Benefits to Workers Irrelevant

That a massive, exploitive industrial project may benefit a few workers is irrelevant to why the project is undertaken. If no workers benefit, the project will still go ahead. If a percentage of the project's profits (5%?, 7%) go to pay workers, it is considered "the cost of doing business" and the oligarchy will hold its nose and reluctantly pay the workers. If they could pay them even less, so much the better. If they could pay them nothing, now we're talking. Jobs, jobs, jobs is simply PR spin on the desire to extract as much oil as possible, destroying the environment along the way, with little concern for the health of the environment or mother earth or the rest of the people who live on it.

This is an industrial model with absolutely no connection with democracy or logic, but all about wealth and monopolization. Every moral leader for the past 2,500 years has recognized that this is not the purpose or meaning of human existence. Yet when the majority of citizens tries to curtail monopoly corporate behaviour, watch out.

Workers are not responsible for this structure, and nor can they stop it even if they wanted to. They are pawns in this process just as workers are around the world, and just as slaves were not very long ago.

Great coverage!

Nuclear is the only thing

Nuclear is the only thing going to get us out of this fossil fuel debacle. We are falling behind. Way behind. Something akin to a Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor is what should be re introduced. Its insane we are sinking our tax dollars into anything else. Nobody can tell me nuclear energy used for power has killed more people than fossil fuel or coal. Yet we still chug forward with it using grants and R&D money into making coal and fossil fuels cleaner? Its insanity and archaic. Jurrasic even.
Well said Jeffrey J!
Great piece.

We can see the enemy

In the mirror on the wall (sometimes in the "rear view", I suppose.)
I just pumped $68.18 CDN into my Chev 4x4.
Should last maybe a week since I only take jobs close to home.
If I knew how to handle an horse and cart I'd be looking (futilely in B.C.) for a well trained mule.
Mind you I would never attempt to compete on our highway - or most of our secondary roads - with the folks in their silent slippery Hybrids trying to get the kid to daycare on time.
SynCrude
Perfect!

Let me guess. Your the only

Let me guess. Your the only one driving it(Chevy 4x4). What a waste. Buy a four cylinder at least. Or, you need the truck to pull your boat quad? Likely not a sail boat. Mules arent gonna solve the problem. [GOADING REMOVED. -MODERATOR.]

No thanks, I'll stay home where I'm loved!

An above average income is excellent justification for raping the human spirit and destroying the land into perpetuity.

Hell, if I wasn't diseased from working with asbestos or my spine degenerating from years of labouring, I'd be getting myself to the oil sands, for some extra self-inflicted misery.

Oil Sands maybe a dinosaur at that

Oil Sands is attracting a great deal attention as of late and it is no surprise fortune 500 companies are doing the environmential thing and saying no thanks US companies will have none of that. And it is curious as Harper could care less about the environment and are self appointed King could find himself out in the cold instead of the Artic looking to do more damage than can ever be imagined, imagine that.

World's Dirtest Oil Producer

Are the Chinese as gives Canadians a get-out-of-jail card to avoid any carbon legilsation by investing a whooping $4.65bn in the world’s dirtiest oil, that will now be destined to the thirsty markets of the Chinese rather than the slowly declining American one.

China’s Sinopec oil company is to pay the American company ConocoPhillips $4.65bn for a 9% stake in Syncrude Canada.

This is the largest project in Canada’s tar sands industry, pumping an estimated 350,000 barrels a day, about 13% of Canada’s overall oil output.

