FINANCIAL TIMES: Wild moose chase: “Chief Jim Boucher has a canny way of keeping Shell on its toes over an oil project near his tribal lands on the Athabasca river in northern Canada.” (ShellNews.net) 10 March 05

By Clay Harris

Published: March 10 2005

Chief Jim Boucher has a canny way of keeping Shell on its toes over an oil project near his tribal lands on the Athabasca river in northern Canada. Perhaps that is his genealogy: he is part Cree, part Scot - his grandfather came from the Orkneys.

With his poker face, it was hard to tell whether Boucher was poking fun at Shell last week when he told a group of journalists that Chinese businessmen were courting him over a plot of land potentially worth billions of dollars in oil sands, the tar-like substance that is mined for bitumen and turned into crude.

The comments were made in the presence of Shell Canada's head of oil sands, Neil Camarta, who has signed a memorandum of understanding to develop the site - containing 350m barrels of crude. Camarta suddenly looked like lunch didn't agree with him.

But there was no mistaking the twinkle in the chief's eye when he was asked what impact open-pit mining of oil sands had on local wildlife, such as moose. When Shell needed a moose to shoot a TV advertisement on its operations in northern Canada, the chief replied, it was forced to import a tame one from southern Alberta.