While surfing Facebook last night, as university students typically do to procrastinate, an ad on the side of the page caught my eye. The irony made me literally laugh out loud in my empty house, however it also made the pit of my stomach feel sick thinking about how effective this ad might actually be. This was the ad:
Credit: Enbridge
In case you don’t know, the Northern Gateway Pipeline is planned to travel 1,177km from Alberta to Kitimat, BC carrying an average of 525,000 barrels of petroleum per day. Enbridge is using this ad to persuade Canadian’s to trust in the safety of their brand. The reason this ad makes me so sick is because 36% of people trust ads displayed by social networking sites. Therefore, people are actually believing the promise of “safety” behind this ad. Unfortunately, the safety that companies like Embridge or Exxon guarantee just isn’t there. Two spills of Canadian tar sands oil have occurred within the past week.
I’m not ignorant of the fact that the tar sands annually pump tens of billions of dollars into our economy, I just think brainwashing our citizens into believing that it’s going to be 100% beneficial to Canada is too much. (Depending on how you define beneficial, I suppose). They’ve convinced many Canadian’s that it’s patriotic to support Canada as an “oil-exporting nation for 60 years.” We are commercializing everything else, why not commercialize nationalism.
The reality is that a spill-free system is an impossible goal. So what can we as consumers do to ensure that we aren’t believing every word we read, consciously or unconsciously? I presume that my stomach-sickening feeling truly comes from the fact that many people get lazy and do not do their research before consuming a product, an idea, or trusting in a company such as Enbridge.