That resulted in two Canadian cabinet ministers giving the Saudis a public tongue lashing, while emphasizing the democratic values championed in the "ethical oil" argument.
Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said Canadians don't "appreciate any attempt by a foreign country to undermine our freedoms."
Added Immigration Minister Jason Kenney: "We don't take kindly to foreign governments threatening directly or indirectly Canadian broadcasters or media for giving voice to freedom of speech. We think that's inappropriate and certainly inconsistent with Canada's belief in freedom of speech."
Kenney is one of the most powerful ministers in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government. And the founder of EthicalOil.org, Alykhan Velshi, was Kenney's chief aide until a few months ago.
Environmentalists see the ethical debate differently. They argue the Keystone pipeline would exponentially increase ecological devastation in the wilderness of northern Alberta, where bitumen deposits cover an area the size of Florida.
Accessing the 175 billion barrels of proven oil reserves involves massive open-pit mining that moves mountains of soil, fells huge swaths of trees, sucks up rivers of fresh water and produces hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic sludge daily.
Coaxing a barrel of oil from the tar sands creates three times as much greenhouse gases as producing a barrel of conventional oil. It partly explains why Canada hasn't come close to meeting the carbon emission targets of the Kyoto Protocol. The respected Pembina Institute notes the oil sands are the fastest growing industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.
Anti-pipeline activists took their campaign to Parliament Hill last week, and like similar protests in front of the White House, several people got arrested. Among the protesters were union leaders complaining the pipeline would export jobs to the U.S. because the bitumen would be refined on the Gulf Coast, rather than in Alberta.
TransCanada estimates construction of Keystone XL will create 20,000 direct U.S. jobs, a figure that has many believing U.S. President Barack Obama will soon give the pipeline final approval. For Canada, the pipeline will trigger further development of the oil sands, creating thousands of jobs and huge amounts of government tax and royalty revenues.
Harper calls its construction a "complete no-brainer." And his environment minister, Peter Kent, has been busy pushing the "ethical oil" argument. But the government has been characteristically silent about a new report that calculates the cost of climate change to Canada at $5 billion a year by 2020, and between $21 billion and $43 billion annually by 2050.
The report, written by a group of business leaders and researchers appointed by the federal government, outlines the dramatic effects that a warmer climate will have on the forest industry, coastal flooding and on the health of Canadians. It estimates that hotter temperatures and poorer air quality will account for 1.3 percent of all deaths in Canada's major cities by 2050.
What are the ethics of that?
