Here's the real news on the big event at the recent Halifax premiers' conference. It was yet another signal that what we gingerly call the oilsands in Canada, but which the rest of the world -- including conservative journals like the Economist -- decidedly calls the tarsands, and which are meant to serve as the pillar of the Canadian economy in the Stephen Harper vision, are actually quicksands in both the environmental and economic sense.
B.C.'s dramatic refusal at the conference to accommodate an Alberta pipeline through its territory without big trouble -- all the more significant because the tiff is West vs. West, not the usual East vs. West -- is the second such rebuff for a bitumen pipeline.
