Before I begin this particular Contemplation, I have a confession. One of my major distractions from the polycrisis our species has led itself into is sports. Primarily hockey (which I follow and continue to play as I travel into my late 60s, skating 4-5 times a week throughout the year) but also baseball (which I did play until about a decade ago; several rotator cuff tears–courtesy of hockey mishaps–in my throwing arm has sidelined this sport for me). While there are others such as curling or downhill skiing that I might watch highlights of and/or cheer for my nation state during international competitions (it’s tough to completely ignore tribalistic conditioning at times), these are the two I gravitate towards since I began playing both as a child growing up in London, Ontario, Canada.

My participation in these sports does absolutely nothing in building personal or community resilience or providing harm reduction for our ailing planet–except perhaps for the periodic conversation I might have with others who show an interest in home food production. They are unnecessary and hockey in particular, with its energy consumption to maintain ice throughout the year, is an energy and resource sink. Being a “fan” of these sports I watch/listen to games of interest. I never miss the World Junior Hockey Championships, and right now the National Hockey League playoffs are on and the Toronto Blue Jays of Major League Baseball are coming off a “Cinderella” season of having played in the World Series last year, losing to the Los Angeles Dodgers in extra innings of game seven.

I raise this personal interest as the focus of this Contemplation, Canada Action, was brought to my attention because of its propaganda, er, I mean marketing/advertising taking place on the television sports channels I use to watch the occasional games. The ads slip in during those moments when a fan’s critical guard is down—precisely the space where a simple “we’re the good guys” message can take root, wrapping itself in team colours or national pride. Now, back to our regularly scheduled program…

Apparently–because of Canada’s fantastic resource endowment (especially oil and gas), strong work ethic, and phenomenal capacity for innovation–we Canucks can prosper like never before as we build and export our way out of the polycrisis. So asserts the marketing campaign of the “grassroots” organisation, Canada Action.

Sounds great for Canada, eh?

My “salvation questionnaire”–a four‑part test focusing upon Narrative, Biophysical Reality, Viability, and Social Aspects that I use to see if a proposed solution honestly confronts ecological and social realities–reveals that Canada Action provides a case study in how industry‑backed advocacy systematically evades the hard questions that truly matter for our species and planet. But perhaps even more nefariously, it misleads/misinforms/propagandises significantly so as to benefit those at the top of society’s power and wealth structures at the expense of the biosphere and everyone else.

Narrative

Canada Action presents a story that focuses exclusively upon the benefits for Canadians of exporting our resources and monumentally building and trading our way out of any perceived problems we might be currently experiencing. It is a tale of unambiguous national benefit that highlights employment opportunities, energy security, and the morally superior “fair trade” fuel Canada can provide for the world. Environmental or social costs of what it pedals are completely absent in its advertisements. Even when pushed, the “grassroots” non-profit refuses to discuss the toxic legacy of tailings ponds, water contamination, orphaned oil/gas wells, Indigenous land rights violations, and climate impacts of exported hydrocarbons.

In fact, Ad Standards–Canada (ASC)—a self-regulatory advertising body with no legal enforcement power—has ruled one particular message (claiming that liquified natural gas (LNG) exports would reduce global carbon emissions) as misleading and a clear case of greenwashing. The group’s ads continue, however, given ASC has no legal teeth to compel the group to pull them or acknowledge the full range of environmental consequences of oil/gas extraction and use. The lies continue to be presented to the public on a regular and repeated basis.

The public is sold a “solution” by the group that is not a replacement for “dirtier” fuels like coal as suggested but an addition that results in increased material throughput. Analyses repeatedly show that when all aspects are considered (e.g., liquefaction energy inputs, methane leakage, market effects, infrastructure needs, and shipping), LNG expands hydrocarbon consumption with no replacement occurring. And any climate “benefits” (determined by the most favourable substitution assumptions) are marginal at best and delayed, with infrastructure construction locking in continued and expanding extraction for decades.

The relatively small-scale and short-term gains for the Canadian economy due to a temporary construction boom and minimal royalty revenues are greatly inflated in the tale of universal prosperity woven by Canada Action. The cumulative impact upon an overloaded atmospheric sink, other negative biosphere consequences, and community instability are conveniently ignored. The story takes a very narrow and context-dependent possibility and scales it up disingenuously to present it as an absolute promise.

The story is seamless, until you ask what it leaves out.

