Canada’s provincial leaders finalized the Canadian Energy Strategy Friday with a document many onlookers are criticizing as too reliant on traditional carbon-based sources of energy.

The NDP would wreck Canada’s economy and should never get into power, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said Sunday.

Harper, who was announcing new security-related measures in Ottawa, told reporters he wanted to address something that had come up over the weekend and that he thought was “pretty important and shouldn’t be ignored.”

A “star” NDP candidate, someone NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair had pledged would be part of his cabinet, said that the way to deal with the crisis in the oil industry is to leave the oil in the ground, Harper asserted.

Alliance Pipeline has shut down a natural gas pipeline in Western Canada after poisonous hydrogen sulphide (H2S) gas got into the system.

The Calgary-based energy company said Friday it has told companies feeding the pipeline to stop while corrective measures are taken.

The shutdown will continue for an "indeterminate amount of time," Alliance said in a news release. 

Alliance said the hydrogen sulphide entered the pipeline in Alberta and was stopped when it reached southeastern Saskatchewan.

Gas to be flared off

Linda McQuaig, a star New Democratic Party candidate, says Alberta's oilsands may need to remain undeveloped in order for Canada to meet its climate change targets.

The NDP candidate for Toronto Centre told CBC News Network's Power & Politics there should not be a rush to extract from the oilsands without proper environmental assessments.

"A lot of the oilsands oil may have to stay in the ground if we're going to meet our climate change targets," McQuaig said.

Activists protest against Fidelity Investments, one of Chevron’s largest institutional shareholder, outside its office building in downtown Seattle. (Photo by Goorish Wibneh)

A diverse group of Seattle activists and students gathered Tuesday at Westlake Park to demand the Canadian government respect sovereignty of the Unist’ot’en First Nation, as well as its own national and international laws.

Economists, an irrational tribe of short-sighted mathematicians, are now calling Canada's declining economic fortunes "a perfect storm."

It seems to be the only weather that complex market economies generate these days, or maybe such things are just another face of globalization.

Garth Lenz's 2011 TED talk (17.4 minutes), illustrated by striking photographs of the tar sands and northern boreal forest.