Canadian Glory: The oilsands have been a boon for the Canadian economy

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Somewhere across this great land, someone or something great is just getting started. This country is built on game-changing people, ideas and initiatives: Wayne Gretzky redefined a game; oilsands innovations helped us prosper; Frederick Banting transformed millions of lives; Loblaws changed how we live. Today, we launch a new National Post series that celebrates Canadian greatness, in whatever form we find it.

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Of the collective psychoses plaguing Canada, a particularly irksome one has to do with our natural resources. This appears to reflect our distaste for the specific tasks of “hewing and drawing,” at least when it comes to wood and water respectively. The reference comes from Canada’s “first great political economist,” Harold Innes, who asserted that Canada’s abundant natural resources would “relegate” us to simply producing staple products — first cod and beaver pelts, then lumber, wheat, minerals. Or hydrocarbons.

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Innes had a point, at least in terms of resource economies’ vulnerability to international markets, and he spurred interminable Canadian hand-wringing about the “resource curse,” “Dutch disease” and perpetual economic diversification efforts, to the tune of countless tax dollars. Think battery plants.

It’s somehow just too easy, says the argument, pulling things out of the ground, harvesting whatnot and selling it. And it wrecks the planet. Our resource endowment is consequently a burden to be abandoned as we emulate the Na’vis in Avatar. Besides, brain work is superior, in fact nobler than the hand-dirtying labour that supports it.

What’s forgotten between the pumpkin spice lattes and yoga classes is the endless toil and ingenuity required to create modern society in the first place, and how technically difficult maintaining our lifestyle is, providing basic materials and energy. Spoiler alert: AI alone now consumes 1.5 per cent of global electricity and over 225,000 kilograms of rock must be mined to produce one Tesla battery.

A case in point is our own oilsands, the estimated 160-billion barrels of oil just sitting there since the Cretaceous period — the world’s fourth-largest proven oil resource. Far from simply “digging it up,” realizing its value required a century of persistent innovation by our best and brightest. Blind optimism and gritty persistence overcame countless technical and financial setbacks, ultimately contributing immense value to Canada.

As recounted in Earle Gray’s