Dead ducks attract radicals

Oilsands Developer Syncrude Canada is facing federal and provincial charges for failing to prevent approx. 500 ducks from landing on its recycling settling pond, where many of them died last April of 2008, at it's Aurora North mining site.

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Syncrude is slated to appear March 25 in Fort McMurray Provincial Court. One charge has been laid under a section of Canada’s Migratory Birds Convention Act, which carries a maximum fine of $300,000 and/or six months in jail. A second charge has been filed under section 155 of the Alberta Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act. The maximum penalty for a violation under this section is $500,000. This equates to over $1600 per dead duck, potentially less than what the Conservatives might expect from a promotional 'peking duck' fundraising dinner per-plate. Environmental radical groups tresspassing on Syncrude's site took pictures of the bitumen-sludge covered birds and distributed them worldwide to draw international attention in an attempt to demonize and shame 'Big-Oil's' tarsands operation. Naturally the worldwide enviro-bleeding heart city dwellers all relished in gleeful emotional revenge on 'Big-Oil'. Note: I am not an investor in Syncrude or the oil industry that I know of (unless my pension fund is partially).

The Irony and Hypocrisy of Singling-out Syncrude is Astounding.

Our economy including the Oil Industry is in the midst of a world wide recession so our genious Environment Ministers, Alberta's Hon. Rob Renner and Canada's Jim Prentice put their wits together and siezed upon this as the worst possible timing to show their importance by hammering the shareholders when they are down. Instead of stimulating our Oil Industry in tough times, encouraging investment and job creation, these two dunces pander to the anti-oil environmental extremist frauds with some dumb underlying political strategy of gaining some leftist votes. These narrow minded political Ministers are singling out the Syncrude single incident to make an example while excusing the other energy industry sector of Wind Turbines which kill twice as many birds annually in Canada on a repeated continual basis, with impunity. Of course Wind is the favorite (environmentally friendly alternative-energy) buzz-jingle that the know-nothing enviro-fanatics are promoting. Wind Turbines kill approx. 76,000 birds in North America annually while producing less than a fraction of 1% of the energy. Pre-Syncrude development- How many natural original ponds and lakes existed with surface floating bitumen and how many millions of birds died from nature over the centuries back then? Bitumen/oil being lighter than water rises and floats to the surface. It's not called the 'Tar-Sands' for nothing. Syncrude is reclaiming the land and restoring it when mining is completed to a better than pre-development environmental state which will be a safer habitat for birds. Had Syncrude surrounded their settling ponds with electrical generating Wind Turbines, they would be praised as only ground-dead-duck would be extracted from the settling ponds which is ok with the enviro-frauds. Maybe the next time an airliner goes down from hitting a flock of Canada Geese these two upstart Ministers will charge the Airlines for interfering with the birds natural migratory flight paths? Alberta issues hunting licenses to recreationally shoot thousands of water fowl migratory birds annually, (as do other provinces) and farmers shoot thousands more. Where are Hon. Rob Renner and Jim Prentice ducking on this one? Household cats, it's estimated, kill over 100 million birds daily across North America. Birds flying into windows kill thousands more etc. To put it into perspective, the point is that this single incident amounts to an insignificant impact on the world population of ducks. I hope Syncrude doesn't acquiesce to this nonsense without a strong legal defense to prevent the enviro-frauds from establishing a precedence to which there will be endless lawsuits to prevent energy development, which is their ultimate goal. Someone who has been laid off, has no job, is worried about feeding the family and making mortgage payments, could care less than two fiddlers farts about some dead ducks in northern Alberta or anywhere else for that matter. At our house alone, we eat dead bird at least 3 times a week and are thankful for it. The Alberta Premier and Canada's Prime Minister should closely monitor and rein-in loose-cannon ministers like this. One would have expected such a stupid move from a far-left enviro-extremist politico such as Stephane Dion, but not two Conservative government cabinet ministers. Once governments go down the path of appeasing, caving and pandering to the Environmental Radical Movement just to gain some lefty votes, they lose credibility in rational judgment, and lose our respect. The Federal Conservatives will have to show better decision making if they ever hope to get a majority government, in my books.