A remark about the oil sands made to the CBC by Linda McQuaig, the NDP’s Toronto Centre candidate, shows the NDP will “wreck our economy” and should never come to power, Conservative leader Stephen Harper said.

McQuaig, a well-known activist, author and former Star columnist, told a Power & Politics panel Friday that “a lot of the oil sands oil may have to stay in the ground” if Canada is to meet its climate change targets.

When host Rosemary Barton pressed McQuaig on the point, she added: “Some of it may have to. We’ll know that better once we properly put in place a climate change accountability system of some kind.” McQuaig declined to comment to the Star on Sunday.

On Sunday, Harper sniped at McQuaig, whom he described as a “star NDP candidate” pre-selected for cabinet by NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair. “That is the NDP’s not-so-hidden agenda on development,” he told reporters. “The NDP is consistently against the development of our resources and our economy.”

McQuaig’s comments are at odds with her party’s policy on resource extraction, as described by deputy natural resource critic Malcolm Allen. Allen said in an interview that the NDP supports continued oil sands extraction, coupled with more rigorous oversight aimed at reducing environmental degradation. The party’s policies do not include limits on the amounts of fossil fuels extracted, according to Allen.

“There is no cap,” he said.

During Thursday’s leaders’ debate, Mulcair called TransCanada Corp.’s proposed Energy East pipeline a “win-win-win” proposition. He said it would lead to a better price for producers, more royalties for producing provinces, and would create jobs. But he said the project would have to go through a rigorous, transparent environmental review.

In 2012, while running for the party’s leadership, Mulcair told the Star, “You’ll never hear me speaking against the development of the oil sands.” But he added that the NDP would apply “the basic principles of sustainable development.”

McQuaig is the author of It’s Crude, Dude, about America’s increasing dependence on oil and its connection to the Iraq invasion, and The Trouble With Billionaires, about the threat to democracy posed by a concentration of wealth and power.

With files from Stephen Spencer Davis

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