With the rise of social media in today’s world, we are also seeing the rise of many companies cracking down on how their employees, prospective or current, use these tools.  The debate on how companies should be able to interact with what their employees do on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter came up in a panel discussion outlined by Chris MacDonald in his blog post “Ethics, law, and social media in the workplace”.

In my opinion it should be understood that there is a clear separation between the life of an employee within the workplace and the life they host outside of it, including online.  My biggest quarrel with companies deciding what can and can’t be posted to social media is it takes away the definitive quality a facebook page or twitter account is meant to create for an individual.  Your friends on facebook don’t want be subscribed to a figurehead of a company, they’re subscribed to a real person whose likes and dislikes can’t always coincide with the ideal image a company might want to portray.

Adding to this, when companies limit their recruitment to people with “clean” social media accounts, they’re not hiring the full person.

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After reading Tudor Barcan’s blog post “Booming Estimates: Another Canadian Export Threatening To Dethrone Maple Syrup”, I was reminded of a quote from a great blogger that once said, “Here is another example why it is a good idea to properly understand a topic before blindly writing about it”.  With American energy independence on the rise, it is Canada whom is the most at risk both according to the article and to my earlier blog post, “The American Dream a Nightmare for Canada”.

Unfortunately for us, while we account for roughly 30% of the 10 million barrels of crude the US imports a day, that number is set to drop to only 5.5 million by the year 2030.  With our exports so focused on the US and so much money invested in oil extraction and refining, now is not the time for us to try and diversify where we get our energy from.

Our economy is going to take a blow, that’s for sure, but how we respond will be what defines our energy production in the next decade.  I think our best option is to become more efficient with what we have today so we can afford a green tomorrow.

Word Count: 200       Canada sees risk in U.S. oil boom and Booming Estimates: Another Canadian Export Threatening To Dethrone Maple Syrup