Climate Politics in the Patch

Meanwhile, settler and Indigenous communities downstream of people of the tar sands and other oil and gas projects are sounding alarm bells about the local impacts living beside oil of extraction on health and the environment. [...] In the initial phase we tracked corporate contributions from the oil industry to three municipalities and their surrounding rural areas including the city of Weyburn (rural municipality of Weyburn) and the towns of Kindersley (rural municipality of Kindersley) and Oxbow (Rural Municipality of Enniskillen). [...] A Globe and Mail article from 2011 suggested that the province’s former status as a have-not province and the “poor cousin” of Alberta, was changing and that people in Saskatchewan are genuinely enthusiastic about the province’s new-found wealth associated with the oil and commodities booms of the 2000s (Pitts, 2011). [...] The majority of Boyd’s participants, for example, were adamant that climate change was 4 On the question of whether climate change is happening, only 56% in the Souris-Moose Lake riding in South-East Saskatchewan agreed, compared to 77% nationally and 91% in the riding of Halifax. [...] The only thing … and I’m all for that, obviously, but the only thing I’ve been vocal about is just the emissions [referring to the venting and flaring of waste gas by the industry]: the emissions and just the irresponsibility.