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An Alberta royalty review panel decided after months of study that oil companies should not pay any more royalties because they’re already paying their fair share. The richest and most powerful industry in human history, that has spent millions covering up the fact that their product is endangering human survival, that in Alberta pays some of the world’s lowest royalty rates, and which makes obscene profits year after year, this industry is paying their fair share.

Allow me to rebut: No. What?! No! They’re not.

The chair of the review panel said “Success for Albertans only comes when the industry is successful.” He was essentially telling Albertans, as they’ve been told many times before, that as workers and even as voters, they are nothing more than servants of the oil industry. And like a hostage with Stockholm syndrome, many workers react to criticism of the oil industry as though it were a personal attack.

But we don’t rely on the oil industry for survival, we rely on a stable climate for survival. And the only way to keep it stable is to decarbonize the economy. And who better to help fund that than the industry that’s spent decades making trillions of dollars by treating our atmosphere like a free garbage dump.

But big oil won’t truly pay its fair share until Albertans elect a government that has the courage to pull the plug on a dying industry and instead give life support to the thing that needs it most right now: life.  

This video originally appeared in the Toronto Star.

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Scott Vrooman

Scott has written and performed comedy for TV (Conan, Picnicface, This Hour Has 22 Minutes), radio (This is That), and the web (Vice, Funny or Die, College Humor, The Toronto Star, The Huffington Post,...