Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps is promising to keep an open mind as she tours an oilsands facility on Friday.
Helps will join Calgary city Coun. Jeff Davidson to visit the Cenovus’ Foster Creek facility, which is a steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) peoject.
Canada Action, the resource industry advocacy group that organized the trip, said the SAGD technique is used in 97 per cent of the oilsands land area, as well as for 80 per cent of reserves and about half of current production.
Helps says she wants to learn more about the industry and the innovations that companies are adopting. She says she’s also interested in hearing directly from workers, particularly with the current unemployment rate in Alberta.
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Helps has been a consistent opponent of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, but says she’s going into the trip with an open mind.
“We’ve got less than 12 years now to clean up our act, to phase to a low-carbon or no-carbon economy,” she said.
“That’s the direction that the scientists think we need to go, direction the feds think we need to go, that’s certainly the direction our region thinks we need to go.”
Calgary City Council invited Helps and the Victoria council to Alberta in February, after Victoria endorsed a class action lawsuit seeking compensation from oil and gas companies for damages caused by climate change.
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