ethical oil

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An extraordinarily reticent man sounds mightily concerned

Erin Weir, an economist with the United Steelworkers, sends along the following video of his appearance before the finance committee last night.

You could pretty much set your clock by it: Two weeks of disdainful coverage about how Tom Mulcair just doesn’t understand how much he’s blundering into a powderkeg are followed by today’s National Post poll, featuring the largest NDP margin over other parties that I have seen since things got weird for a minute in 1988, or maybe the best poll ever for the NDP.

Ethical Oil has already turned yesterday’s QP exchange into an attack ad.

Why Jacques Cousteau had a boat instead of a Paris Métro pass

This column, a couple of weeks ago, posed a question about Thomas Mulcair’s ability to appeal to a broad segment of the population with an environmentalist, oil-sands-skeptical, protectionist-on-trade message. “To beat Harper, he needs issues that can rally active and broad support,” I wrote at the end. “I’ll offer no predictions, but whatever happens in Montreal on April 22 will tell much of the tale.”

At first glance, there are no major transformations, but below the surface this government is escalating a dozen of its favourite combats

In Ottawa a few weeks ago, I ran into an old friend who used to work for the Chrétien Liberals. He’s in the private sector now. I was fresh back from China and I said one of the big surprises was the heavy resource orientation of the business delegation accompanying Stephen Harper — Oil, diamonds, gold, pork and lentils, not boutique software firms.

The Quebec premier’s Plan Nord promises to transform Quebec—into Alberta

Mulcair says he could be talked into considering a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade mechanism

In all, Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt et placement holds $5.4 billion in investments in oil-sands companies