Biogeophysical Reality

The narrative woven by Canada Action is completely devoid of the full lifecycle inventory of what it is championing. The unavoidable physical stages for its proposal are completely hidden behind a cloak of invisibility. Raw material extraction for infrastructure (e.g., steel, concrete, pipelines). Manufacture of LNG trains. Methane leakage from wells, gathering lines, and liquefaction. Byproduct disposal (e.g., sulphur piles, petcoke). Decommissioning and/or reclamation of mining pits and tailings ponds–success of which remains unproven. The tale speaks of “ethical oil” but the entire material basis of the system and its environmental and social impacts are invisible.

Then there’s the energy-return-on-investment (EROI) facts. The oil sands projects that sit at the heart of the agenda provide some of the lowest EROI of any liquid fuel source. Once upgrading, refining and delivery are factored in, they skate perilously close to—or below—the 3:1 ratio of basic survival, let alone the 10–14:1 needed to maintain a complex society. Canada Action only speaks of abundance, not the actual numbers.

The buildout championed by this group requires massive quantities of steel, nickel, copper, special alloys, freshwater, fracking sand, helium and rare gases, and petroleum-based diluents–all finite materials that are already experiencing supply chain pressures and rising costs.

Even Canada Action’s carbon tunnel vision is flawed. It not only ignores biosphere integrity with its continuing clearing of boreal forests, but also freshwater depletion and pollution, phosphorus and nitrogen loading, contributions to ocean acidification, and chemical contamination of downstream communities. The framing of Canadian hydrocarbons as “ethical” is a deliberate narrowing of morality to a choice between two evils, while avoiding the fact that both choices exacerbate ecological overshoot and its broaching of planetary boundaries.

The long-term waste liabilities with no proven or at-scale management solution are ignored. As are the more than a trillion litres of toxic tailings in ponds whose attempted reclamation processes have repeatedly failed. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of orphaned wells whose tens of billions of dollars in cleanup costs have been downloaded to the public.

The claim that LNG will reduce emissions depends entirely upon oceans and forests but avoids the harsh reality that our atmospheric carbon sinks are already demonstrating declining absorption capability, a sign of being overloaded.

Canada Action’s response to these concerns is to dismiss them as being solvable with future technologies that have yet to be proven at scale, or aren’t even yet successful at a small-scale. This is creating an intergenerational toxic debt while arguing that the ledger is quite balanced.

What Canadians are being sold is a physical impossibility dressed in patriotic language.

Viability

The projects promoted by Canada Action cannot survive without externalised costs, public loan guarantees, and significant government subsidies. The oil and gas industry benefits from tax holidays, exploration incentives, royalty breaks, public assumption of liabilities, and externalised health costs borne by downstream communities–especially Indigenous ones.

The federal government’s purchase and multi-billion dollar expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline is a perfect example of public subsidy for a private enterprise, where the costs are socialised but the profits privatised. These transfers from the public are conveniently ignored while claiming the industry is a net contributor to the economy.

The full physical footprint of the massively complex and resource-intensive infrastructure required for the proposed projects (e.g., new and expanded pipelines, new or enlarged LNG terminals and port facilities, upstream fracking networks and water systems, bitumen processing plants) is overlooked while the supposed benefits are celebrated.

That much of the story told depends upon technologies that have yet to exist or be proven at any meaningful scale (e.g., carbon capture, utilisation, and storage) is well hidden behind claims to the contrary. Breakthroughs in successful tailings reclamations are always just a few years away while the liabilities continue to accumulate. Promises are made that will likely never, ever be realised. All the while, a few people make an awful lot of money.

A house of cards, held up by public money and promises that never seem to arrive.

Social Aspects

Canada Action explicitly enables the infinite economic growth paradigm. Its entire narrative is about expanding national prosperity (i.e., employment, increased material living standards, etc.) through the growth of resource extraction, trade, and construction–the very essence of an increasing material throughput.

This “grassroots” organisation is promoted by corporate funders such as Cenovus Energy and ARC Resources. The financial beneficiaries of the projects it supports would be the shareholders, executives, construction consortiums, and financial institutions that hold hydrocarbon assets and fund the projects. The workers who the marketing suggests will be the most helped experience only temporary gains.

The entire “grassroots” image portrayed in Canada Action’s advertisements serves to disguise the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small elite that actually occurs and funds the marketing. Resource booms and busts, along with externalised liabilities shouldered by the public, transfer value upwards and leave communities holding the risks. This is a reinforcing of status quo power and wealth structures, as opposed to any type of challenge to them.

