The I.S. Saga, Part 1

Today was Day 1 of our semi-annual, two-day Interdisciplinary Studies (I.S) Conference. This term's topic was as controversial as they come - the debate over Alberta's Oil Sands.

There are two inter-related stories that I want to tell over the next few posts. The first one began a week or so ago, when I noticed the following phrase on an ad poster for the conference:

Is (oil sands oil) "ethical oil", as some have claimed....?

This was, I assumed, a direct reference to a book by conservative pundit Ezra Levant, entitled Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands - a book which I had recently begun to read (and was thoroughly enjoying). The book's thesis is essentially this: in our oil-consuming world, the choice we face is not between oil from the oil sands and some perfect, emission-free fantasy oil of the future; it's between oil from Canada (a peace-loving, free and democratic society, which cares about the environment) or oil from nastier places like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran or Nigeria. Thus, we have to look at which economy we would rather put our money into, not simply whether the oil sands are a perfect operation from a green perspective.

The book was published only last year, but the phrase "ethical oil" has already been used by the Prime Minister and the Federal Environment Minister in their defenses of the oil sands. That's the kind of influence the book is having.

So, given the importance and influence of Mr. Levant's arguments, I couldn't help wonder why his name was not on the list of speakers. Did he decline an invitation, or was he never invited in the first place?

I went straight to the source: Roy Berkenbosch, the director of the I.S. conferences. He assured me that while   he would not be presenting, "his perspective [would] both be heard and challenged." While I was certain that was true, I wondered why Mr. Levant's views were important enough to mention on an ad poster, but not enough to even invite him to the conference? It seemed contradictory, and since the other side of the debate, environmental activists, seemed very well represented indeed, most notably by Andrew Nikiforuk, who is one of Levant's most vocal and unabashed critics.

It seems that, according to Mr. Berkenbosch's reply to my e-mails, there simply was not enough room in the 2-day conference to invite this or that speaker. Fair enough. But it does seem odd that while there is a nationally-bestselling author who was anti-oilsands presenting at the conference (not once, but twice), the idea to invite a nationally-bestselling author who was pro-oilsands, and whose book is being referenced by the federal government, did not occur to Mr. Berkenbosch.

Given the I.S. Conference's track record of highly skewed political debates (I've written about that here), I can't help but wonder whether this is truly logistics, or whether we have crossed over into censorship. Food for thought.