A trailer home cost nearly 1/2 million during the boom

well things are still booming. Those workers should at least be put up in hotels with recreation centres-at a minimum. I would even support tar sands development IF it could be done in an environmentally safe way-it cannot. The drain on the water supply alone is not worth the price and the size of those ponds. Don't think for a minute if we were to pollute the US water basin that they wouldn't have us in court and seize the whole dam works.
We are no different to Iraq or Iran to them and they will treat us the same way when it becomes vital to their national interests. Of course our chicken shit politicians don't ask for sfa in royalties or environmental standards so they have no need to invade. Try selling to China at a higher price with better technology and see what happens. Why do you think Cisis put out that scare story about ASian spies not long ago. China wants into the tar sands that is why.
Capitalism is a criminal enterprise and our politicians are nothing more than button men. To bad we sold our oil refineries we could have set the industry standards and I agree with our going nuclear-all those billions now going down the drain or to General Electric Harper is starving them out so he can say they are unsustainable and need to be sold. What a Co*ksucker. I never though I would be defending nuclear energy but our reactors don't even need the high grade plutonium anymore and the waste can't be turned into weapons grade material. We should be selling our CANDU's to Iran instead Russia is. Oh and those professionals working in the patch well their kids won't live long enough to benefit from any of it. Those tar sands are turning the earth and the water into cancer causing agents-nothing will be useable in the not to distant future and it does look like a catastrophe is in the making. One of those toxic ponds is bigger than the answar dam is it? Those cats are making the love canal look like the healing baths in Lourdes France.

RR

IF and when the tarsands are gobbled up till none left

"You can be sure those 'regular' folk will abandon Fort Mac once the paycheques end.

Its like the traditional company town where the 'nabbies draw their pay and then pay their rent' (Ode to Gordon Lightfoot!) and when the unsutrainable resource is used up they leave!

(Gagnon, Quebec is a ghost town, formerly a mining town, in east-central Quebec. It was founded in 1960 by the Quebec Cartier Mining Company for the purposes of mining iron ore.

By the mid-1980s, it was no longer turning a profit. The mines were closed and the town fully dismantled in 1985. All buildings and nearly all of the streets were dismantled. The town's main street remained and is now part of Route 389. That section of highway retains a boulevard configuration, complete with a median, sidewalks, and sewers, despite being deep in the wilderness, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest active community." (Ask Encyclopedia)

Well said RR. I think a

Well said RR. I think a majority us are on the same page. The fact this serious is called the Mordor diaries should indicate how archaic fossil fuels are. The LFTR reactor has been out of service as long as Ive been on the planet. What disgusts me is OUR generation could have advanced this technology even further. By now. We may have had a LFTR reactor car/truck sized. Instead....disgusting.

Noggy...

"Hell, if I wasn't diseased from working with asbestos or my spine degenerating from years of labouring, I'd be getting myself to the oil sands, for some extra self-inflicted misery." Noggy.

Hear ya, Noggy. Sometimes a man, no bloody less than a woman, does what he has to do for himself and his family to survive and thrive... nowhere more than this side of capitalism, as the economic depression reality begins to take serious hold and bite all over. Some here may not understand that, but I sure as hell do, brother.

And I'm damned sure those Chilean miners paying the price underground right now, for their relatively good wages in bad times, understand this too.

The goody two shoes on the left/progressive and right can rave all they want.

Take care, brother.

Coyoteman

There is nothing wrong with doing a hard days work but at the end of the day it shouldn't be at the expense of the environment or the world for all that matters. Like I said the oil sands are now considered as low as you can go as Canada is taking a beating around the world for sure. China has no problem with that as children in China also know what a hard days work is working with dangerous particles and chemicals. It is understandable with children the little ones don't know the difference between right and wrong.

Falling Into The Toilet... Morechatter

"There is nothing wrong with doing a hard days work but at the end of the day it shouldn't be at the expense of the environment or the world for all that matters." wrote morechatter.

And most here, quite likely even working at the grunt level for Suncor, if they were being honest, would sure as hell not disagree with that. But the moral, ethical and practical dynamic at work in capitalism is, starting at the top and spilling over like shit on everyone else to the very bottom, every man and woman for his/herself, and the devil take the hindmost. Then we are surprised that the working class gets drawn into this "free market cesspool" no less, often with no choice if they and their families are not to fall into the working poor or the underclass.

