Big Oil just keeps passing the buck to us

As an analyst for the Royal Bank, Greg Pardy would be expected to carry their interests as the focus of his service. I would further suppose that’s the motivation for his suggesting we, the tax payers, pay Big Oil’s royalty costs for a while so the overall cost of oil is reduced to spur sales. Of course, on top of our already paying both the government and Big Oil at the pump, we also give them multimillion tax credits annually and we just dropped $40 billion to buy them a shiny new pipeline. And now Pardy wants us to pay their royalty expenses so they can distribute as much of their filthy tar sands oil as possible ... before it’s banned to save the world. But if they only have twenty years to sell the stuff, why would taxpayers want to spend those years accelerating the poisoning of their children’s environment? Our government is serving Big Oil. Big Oil customers are serving our government and Big Oil. And Big Oil serves the few who matter.

Cavan Gostlin, Oshawa

The bigger story here is not the difference in the cost of remediation of the tar sands lands, but how little the oil companies have had to put aside for the cleanup. A piddly $1.6 billion towards a possible $58 billion in cleanup costs. And the risk to taxpayers is enormous. The actual cleanup costs might be in flux, but before anymore projects, extraction or pipelines are given the green light, the amount held in trust for the eventual cleanup should be raised to at ‘least’ half of estimated costs. That they have been allowed to plunder the land for so long so cheap is a wake-up call. Taxpayers across Canada should be horrified.

Richard Kadziewicz, Scarborough