Environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s visit to Alberta this week is causing a stir and some people are hoping the 16-year-old Swede learns a bit about our country and how Canada develops its natural resources

Cody Battershill of Action Canada, an organization that supports both the resource industry and the environment said on the NL Morning News, our country leads the way in areas that concern environmentalists.

“When you look at the world’s top ten oil exporters, Canada is actually the number one ranked country on every metric of environmental protection, human rights protection, equality, freedom of the media, freedom of speech, clean technology, renewables.”

“So, you name it and we are absolutely leading.”

The Calgarian added we should be using that to our advantage.

“We should be trying to compete globally with countries like Saudi Arabia,” he added. “Make them compete with our energy resources for international customers because we outrank a lot of these other countries on these values and these metrics that these protesters are talking about, such as again environmental protection and climate change action.”

Battershill thinks we need to ask ourselves some hard questions.

“Do we want to shut down all of our resource production?” he asked. “Not just oil and gas but we’re seen what’s happened with fish farming. We’ve seen with the forestry industry. We’re looking at what’s happening right now with our farmers and our ranchers.”

“So we can take Canada completely out of the game, there’s no environmental benefit around the world and our families will absolutely continue to suffer.”