per cent), creating more jobs in clean energy (73 per cent), reducing Canada’s carbon pollution to slow down climate change (67 per cent) and reducing our reliance on fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal (61 per cent). In contrast, only 31 per cent of those surveyed called “exporting more of Canada’s oil and gas resources” a high priority.

So why, when there’s so much common ground in the middle, does the Canadian energy debate continue to rage around the edges?

Well, for one, that’s where the conflict happens and we all know the media loves a good ole’ dust-up. And since the media likes a brawl, it’s tempting for players on all sides to make polarizing statements because they chalk up media hits and social media shares.

However, in doing so, they’re playing a dangerous game. Andy Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan, describes scenarios in which two opposing sides talk past each other, impeding meaningful dialogue, as a “logic schism.”

“In a logic schism, a contest emerges in which opposing sides are debating different issues, seeking only information that supports their position and disconfirms their opponents’ arguments,” Hoffman told the University of Michigan Record. “Each side views the other with suspicion, even demonizing the other, leading to a strong resistance to any form of engagement, much less negotiation and concession.”

Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, who researches science communication and the application of science to law and policymaking (and who just so happens to be a fan of Neil Young's music), says debates like the one stirred by Neil Young become about much more than what they appear to be on the surface.

“People end up seeing questions of fact as kinds of symbols that are badges of who they are and stock that indicates their status in society,” Kahan says. “The kinds of dynamics that I find disturbing and sad are the ones that prevent people who really probably have the same goals, or at least pretty close to the same goals, from recognizing what the best available evidence is."

Which brings us to the state of debate in Canada today. When Young says the Canadian government is “trading integrity for money,” Harper’s spokesman says: “Canada’s natural resources sector is and has always been a fundamental part of our country’s economy.”

Logic schism, anyone? The fact is rapid oilsands development comes with tradeoffs. Now, people are free to make different value judgments on those tradeoffs, but to deny they exist is to deny Canadians a sensible conversation on natural resource issues.

Young responded to the PMO with this: “Our issue is not whether the natural resource sector is a fundamental part of the country, our issue is with the government breaking treaties with the First Nation and plundering the natural resources the First Nation has rights to under the treaties.”

Indeed, proceeds from ticket sales for the concerts are going to support the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in their legal challenges of oilsands projects. Unfortunately, as of right now, most of the conversation spurred by Young’s tour doesn’t appear to be of a substantive nature about the issues the First Nation faces.

Reading the PMO’s statement, you’d think there is nothing controversial going on up there. “Projects are approved only when they are deemed safe for Canadians and [the] environment,” MacDonald said.

That seems a strange thing to say given the federal government recently approved Shell Canada’s Jackpine mine expansion even though Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq said it is “likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects.” (That's what's called a tradeoff, folks.)

And so it is that almost every environmental issue in our country plays out as a he said-she said in the media, and then goes on to one of two fates — stagnation or escalation, wherein both sides of the debate end up viewing the other as untrustworthy without much discussion of the real issues.

Roger Conner, a law professor at Vanderbilt Law School who also runs a consulting practice specializing in consensus building and conflict resolution on contentious public policy issues, coined the term “the advocacy trap” for this point in the debate where both sides have a profound distrust of the other.

“There are a few profoundly evil people in the world, but if you think you’re surrounded by them, you probably need to change your own psyche,” Conner said in an interview with DeSmog Canada founder Jim Hoggan. “If you think that the whole movement of people for the pipeline in Canada is made up of people who are either evil or idiots, I can almost assure you with great certainty that’ s not accurate.”

The only way out of this trap, Conner says, is for advocates to police their attitudes so they can learn to push sometimes, pull sometimes, collaborate sometimes and remain limber enough to sway back and forth as the situation demands, like a light-footed boxer. To use the entire range of strategic options, a public advocate must be able to avoid thinking of others as foes, he stresses.

“Resentment is like a drug. It feels good to go home and say: ‘Those assholes! Those jerks! Those liberals. Those conservatives … I’m right, they’re wrong,’ ” Conner says. “The truth is we all have some degree of uncertainty and we go to this self-righteous place to protect ourselves from that uncertainty.”

In other words, while it might feel good to be self-righteous and demonize people on the other side of the debate, it's likely not helpful in advancing the energy policy solutions the vast majority of Canadians want for their country.

So long as civil society groups rely on ingenuity to do battle with companies with multi-million dollar PR budgets, celebrity activists are likely to continue to play a role in the debate. But if you're using this as a moment for self-affirmation, to dig your trench a little deeper, remember: if we’re going to make progress on energy issues in this country, we’re all going to have to stick our heads up, stop seeing the people on the other side of the debate as enemies and find some common ground in the middle. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.