It is necessary to understand the dynamics and pressures at work here, especially since the Social Democratic State of capitalism rolled over in the early 80s, compounded by the slide into economic depression ever since, and the "peak oil crisis". If we, especially "the left" doesn't understand this, and have some empathy with all working people, then we wind up blaming the wrong people as the primary cause. (And yes, everyone in society has to accept some share of the responsibility as enablers, no doubt.)

Still, "The System" is fugged. It leaves people no or few other options. Change the underlying socio-economic system, instead of preaching in a vacuum from the holy mount.

Life is not simple. A moral highground does not currently exist... only a shabby, corrupted reality into which everyone gets sucked, and how deeply and with what stench attached, depending on your circumstances at any given moment.

The oil sands are a travesty, no doubt. But the politics and practical economic realities of it for large numbers of the working class are complex and nuanced too. Some people fall into the toilet and can come out of it smelling like a rose. Most of us, however, come out of it smelling quite like something else.

Paid 2 BILLION more than anticipated

Isn't that something Analysts said that the price paid by Sinopec for the Conoco stake was about $2bn more than was expected. "It just shows that the Chinese are a different kind of buyer," said Phil Skolnick, an analyst with Genuity Capital Markets.

Necessity

The mother of all inventions, and Coyoteman I'm not knocking the working man sorry if you got it wrong. I was looking at the politics and the questionable dealing going on and the serious harm that has been done to the working stiff who does what they can when they can out of the necessity to make a buck.

"I was looking at the

"I was looking at the politics and the questionable dealing going on and the serious harm that has been done to the working stiff who does what they can when they can out of the necessity to make a buck." wrote morechatter.

And my apologies for having misunderstood you, brother/sister. :-)

morechatter/coyoteman

Not to slag the little guy too much, but even as the little guys from Fort Mac struggle to earn their $95,000-a-year bread, they still have a responsibility to participate in the governance process of this country, not sell out to it. Remember tractorman? A power engineer on this board from the sands who vigorouosly defended the sands as clean and green? That's a sellout.

Working here is just like working at Litton Systems, or Bombardier Military Systems, or GM Defense, or SNC-Tec - it earns you a paycheque, but what are you doing to change the need for your job to survive in its present form? How can any job that builds machines expressly for killing other people, especially in other countries half-way around the world, rank as an honourable way to earn a living, even if you are a top-flight metallurgical engineer with degrees up the wazoo?

It's what you do with the rest of your life that counts, and when some of these guys climb into their 300HP behemoth and fly on down the highway in a death trip to nowhere at a hundred miles an hour... well, they're living the unexamined life, and like all lives not worth living, I'm entitled to call them on it, and so are you. As, in different ways, you have both done.

Don't disagree, Zalm...

Don't disagree, Zalm.

But the reality is, as I keep saying, just about everybody I know, even a lot of the self-stroking goody two shoes have sold out to the system. Capitalist ideology has won. They own the battlefield.

Unions have sold out. Which makes it doubly hard to buck the pressure.

Besides, in my mind, as bad as it is, working for Suncor is no worse than working for the financial industry right now, or being a copy and basically being preoccupied with serving the ruling class. Or being a soldier and serving the US Empire cause in Afghanistan.

For many there as grunts at Suncor, it's do that or flip burgers, and deal drugs and join the underclass. When the shit is hitting the fan, especially as it is in the current economy, folks will do what they have to do... and the preachers with their pie in sky when you die can pontificate 'til the cows come home.

I'd do the same damn thing, frankly, to see that my family was properly housed, fed, and given a chance to climb out of the toilet hole.

And its going to be this way until capitalism is once and for all dealt with, and there's a real and viable alternative to the current lives of the working class. Like it or get something else happening.

It's all coming undone anyway Zalm, and going to be dealt with soon enough, one way or another.

Being a bus driver was crap... arguing with folks that really couldn't afford it, over nickles and dimes.

Shit always runs downhill and settle to the folks at the bottom, doing the grunt work... it's that way it is in the class system. They, of all people, should do better. I agree. Kick ass bigtime, in the self-righteous class system, where the pus oozes out at the top.

Blame the friggin' grunt. He's the problem. No doubt.