The mayor of Victoria is in Alberta this week to tour an oilsands operation at the suggestion of some members of Calgary city council.

The Calgary politicians invited Mayor Lisa Helps to join them for the tour after Victoria city council endorsed a potential class-action lawsuit against the oilsands industry.

Helps will join industry leaders from Cenovus and members of the pro-energy advocacy group Canada Action for a tour on Friday of the steam-assisted gravity drainage oilsands project at Foster Creek.

"There's way too much polarization, there's way too much finger pointing, and I think even if we disagree, we need to disagree in an informed way — and that's one of the reasons that I am coming," she said Thursday.

At Cenovus's Foster Creek oilsands operation, 450-metre-deep wells are drilled andImage caption Unemployment remains stubbornly high in the US at 9.6%

The Federal Reserve has announced that it will pump $600bn (£373bn) into the US economy by the end of June next year to try to boost the fragile recovery.

This stimulus equates to $75bn a month, in a second round of "quantitative easing" (QE).

The US economy grew by an annual rate of 2% between July and September, which is not enough to reduce high unemployment.

Some analysts see QE as the last chance to get the US economy back on track.

The move was widely flagged, with most analysts expecting the Fed to inject $500bn into the economy.

For this reason, stock markets rose only slightly, with the Dow Jones closing up 26 points at 11,215, still enough to take the index