Tony Clarke told a rapt Hamilton audience this week that apart from being “the most environmentally destructive project on the face of the planet,” the tar sands are distorting the rest of the country’s economy by linking the dollar to oil prices.

This has devastated the manufacturing sector and killed 400,000 jobs, many of them in Ontario, all to serve energy needs south of the border, he said.

“We have a serious, serious distortion in our economy, and it’s a structural distortion,” Mr. Clarke told a packed hall on hand for the 4th annual Spirit of Red Hill Valley lecture at First Unitarian Church.

“The problem is we have lost the vision of building an industrial and manufacturing base, and we have allowed resources and commodities to take over and to dominate the Canadian economy.”

Author of Tar Sands Showdown, Mr. Clarke said Alberta’s oil development is also depleting critical natural resources and polluting precious watersheds, particularly in the Athabasca region.

The tar sands production generates three to five times the greenhouse gases of conventional oil recovery, he said, because it requires massive amounts of natural gas to heat up and extract oil from the deposits of tar-like bitumen.

For every barrel of oil recovered, it also uses and contaminates up to 4.5 barrels of water and will strip mine 90,000 square miles of boreal forest –about the size of Florida.

“Many people have likened this very much to turning gold into lead,” he said. “It perpetuates the

kind of addiction to oil for some time to come by getting people hooked on dirty oil.”

Mr. Clarke said the price of the tar sands development far outweighs any benefits to the country, including on the world stage, where Canada is quickly losing its reputation as an environmental leader.

The toxic fallout has contaminated moose, deformed fish and raised cancer rates on a nearby aboriginal reserve, he said, while siphoning enough natural gas to heat half of all Canadian homes at a time when the country has only about nine years in reserves left.

Even then, pipelines are sending most of any recovered oil and bitumen to the United States for refining as part of commitments under the North American Free Trade Agreement, he said.

In the meantime, the Atlantic provinces, Quebec and parts of Ontario rely on oil imported from the Middle East, raising questions about what will happen if they cut off the supply, he said.

“It does not serve Canadian needs. We do not have a national energy policy and strategy in this country,” said Mr. Clarke, founder of the Ottawa-based Polaris Institute, a non-governmental organization dedicated to fighting corporate- driven globalization.

“I think this is something that we need to think about very deeply, the extent to which we are really, if we’re honest with ourselves, not much more than an energy satellite of the United States.”

Mr. Clarke said the tar sands’ influence on Canada and global warming is likely to only worsen, even if the recent economic downturn delays development.

Planned projects will raise production to more than five million barrels of oil per day and annual greenhouse gases are projected to nearly double by 2012, to 123 million tonnes.

A grassroots movement is afoot to push for a moratorium on the tar sands’ development, with the goal of an eventual halt to all production, he said.

“It is a choice and a decision that we all have to make,” Mr. Clarke said. “It is a choice and a decision that lies at the very heart of where we are moving as a country and it lies at the very future of the planet we inhabit.”