Jul. 21, 2010 - Issue #770: Draw It Yourself

Image consultant needed

Rethink Alberta challenges Alberta's tourism industry

If Premier Ed Stelmach's advertorial in The Washington Post earlier this month represented the opening salvo in the global battle over perception of the Athabasca tar sands, his opponents returned fire forcefully and caught Alberta's tourism industry in the fusillade. Corporate Ethics International, an environmental NGO based in San Francisco, unveiled its Rethink Alberta advertising campaign last week.

CEI put up billboards in Seattle, Portland, Denver and Minneapolis labelling the tar sands "the other oil disaster" in reference to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. CEI also published a video layering images of the Rockies with footage of tailings ponds near Fort McMurray. Both billboards and video urge Americans not to visit Alberta until the industry cleans up. "The tar sands, taken as a whole, is the largest and probably most destructive project in the world," says CEI's Kenny Bruno. "What we're hoping is that Albertans will come together ... to bring reform to the industry, to clean it up and to stop its reckless expansion."

CEI's efforts, predictably, drew condemnation from many Albertans—Stelmach held a news conference last Wednesday to counter some claims in the video, the Calgary Herald's editorial board penned a scathing denunciation of CEI's tactics and the Edmonton Journal ran irate letters from readers.

CEI issued a revised version of the video last Friday after its claim that tar sands development will destroy an area twice the size of England was contested.

Bruno says the billboards will be seen by thousands of Americans each day. Raising the tar sands' global profile is one of the goals of the campaign. "Most Americans and most Europeans have not even heard of this," he says.

The campaign comes at an inopportune time for the tourism industry. Cindy Ady, Alberta Minister of Tourism, Parks and Recreation, estimates that overall tourist visits to Alberta are down about eight percent from a typical year. This year's Stampede drew 40 000 fewer visitors than last year. One million Americans visit Alberta a year on average, and the tourism industry employs 100 000 people in the province. But at least one tourism business owner takes a philosophical view on the matter. "If it wasn't this group, there would be another group," says Len Grant, owner of KolorKard, a Calgary-based publisher that distributes postcards and calendars to tourist destinations around southern Alberta. "I don't praise them for doing what they're doing, but I think if they weren't doing it someone else would."

Grant places the blame closer to home. "To not anticipate such a campaign is a failure on the part of the government and the Alberta oil industry," he says. "I fault them more than the backers of this ad campaign. You can anticipate something like this happening."

It's going to happen again fairly soon, as CEI plans to unveil new Rethink Alberta billboards in Britain in coming weeks. Britain, according to Ady, is a more important source of tourist dollars than America.

Attacking one industry to get another one to change may seem counterintuitive to some—Syncrude and Suncor, after all, don't draw their revenue from anything connected to Moraine Lake or the Columbia Icefields. Bruno says CEI hopes to get the Alberta tourism industry to pressure the provincial government. "It would be to [the tourism industry's] benefit, to everybody's benefit, to pull together to pressure this industry and to pressure government," he says. "They don't have to love Corporate Ethics International."

It remains to be seen what impact, if any, the campaign will have on the tourism industry beyond generating press conferences and newspaper clippings. Grant expressed doubt that a substantial portion of tourists would be influenced by the ads. "There's a lot of information for people to consider when they're travelling to a location," he says. "This is only one little bit of the whole picture that people will be exposed to if they do any sort of research before travelling."

Ady claims that most tourists in Alberta have never heard the words oil sands. She does concede that the government should do a better job of getting its side of the argument heard. "It's naïve to think that you can sit back and people will understand you when other groups are going to try to get them to misunderstand you," she says. "We have to do our half of that work." Stelmach's Post ad, which cost the government $56 000, is presumably part of that work.

Ady also cries foul at CEI's choice of target for its campaign. CEI is "throwing a hundred thousand people under the bus," she says. "It doesn't seem very fair to me, but that's not anything they're too concerned with." Grant takes it in stride. "It's not fair," he says of CEI's strategy, "but life isn't fair." V 

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