Think duck deaths on oilsands tailings ponds are bad? The real slaughter happens elsewhere

By EZRA LEVANT:

Around the same time as the Buffalo wing festival, another 200 birds died. But they weren’t eaten in New York. They were caught in a freak ice storm in northern Alberta, and landed on Syncrude’s oilsands tailing ponds. Government wildlife officers ordered them euthanized.

Linda Duncan, the NDP MP for Edmonton-Strathcona, called the bird deaths “reprehensible” and said “no amount of penalty” was enough. She demanded the tailings ponds be shut down — which would mean shutting down the whole oilsands mine at Mildred Lake. If Duncan got her way, more than 3,000 people would lose their jobs.

Duncan’s proposal would fire 15 workers for every dead duck. That’s nutty, but not much nuttier than the $2,000-a-duck fine Syncrude had to pay for a duck accident in 2008.

But as a new video produced this month by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy points out, the duck obsession of Linda Duncan and other oilsands haters is misplaced.

The Frontier Centre compared the number of birds killed by the oilsands with the number of birds killed by a wind turbine at an Ontario wind farm — allegedly a more environmentally friendly source of energy.

When the rate of bird kills was measured, kilowatt hour by kilowatt hour, windmills were 445 times deadlier than the oilsands.

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