Kathryn Marshall, spokesperson for the oilsands lobby group Ethical Oil, is no doubt pissed at U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement that he’s putting off a decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project for 18 months. The pipeline promises Canadian oilsands bitumen to Texas refineries. Ethical Oil has put millions of dollars into lobbying and marketing tar sands oil as a squeaky-clean source of oil.

“It clearly didn’t work,” said Michael Levi, senior fellow at the New York think-tank Council of Foreign Relations. He pointed out that Ethical Oil’s campaign mostly appealed to those who already agreed with it.

That assessment is, I think, a trifl e harsh. Marshall did her best. She announced on the Huffington Post that Ethical Oil is way ahead of women’s rights organizations in Canada when it “stands up for the rights of oppressed women in confl ict oil regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.”

However, Marshall’s outfit, the brainchild of conservative Ezra Levant that was founded by Alykhan Velshi, a former aide to federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, is a trifle narrow and obviously needs to appeal to a broader audience. In fact, some unthinking (not to mention childish) dissenters have suggested it’s not enough to charge: “Our oil is better than your oil because we let women drive and you don’t, so nyah, nyah, nyah.”

Yet it’s obviously not suffi ciently inclusive to simply talk about oil in terms of ethicality since the windmill, solar and natural gas people are sure to nod off after the fi rst sentence. And those people who inexplicably insist on paying more attention to social issues than to business will refuse to relate. Then there has to be something for those who follow the Don Cherry Just-Say-No-to-Pinko-Sissies approach to life.

In broadening the appeal of Ethical Oil, Marshall would do well to start up Ethical Fisticuffs in Hockey and, after that catches on, she may want to throw in a couple more tidbits to the business community, such as Ethical Salmon Farming and Ethical Asbestos. Also, the lobbyist needs to offer something for intellectuals—Ethical Poverty would be a good title. As a grand finale, she could go for a Huffington Post piece titled “Ethical Sexism” to draw in women who, for some reason, didn’t get the point of her first piece.

So, let us take a closer look at the big three: Ethical Fisticuffs in Hockey, Ethical Poverty and Ethical Sexism. Ethical Fisticuffs in Hockey is a no-brainer, a mark of Canadianness right up there with the maple leaf and being polite. Of course, being polite does not apply when one is in the NHL. Note that underprivileged countries such as Saudi Arabia do not encourage anyone, especially women, to play hockey. Worse, I hear they don’t have much ice. That sounds the final buzzer to that argument.

Ethical Poverty is certainly something Canada can be proud of. Take Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as an example. Known as the poorest postal code in Canada, its streets house large numbers of those who suffer from mental illness, work in the sex trade, have drug addictions or are homeless.

It is the concept of Ethical Poverty that successfully keeps all these people in one place where they can be fed in soup kitchens and kept out of areas inhabited by their betters. It is a concept that has saved all levels of government—municipal, provincial and federal—countless money over the years by effectively keeping them occupied arguing about whether or not it would be a good idea to provide affordable housing, good medical assistance and accessible substance abuse programs.

Ethical Sexism is exemplified by the recent sexual harassment scandal in the RCMP, which began when Corporal Catherine Galliford publicly alleged that she experienced years of sexual misconduct . Since then, several other women have come forward. Nonetheless, it is but rumour that the RCMP has changed its mantra from “We always get our man” to “We often get the woman, then promote the man who harassed her.”

Stack that up against the fact that there are no women in any Saudi Arabian police force for the male officers to harass. In other words, Canada’s Ethical Sexism is far superior to the sexism in places such as Saudi Arabia where women have to stay at home to be harassed.

All of these concepts are sure to broaden the appeal of Ethical Oil. In fact, I believe Marshall and the other people behind Ethical Oil have already put them in play. After all, it is the only possible explanation for the fact that Obama is rethinking the Keystone pipeline project.