Episode Details

This episode of The Gravity Well centers on the critical issues of environmental responsibility and economic reform in Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Regan Boychuk emphasize the need for enforcing existing laws to ensure that oil companies are held accountable for environmental cleanup and reclamation. You hear highlights of the historical context of Alberta’s regulatory framework. The financial mechanisms that have allowed foreign shareholders to profit at the expense of local resources, and the potential for job creation through responsible environmental practices. The conversation also touches on the broader implications of financial imperialism and the importance of public awareness and engagement in driving meaningful change. Regan advocate for a fairer distribution of Alberta’s natural resource wealth to benefit all citizens to ensure sustainable future.

Welcome & Regan Boychuk Introduction

Alex:

Welcome to The Gravity Well where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets anyone can handle. Our mission is simple, to work through our differences and collaborate with others through conversation and processes. Together we can face our dilemmas and make our world a better place for everyone.

Jenny:

In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge we are in Blackfoot Treaty 7 territory and Métis District’s five and six lands. We take reconciling action by seeking the wisdom of elders and individuals who aim to restore water, air, land, life and community. A healthy living-relationship with our homeland and each other is our guide. Okay, so I’m going to say a quick welcome, but Alex is going to lead us off today.

Alex:

Last time we spoke with Regan, we spoke about sourcing news and the importance of being able to fact check and back check information that may be sort of advertised in the mainstream and also how there are discrepancies in terms of interprovincial media. Some things will be overly reported in Alberta, and under reported in Central Canada, and Eastern Canada. Some things will be overly reported in Central and Eastern Canada that are under reported in Western Canada. We see these bifurcations, in terms of information that people are being flooded with, and it leads to these miscommunications.

What we’re setting out to do in this second conversation is based on the previous one and that understanding. Is there anything that you’ve discovered since in terms of being able to source media where the discrepancies in communication and lack of information that the general public and population has access to?

Regan:

Well, these are the issues, these discrepancies that I started to come across in my research 25 years ago are what motivate me and interest me and there’s so many to uncover. They’re everywhere. But I have started to see a pattern to how much is missing and how systematically different things work. Over time you see these patterns and the biggest insight that I’ve had is I’ve studied these kind of the shadows, the taboo subjects so much that you realize how big a part they are of the world. Whether we think about them or know about them or not, there’s trillion dollar infrastructures in many countries all setting to work on these things for many decades and they haven’t accumulated impact, an invisible force that if we can start to make sense of, I would say that that force has grown to such we can’t make sense of the world without appreciating what’s not there, the missing pieces.

That’s my biggest and inadvertent insight as I’ve studied these taboo subjects. I found some issues that are genuinely censored. So we know that they’re not there at all. The way that they do that, one of the main ways they censor things is they keep the dates out. When I started to look back at the history books, even the history books in Canada had the strange thing when I went to go look