Greenpeace brings Just Beeber tour to Oakville

Justin Bieber is coming to a town near you – in cut out form, that is.

Greenpeace Canada is using images of the Canadian pop star in cutouts and billboards as a front to raise awareness of the tar sands in Alberta. The Just Beeber tour kicked off in Oakville Tuesday on a five-city tour across southern Ontario to educate people about the tar sands with the group's new tabloid-style magazine, GP in Touch.

Bieber fever. From left, Greenpeace Canada's Just Beeber tour volunteers, from left, Sandra Sinayuk and Peter de Vries, and volunteer organizer Natalie Caine, as the Tar Sands awareness campaign rolled into the Towne Square in downtown Oakville Tuesday.

“A lot of people read tabloid magazines (and) a lot of people are talking about celebrity scandals and love affairs, but really the biggest scandal in Canada right now is the Alberta tar sands,” said Natalie Caine, Greenpeace Canada volunteer organizer. 

“We’re using this tabloid magazine as a way to get people to think about how shameful a project this is and all of the social costs and environmental destruction that goes with it.” 

Fans can interact and pose with a life-sized photo of Bieber, and with a billboard sized cutout of their magazine cover featuring other celebrities, and upload them to Facebook and Twitter in an effort to try and persuade Bieber to be a spokesperson for the campaign, said Caine.

“What would be great is if we had more celebrities signing on through the campaign, endorsing it and helping spread awareness and education about Canada’s poor record when it comes to reducing our climate change greenhouse gases,” said Caine.

Caine said people have been contacting Bieber through social media, e-mails and messages on his website, but doesn’t know if the singer has received them.

“We’re trying to get in talks with him and we would love it if he would endorse the campaign, but that’s not the goal or objective of the campaign, the message of this tour is to really get people thinking about what’s going on in Alberta and the impact of the tar sands,” said Caine.

The photos will be added to a gallery that will be shared with participants who will be asked to post their photos on their social networks via Facebook and Twitter, she added.

“Getting people to interact with our campaign that way (will) educate the public about what’s really going on in Alberta and the energy policies that Canada is adopting and how they are shameful practices as we are facing global climate change,” said Caine.

Caine said the tar sands is the number one reason why Canada isn’t able to reach its Kyoto protocol agreements, and emits more greenhouse gas emissions just in production than all cars in Canada.

“When you have real and clean green energy solutions, like renewable energies, it doesn’t make any sense to subsidize an industry that makes billions of dollars a year with our government money when we could be using that money to subsidize a cleaner and greener future,” said Caine.

“Once people know it exists (clean energy), I think everyone (will) get on board that we don’t want a tar sands future, and that’s one of the biggest challenges and blockages to us transitioning to such a green economy that uses a cleaner renewable energy.”  

Source: InsideHalton