IN CANADA, STANDING UP FOR “ETHICAL OIL.”

Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver unleashed a fire storm of debate after he published an open letter in the Globe and Mail claiming “environmental and other radical groups” seek to “stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth.”

“No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams,” said Oliver in the open letter published in Monday’s edition of the Globe and Mail.

The letter was published on the eve of the beginning of oral hearings Tuesday on the C$5.5 billion proposed Northern Gateway project that would bring Alberta oil sands bitumen to port at Kitimat, British Columbia. The current hearings are scheduled to wrap-up in early April.

“These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” the minister asserted. “They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects.”

“They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources,” he charged. “Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”

Indeed. And where are the Saudis in all of this?