Article content

This week, the city of Victoria, B.C. announced plans to launch a class action lawsuit against the oil and gas sector. The idea is to tally up the various damages done to the city by climate change and send the bill to the likes of Suncor or CNRL.

It’s the latest salvo of a movement that seeks to singularly blame the oil industry for climate change while conveniently ignoring the millions of daily consumer choices, often made by activists themselves, that contribute to Canada’s fossil fuel addiction.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or You’re all hypocrites: Why it's a colossal cop-out to keep blaming Canada's sky high emissions on Alberta Back to video

Below, a quick primer on how some of Canada’s most anti-oil, anti-pipeline corners seem to have no problem burning oceans of oil when it’s for stuff they like.

Victoria is Canada’s busiest cruise ship port of call

At the same time that they’re itemizing damages they can expense to ExxonMobil, Victoria is aggressively trying to attract more cruise ships. Mayor Lisa Helps, in fact, has championed a campaign that would make Victoria a home port for vessels. “It’s a great opportunity not only from the room nights from a tourism perspective but also for the spinoffs it would generate for the local economy,” she told local CBC. Tourism is very important to the B.C. capital, and a lot of that is indeed sustained by the estimated $130 million brought in by the city’s more than 200 cruise ship visits per year. But it all comes at the cost of enormous, heavy-oil-powered pleasure vessels idling just out of sight. The size and efficiency of cruise ships vary, but an analysis by the Global Sustainable Tourism Dashboard estimated that the average cruise ship passenger is racking up a carbon bill of 0.82 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent; roughly the same as a trans-Atlantic flight. The European Committee on Transport and Tourism, meanwhile, has estimated that a cruise ship passenger does about 36 cents of environmental damage for every kilometre they travel. It’s essentially a marine equivalent of Victoria’s economy being dependent on a sprawling parking lot filled with constantly idling RVs. Oh, and Victoria also just opened a dedicated marina for mega-yachts.