Why the prairie province should have received more attention yesterday
Tucked into Stephen Harper and Barack Obama’s joint communique yesterday was a small mention of Weyburn, Saskatchewan’s carbon capture and storage facility, the world’s largest, and a project well in keeping with the spirit of the Obama-Harper chitchat. Weyburn is where Calgary-based EnCana buries the CO2 that it buys from a North Dakota coal gasification plant. Bigwigs in Saskatchewan were delighted to get the kudos. But, writes the Regina Leader-Post’s Murray Mandryk: “Wouldn’t this have been a wonderful opportunity to hear much, much more?” What Mandryk and others were looking for in yesterday’s announcements was a more concrete announcement regarding further cooperation on environmental technologies in Saskatchewan–exactly what Mandryk suggests Premier Brad Wall had been lobbying Ottawa for. Why didn’t it happen? Mandryk wonders if it wasn’t because Wall, who is said to be close with the PM, gave Harper’s budget a grade of “D” last month.