It would appear that the entire function of Canada Action is to protect the ongoing acceptance of the oil and gas industry practices that reside at the heart of Canada’s political economy. Environmental groups are attacked as foreign-funded extremists and their criticism of resource industries is anti-Canadian. This helps to delegitimise dissent and maintain the political influence of resource industries.

The vision that the group promotes is very dependent upon globalised, centralised, and extremely fragile supply chains. This works against relocalisation by communities by locking them into volatile commodity dependence and discouraging diversified, resilient local economies.

Perhaps most crucially, the story being told by Canada Action shuts down discussion of more fundamental changes such as degrowth, reduced consumption, and a just transition. Instead, a false binary is imposed: support resource extraction and trade, or be anti-Canadian and anti-employment.

The question is never “How much is enough?” but “How much more can we take?”

Conclusion
In every dimension of the above analysis Canada Action’s story fails the salvation questionnaire. It suppresses drawbacks, ignores material realities, depends greatly upon public subsidies and unproven technologies, entrenches corporate power, and blocks the transformative conversations human societies urgently need.

And so I’ll keep periodically watching my favourite sports, but I’ll also keep my eyes open when the commercial break rolls around, knowing whose story is being sold and who’s paying for it.

What makes this more than just another industry greenwashing exercise, however, is what it reveals about our species’ collective trajectory. The campaign is not simply a lie about one country’s resources; it is a microcosm of the broader denial that keeps us hurtling toward ecological overshoot.

Every “we can build our way out” advertisement, every “ethical oil” soundbite, every invocation of future technologies that never quite arrive, serves to extend the lifespan of an energy system that is literally unravelling the biosphere. The planetary boundaries that might have buffered such recklessness—stable climate, intact forests, functioning nitrogen cycles, a forgiving ocean—are already breached or strained to breaking point.

To double down on hydrocarbon-fuelled expansion at this moment is not merely unwise; it is to accelerate the collapse of the life‑support systems upon which every human community, including the ones Canada Action claims to champion, ultimately depends.

Recognising stories like this for what they are is a small but necessary act of intellectual self‑defence. But recognition alone will not build resilience.

The work that matters now happens at the local scale, far from the television ads and the corporate boardrooms. It looks like strengthening neighbourhood food networks, restoring watersheds, learning to repair instead of replace, and re‑skilling in the practical arts of shelter, care, and conviviality. It means disentangling our own lives, however imperfectly, from the centralised systems that propaganda like Canada Action’s is designed to protect–in other words, “collapse now to avoid the rush”.

None of these efforts will stop the collapse of the old order, but they can buffer the worst of the harm, preserve fragments of dignity and mutual support, and perhaps plant the seeds of cultures that can outlast the extractive frenzy. The commercial breaks will keep rolling, but what we build in the spaces between—grounded in honesty, limits, and community—will matter far more than the constant barrage of marketing telling us “salvation” is at hand, if we simply stand out of the way for the people with all the “solutions”.

Post-Script
While working on this Contemplation the past couple of weeks, I’ve been somewhat more attuned to the propaganda being spewed by growth advocates. Typically I tune out during advertisements, even turn the volume off, but I’m seeing and hearing quite a few marketing campaigns from Canada’s federal government, Ontario’s provincial government, and a variety of techno-fix corporations bleating on about “solving” the economic woes being experienced via building, constructing, and growing. The noise seems to be getting louder, suggesting to me that the elite are getting more desperate in their attempts to maintain the various Ponzi schemes from which they profit. And it’s not about “saving” anything, except perhaps the privilege that flows to the top of our society’s power and wealth structures. And one of the things that drives me crazy about the “government-funded” propaganda, er, I mean advertisements is that I’m having to contribute to the lies through my taxes.

What is going to be my standard WARNING/ADVICE going forward and that I have reiterated in various ways before this:

“Only time will tell how this all unfolds but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by ‘collapsing now to avoid the rush’ and pursuing self-sufficiency. By this I mean removing as many dependencies on the Matrix as is possible and making do, locally. And if one can do this without negative impacts upon our fragile ecosystems or do so while creating more resilient ecosystems, all the better.

Building community (maybe even just household) resilience to as high a level as possible seems prudent given the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. There’s no guarantee it will ensure ‘recovery’ after a significant societal stressor/shock but it should increase the probability of it and that, perhaps, is all we can ‘hope’ for from its pursuit.

If you have arrived here and get something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my “fictional” novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the “profits” of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).

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You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially William Catton’s Overshoot and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies: see here.