A Slippery Debate

I first met Ezra Levant in the depths of CTV’s Calgary studios, a hallway encounter that only lasted a few seconds, just long enough for the pugilist-conservative to grin and to flash a thumbs-up in my direction.

My thumb-worthy deed? I had made an offhand remark on air a few minutes earlier that Albertans remained unhappy about the National Energy Program. That was enough to put me on the right side of his political ledger.

There are no neutrals in Ezra Levant’s world, just a tally of allies and of enemies that need continued thrashing. The first group gets a thumb, as I found out. The latter group gets the finger, which any reader of Levant’s latest polemic, Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands, will quickly discover.

In what purports to be a “moral inventory,” Levant ranges far beyond the typical economic defence of Alberta’s bitumen deposits, namely that the resulting jobs, revenue and public income justify the hefty...