Alberta’s oilsands have iconic status in Canada. They are magnets for foreign capital and sources of great wealth.

They are credited with keeping this country’s economy alive in the midst of a global slump.

Politically, they symbolize the new Canada — one governed by a prime minister determined to encourage resource extraction at the expense of virtually everything else.

But as Albertans are discovering, the icon has feet of clay. Even a brief hiccup in the oilsands boom has sent the province’s finances into a downward spiral.

And the future remains uncertain. Suddenly, the politics of climate change have made Alberta’s carbon-emitting bitumen less welcome in the United States.

More to the point, technological changes that favour the production of cheaper shale oil and gas, are transforming the U.S. from an energy pauper into one of the world’s big petroleum players.

To put it another way, Canada’s biggest export market no longer needs the tarsands quite as much as it did.

Into this mix comes a new study that tries to make sense of the oilsands phenomenon.

Actually, The Bitumen Cliff is an oldish new study in that it uses the classic work of political economist Harold Innis, one of the first to undertake a systematic analysis of what makes the Canadian economy tick.

To Innis, Canada’s history was dominated by natural resource exports, which he called staples. That Canada has exported raw materials is hardly novel. What Innis grasped, however, was that these staple exports created a pattern of development, both political and economic, that over time was hard to escape.

To use the language of one of his students, the Canada that Innis described kept enmeshing itself in a “staple trap.”

Vast quantities of money would be spent (usually by government) on infrastructure needed to extract whatever resource was in demand. And then, suddenly, things would change.

Maybe the commodity would fall out of fashion — as did felt hats made from Canadian beaver pelts. Or maybe technology would make the staple irrelevant, as the steamship did to masts made from Canadian white pine.

In all instances, Canadians would be left paying the costs.

The Bitumen Cliff applies this analysis to the tarsands. Again, vast quantities of money are required, not just to extract the heavy oil but to transport it by rail, pipeline or ship.

Again, other economic activities are given short shrift. In this case, the high dollar created by Canada’s soaring oil exports has eaten into the ability of manufacturers to compete abroad.

And again, the political system wraps itself around the staple, with Ottawa’s Conservative government gutting environmental laws for fear that they might interfere with pipelines and resource extraction.

Can this last? Unless tarsands oil is a very unusual staple it cannot. Prices rise; prices fall. Tastes change; things happen. We are beginning to see some of that now.

The authors suggest that what they call the carbon trap will be the contradiction that finally sinks the tarsands — that the world will turn away from forms of energy that emit high levels of greenhouse gases.

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When this does happen, they say, we will once again be left holding the bag — dependent on natural resources that are no longer in demand — having failed again to develop the kind of integrated and balanced economy that can keep this country on an even keel.

The Bitumen Cliff, published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, is written by Canadian Autoworkers economist Jim Stanford, Polaris Institute director Tony Clarke, consultant Diana Gibson and — the Innisian in the crowd — Carleton graduate student Brendan Haley.