Rex Murphy says he just doesn’t get the segment of society that doesn’t want anything to do with the development of Canada’s mineral and energy resources.

In fact, he finds it mind-boggling, the CBC personality and national newspaper columnist told delegates attending the 46th annual Yukon Geoscience Forum in Whitehorse.

There are two things that provide Canadians with the quality of life they enjoy today, he said.

Energy and minerals are the very foundation of the quality of life here, Murphy added.

Take either away, and that quality disappears; vanishes just like that, Murphy told the audience.

Imagine, he suggested, a world without the minerals mined to support the needs of society.

No computers, no cell phones, no lots of things.

Energy. Everybody uses it.

Murphy’s hour-long presentation to delegates was punctuated with humour, to say the least.

It was the kind of humour that makes you chuckle, even laugh, not just smile.

Murphy joked – presumably – that when he was working on the fourth floor of the CBC edifice on Front Street in Toronto, one of his jobs was to go down to the lobby, water the ferns and light the candles at the foot of Bishop Suzuki’s alter.

But he also shared some of the harsher realities of life in his home province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

When the cod industry was shut down, Murphy said, there were thousands and thousands of people washed out of a livelihood that had sustained them and their families for centuries – literally.

He remembers people giving away their homes for airplane tickets. He knows a fellow who sold his dwelling for seven airplane tickets.

Murphy said he knows the despair unemployment brings.

It was the resource sector, including the oil sands of Alberta, that provided jobs for the unemployed from the East Coast. It was the oil sands that supplied the glue that cements Canada as a nation, he suggested.

Murphy said Canada is fortunate to have some of the greatest oil and gas resources on the planet.

The trouble is, we can’t get them out of the country, he told the audience.

Murphy said he knows a man who worked for nine years on the Keystone Pipeline project before he decided to move to Mexico – where he’s already built three pipelines.

The resistance has meant that instead of taking full advantage of Newfoundland’s offshore oil, the refineries are importing their crude from Venezuela and Albania, he told the audience.

Murphy said he was not able to discuss the technical aspects of the mining industry, because he just doesn’t have that depth of knowledge.

He can, however, see the resistance to an industry that supplies jobs and economy, just as it provides the material used to in everyday life; the material that provides the cradle of comfort for Canadians.

Imagine, he suggested to the audience, a proposal these days to build the icon the Banff Springs Hotel has become.

It’s a work of magnificence from a time when it was sweat and hardship that laid one floor on top of the other, without any modern day cranes or sophisticated computer design programs, he said.

Murphy said suggesting such a project today, suggesting that a resort of such grandeur be built from the very rock it sits on, would likely bring the gallows.

He recalled the words of Samuel Jackson, his hero as a writer and poet who penned the the first English dictionary in 1755.

Jackson wrote that people more often need to be reminded than informed, he said.

Murphy said what Jackson meant is the importance of things most obvious in our daily lives can slip away from our minds; the things of importance can be the least appreciated at the same time.

As is traditional at the geoscience forum, guest speakers are given a gift.

Murphy was given a piece of driftwood with a painting on it by Jim Robb – a painting of a gold dredge.