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Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

It probably isn't.

There is a large portion of the federal government that have tied up Canadian economic interests in the tar sands. Entire regions of the central provinces are literally propped up on tar sands extraction. Take that away and you'll have swaths of blue-collar workers with mortgages, debts, and families and no income. They will probably be pretty mad.

Any group that harms tar sands extraction operations harms Canadian citizens... I can see the logic there.

The scary thing is the wider implications of C51 and that it hasn't been voted out, just tabled. This sort of thing winds up being buried in another bill with more obscure language around it when everyone has moved on.

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The scariest thing is that this is just the "too big to fail" thing all over again, just in Canada now. We're doing something that's bad for the environment, just because it props up huge swathes of the economy. This is short sighted. No country should prop up significant portions of their economies with unsustainable activities. While it's profitable, the population pays. When it fails, the population pays.

My Pediatrician made a particularly profound statement to me when I was trying to get my first child to sleep through the night and it applies when you're considering industry:

Pay now or pay later, but one way or another you will pay. It might seem hard now, but the longer you leave it, the worse it's going to be.

As noted by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9063463 tabling a bill is not getting rid of it; Tabling a bill is the first step to passing it.

Exactly; often the first of many. Industry lobbyists have no shortage of time and resources when it comes to pursuing the interests of their employers. With the copyright battle in Canada we went through several bills before an outcome was achieved [0].

Unfortunately for those corporations with assets tied up in the oil sands the market hasn't been terribly kind of late and people who moved out there for the industry jobs are beginning to see the effects of market demand slowing for their rather expensive goods.

[0] http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2012/06/canadian-copyfight-succes...

'Harm' is such a vague word though.

Could divesting of oil stocks be considered tantamount to terrorism going forward?

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