Andrew Nikiforuk named first writer-in-residence at The Tyee

Just catching up with last week's welcome announcement that award-winning writer and journalist Andrew Nikiforuk has agreed to be the first writer-in-residence for the online magazine The Tyee. He's best known for his Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. Therefore it is no surprise that for the next while he will be writing a regular column called Energy and Equity. 

His first column tells the lamentable story about the parliamentary standing committee that not only didn't publish a report on its deliberations about the tar sands and contamination of the ground water and the Athabasca River, but shredded all copies.Editor David Beers says:

Andrew painstakingly pored over what the committee had heard and been shown, and today he constructs a damning picture of grievous pollution made possible by lax regulation and a government that would rather kill reports than learn from their contents.

On the phone from Calgary, where Nikiforuk lives with his wife and three sons, he described why, even though he has written an entire book on the tar sands, he savours the opportunity to stay on the file and share his findings with readers of The Tyee. He acknowledged the excellent work that Tyee reporters Geoff Dembicki and Mitchell Anderson have been doing on the issue in recent months, offering that "unfortunately the tar sands project is so extraordinarily large and beyond a scale that most can imagine, you could have 100 reporters covering it and not tell the story."

Nikiforuk said his intent is to widen his scope to examine all angles of Canada's morphing into a petro state, a political and cultural sleepwalk that he believes will profoundly change our character as a people. So far, it is proceeding with very little serious public debate.