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Canada’s oil sands are key to the country’s prosperity and for it to grow, the industry needs more pipelines, more collaboration, and dialogue that does not fuel “a climate of antagonism,” said a report by Deloitte Canada.

There was dissent back then about spending all that money on the railway, but now we ask how could you not have done that. It is the same with the oil sands

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“Proponents of development argue in favour of the economic benefits while opponents argue those benefits aren’t worth the environmental risk,” said the report, entitled Gaining Ground in the Sands 2013. “From our perspective, growth of oil sands is key to continued growth in Canadian prosperity.

“The constructive argument is really over how to develop the oil sands…not whether or not to develop them at all.”

Over the next few decades, the Canadian Energy Research Institute estimates a boon of $2.1 trillion in economic benefits over the next 25 years and about 905,000 jobs by 2035.

“The oil sands are going to be the economic engine for the country for the foreseeable future, for the next 25 to 30 years, and it is akin to the impact of building the national railway in the 1880s,” Marc Joiner, a partner at Deloitte in Toronto, told the Edmonton Journal. “There was dissent back then about spending all that money on the railway, but now we ask how could you not have done that. It is the same with the oilsands.