Quote:
Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis
I think I said in another thread this province would be worse off than the maritime provinces without the oil in this province, so I quite understand how important it is. But is it more important than farming? I mean they did survive for tens of thousands of years without oil, but good luck surviving tens of thousands of years without food. So why aren't we doing everything in our power to protect farms from attacks? Because it would be incredibly costly and wasteful to do so, especially when there is a lack of evidence anything has or will be done.
You know its funny, the people who "attack" O&G infrastructure are always called "environmentalists". Explain to me then, why would environmentalists risk possibly destroying ecosystems just to send a message to those O&G companies? I think the likelihood of any major incidents effecting the oilsands is somewhere around 1%, and as such that just doesn't seem like a worthwhile investment. In this case I'd rather save the money for any potential incidents rather than spend millions of taxpayer dollars on the "potential" something goes wrong.
My number one concern isn't bashing O&G companies, its ensuring our government isn't wasting the finite tax dollars they have. I don't hate profits or corporations are anything like that. I hate wasteful spending.
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If you believe that the government decided to do this on a whim, then you are incredibly naive. Someone just woke up this morning and thought "hey, let's spin up a counter-terrorism organization for the oil and gas sector. gotta protect them corporate profits." And the RCMP said "sounds good, boss. we'll get the patrol cars out to the oil fields asap."
Really, you should let the gov't know that you've calculated the risk of major incidents affecting the oil sands at 1% and they should just save our hard-earned tax money. By the way, what formula did you use to come up with the calculation? On what information did you base it on?
I've always found sense in the adage: "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." But that's a really old saying, so probably not worth thinking about.