Costly Fix: Power, Politics, and Nature in the Tar Sands by Ian Urquhart

Abstract

Reviewed by: Costly Fix: Power, Politics, and Nature in the Tar Sands by Ian Urquhart Kyle Conway Costly Fix: Power, Politics, and Nature in the Tar Sands. By Ian Urquhart. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. ix + 351 pp. Map, tables, references, index. $39.95 paper. Two things flow in Ian Urquhart's Costly Fix—oil and money—and if there is a lesson to be learned, it's that capital is even more liquid than the sticky bitumen found in Alberta's tar sands. The book traces the history of the tar sands, from the late 19th century when Canada's settler government first surveyed oil-rich northern Alberta, to the present day when international oil companies have taken full advantage of the land (and favorable tax arrangements). It situates Alberta in the global oil trade and shows how international markets shape local and regional governments in Canada's northern Great Plains. The Albertan and Canadian governments, Urquhart argues, have acted in the name of development, wealth, and North American energy independence, but they have sold access to their resources at a bargain price. The key idea in Costly Fix is that of market fundamentalism, or the paradoxical belief that the solution to problems caused by unfettered markets is the removal of still more fetters. The challenge governments face is that oil companies can always take their business—and the jobs they create—elsewhere. The threat of capital flight pits governments of resource-rich areas against each other. As a result, regional economies are anything but regional, as in the case of Alberta, where successive provincial and federal governments have sought to accommodate international oil companies, all the while reacting to changes in the United States as it has sought to decrease its dependence on oil from the Middle East. Over the years, Alberta's government, Urquhart writes, has renegotiated its leasing terms with oil companies, always in the companies' favor, even when Albertans have demanded that their government protect their environmental and financial interests better. Even groups opposed to development have been hampered in their efforts. For instance, the specific terms limiting who can address Alberta's regulator, the Energy Resources and Conservation Board (ERCB), have prevented most environmental groups from testifying. Groups must demonstrate that they would be "directly and adversely affected" by a company's actions, a test the ERCB interprets in the narrowest possible way. First Nations have faced similar structural restrictions. In their case, they have also taken a pragmatic approach to allowing oil exploration on their land: money from oil companies helps them solve problems related to immediate material needs, but at the cost of long-term environmental damage. Overall, Costly Fix is a thorough and well-argued polemic. Although it would benefit by engaging with similar books (such as Jon Gordon's Unsustainable Oil or Dominique Perron's L'Alberta autophage, both of [End Page 172] which describe similar structural and discursive contradictions), it provides a detailed account of Alberta's tar sands and demonstrates the degree to which money and oil move through Alberta, linking it inextricably to the larger network of global capital. Kyle Conway Department of Communication University of Ottawa Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln