The Canadian oil and gas industry has been hit by a rash of terrorist attacks in recent years, and the outlook is for much of the same, at least according to a recent risk report.
The report, entitled “Resource Industries & Security Issues in Northern Alberta,” states that five groups are considered the most likely to carry out efforts that would hinder development of Canada’s petroleum reserves.
The five main threat groups include individual saboteurs, ecoterrorists, mainstream environmentalists, First Nations, and the Métis people, who constitute a distinct Aboriginal nation largely based in western Canada.
“All except the Métis have, at various times, used some combination of litigation, blockades, occupations, boycotts, sabotage, and violence against economic development projects, which they saw as a threat to environmental values or aboriginal rights,” said the report’s author, Tom Flanagan.
Small-scale attacks
“However, extra-legal obstruction is unlikely to become large-scale and widespread unless these various groups make common cause and cooperate with each other,” said Flanagan, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
“Such cooperation has not happened in the past, and seems unlikely in the future, because the groups have different social characteristics and conflicting political interests,” Flanagan said.
While Flanagan rules out the possibility of such cooperation among the five threat groups, along the way he makes some highly interesting observations about the people likely to carry out attacks on Alberta’s oil and gas industry.
He says the Peace River country of Alberta and British Columbia, as the last homestead frontier in North America, has attracted many highly independent people who want to live undisturbed in remote bush land.
“These people may see roads, seismic cuts, and pipelines as an intrusion on their property rights, and perceive hydrocarbon emissions as a threat to their health,” Flanagan said.
Remote homesteaders
These remote homesteaders are well equipped to carry out acts of sabotage since they own firearms for hunting and self-protection in the wilderness; and they are familiar with heavy machinery because of their work as farmers, ranchers, lumberjacks, drill hands, and truck drivers.
They are not easy to detect and apprehend in such a vast expanse of territory, especially where they have some community sympathy.
“They will probably remain a nuisance factor, imposing extra security costs on natural-resource industries, but not bringing such industries to a standstill,” Flanagan said.
If there is a problem with Flanagan’s report, however, it is his exclusive focus on domestic sources of terrorism to the exclusion of any threat from abroad—a point noted by writer Andrew Nikiforuk.
“Most terrorism experts would say Alberta has made itself terribly insecure again by rapidly expanding oil and gas pipelines, and by becoming the No. 1 supplier of oil to the United States,” said Nikiforuk.