THE SLOWEST TRAIN CRASH

The chief executive of one of the country’s largest petroleum producers says the profound problem moving oil out of Western Canada is “the slowest train crash” he’s ever seen.

“From about 10 years out, you could see it coming, and yet we walked right into it as a nation, so a pretty, pretty sad statement on Canada,” Husky Energy CEO Rob Peabody said Thursday.

The trouble Peabody is talking about is the bottleneck affecting Canada’s oil transportation system and the wide price discount hammering petroleum producers this fall.

It’s costing industry and governments an estimated $84 million a day: $54 million to producers, $18 million to Alberta and another $12 million to the feds, according to the provincial government.