"Ethical Oil" by Ezra Levant

Posted on September 4th, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace
Topics: Reviews, Politics, Energy

This weekend I read the book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands by Ezra Levant. I have complicated feelings about Ezra Levant, and I was certainly of two minds about buying this book. On one hand, it's an interesting topic. On the other hand, it's Ezra Levant, someone who I view as trying to inject the Canadian body politic with the same poison that's killing the United States an inch at a time à la Fox News, and that's not something I want to support financially. In Levant's favour, when it comes to the civil liberties and journalistic freedoms which make public dissent possible, Ezra is not just a cynical ideologue playing for his team first, last and only; he is the real deal, willing to stick up for anyone's rights, even people he doesn't agree with. What clinches it for me was the fact that he was the only person with a media outlet (when he ran the Western Standard magazine) who had the sheer balls to publish the Danish "Mohammed Cartoons." Furthermore, he was hauled before the Alberta Human Rights Commission as a consequence of doing so, winding up out of pocket something like a hundred grand to defend himself, and succeeded in staring them down. It is ultimately in honour of that swinging pair and that single, decisive act to defend freedom of speech in Canada from religious oppression that I threw a few bucks his way, and now a few links, too, via giving my impressions of his book.

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