Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau sparked outrage earlier this month by saying the Alberta oil sands need to be “phased out”. Because the oil sands industry is the third-biggest employer in the province, the outrage is easily explained, even though Trudeau acknowledged that the phase-out wouldn’t happen overnight. The province is estimated to hold the world’s third-largest oil reserves. As several Canadian observers noted in analyses following Trudeau’s controversial statement, the oil sands make the perfect target for environmentalists and liberal politicians. The Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason puts it brilliantly. “The oil sands make an easy target. The aerial shots are ugly. In a perfect world, they wouldn’t exist; it would all be boreal forest. Flyovers would be organized to see marauding herds of caribou instead of eerie images of molasses-like pits of bitumen. In that same utopia, our cars and planes would not be powered by fossil fuels, […]