Gunsmith
Well-Known Member
Basically same as North slope crude that is still hanging around after the Exxon Valdez.
Northern Gateway APPROVED
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walleyes
Crew Member
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wow, what a snow job in that bevy of links. as I said, get ready for the eventual spill from a pipe line. and unlike the Valdez experience, the dilbit will be a permanent feature of your waterways, forever, just as it is in Michigan.
GLG
Well-Known Member
Alberta and it's tarsands riches....
How do you square the 7.8 billion dollar debt and rising at a rate of 11 million a day?
I read those links and was amazed how they put all those billion dollar pictures out there.
They seem to be proud of all the taxpayer money that has been invested into tarsands.
Here is quote from one of those links.
How do you square those quotes with this?
Fort McMurray school board contemplates four-day school week to deal with budget shortfall
Four-day school week and reconfiguring schools debated by Fort McMurray school board to deal with budget deficit; board to vote as early as next week.
The Fort McMurray public school board in Alberta is contemplating compressing the school week to four days to help make up for a projected budget deficit of $4.4 million.
The board of trustees sent a notice to parents in January to seek input on how best to deal with the budget shortfall, saying that among the considerations is reconfiguring or combining schools or chopping a day off the school week............ “The board has only built one new school in the last 26 years. That’s not acceptable,” he said. “There’s been all kinds of growth. We don’t have capacity where we need it and we don’t have schools where we need them.”
More... http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/...school_week_to_deal_with_budget_shortfall.html
So that's how your Alberta advantage is working out....
Seems to me that you friends at CAPP like to paint a nice picture but the average Joe get's the shaft.
What's that say about your investment in your kids........
How do you square the 7.8 billion dollar debt and rising at a rate of 11 million a day?
I read those links and was amazed how they put all those billion dollar pictures out there.
They seem to be proud of all the taxpayer money that has been invested into tarsands.
Here is quote from one of those links.
- Thanks to oil sands development, Fort McMurray has become one of the fastest-growing communities in North America, with average annual population growth of approximately 5% from 2006-2011. Source: Statistics Canada.
- As of March 2011, 21,115 people were directly employed in oil sands operations jobs in Fort McMurray. Source: Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.
How do you square those quotes with this?
Fort McMurray school board contemplates four-day school week to deal with budget shortfall
Four-day school week and reconfiguring schools debated by Fort McMurray school board to deal with budget deficit; board to vote as early as next week.
The Fort McMurray public school board in Alberta is contemplating compressing the school week to four days to help make up for a projected budget deficit of $4.4 million.
The board of trustees sent a notice to parents in January to seek input on how best to deal with the budget shortfall, saying that among the considerations is reconfiguring or combining schools or chopping a day off the school week............ “The board has only built one new school in the last 26 years. That’s not acceptable,” he said. “There’s been all kinds of growth. We don’t have capacity where we need it and we don’t have schools where we need them.”
More... http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/...school_week_to_deal_with_budget_shortfall.html
So that's how your Alberta advantage is working out....
Seems to me that you friends at CAPP like to paint a nice picture but the average Joe get's the shaft.
What's that say about your investment in your kids........
Last edited by a moderator:
Haha, easy to explain, tarsand goons don't need no brains. Actually better they don't know much so they can just focus on their work without worrying too much about what's happening around them! lol
The strategy is to give the goons enough so they can afford some toys and think they do well while the real $ goes to a few out of country super rich while BC's, Canada's and the world's interests are ignored.
Bent-Tip
Well-Known Member
I'd like to laugh at this calmsea, but really it's too true to be funny.......
Gunsmith
Well-Known Member
What do you mean unlike the Valdez? That oil is still in place under the surface, where it is still causing issue to the environment.
Gunsmith
Well-Known Member
GLG
Well-Known Member
17 Sep 2012, TheTyee.ca
As Canada's inept Tory politicians now salute the remarkable achievements of Peter Lougheed, they tellingly omit his radical views on resource development. And that should come as no surprise. Unlike the current libertarian "strip it and ship it" crowd that governs most of the west, Lougheed stood for something different. He offered a farsighted vision that was both progressive and altogether conservative. Although everybody from Saskatchewan's Brad Wall to Alberta's Alison Redford now praise the famously competent premier, none walk his talk.
Lougheed's famous principles, which greatly influenced Norway's take on oil development, strike at the core of Canadian life. Alberta's own oil patch didn't like him. Yet over the last few years the affable and charismatic statesman repeated his basic philosophy to the likes of Policy Options and this humble reporter. They should remain on the lips of every Canadian.
1. Behave like an owner
As oil prices shot up from $2 to $25 a barrel in the 1970s Lougheed learned that Albertans, the lucky occupiers of much oil real estate, needed to think and behave like owners. Ownership, of course, came with onerous responsibilities, including the basic recognition that hydrocarbons and most mineral resources are finite. "You have to look at oil and natural gas as a depleting and declining resource. And you have to manage the resource and that means to manage it with good public policy," he recently told Policy Options.
The absence of meaningful public policy on resource ownership (and only the NDP now embraces this conservative notion) puts Canada in the camp of backwater kingdoms.
2. Collect your fair share
Smart owners don't give away oil or any other depletable resource. Lougheed thought that low royalties were not only bad for the owner but encouraged Big Oil to be fat and complacent. One of Lougheed's first moves as premier was to capture a much larger share of hydrocarbon profits. In his day that amounted to raising the owner's share from 17 per cent of all non-renewable resource revenue to 40 per cent. Such increases boosted government income by $10 billion a year (and 30 per cent of that was directly saved for future generations). Industry, of course, called the man a cruel sheik and a "red Tory." Higher royalties moderated the pace of production but also forced industry to be more innovative and competitive.
Ever since then successive Tory governments have lowered royalties and thereby cheated the citizens of Alberta, the owners of the province's hydrocarbons, of tens of billions of dollars. Today, Alberta collects less than 15 per cent of available non-renewable resource revenue. Governing parties in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ottawa now shamelessly offer Big Oil some of the lowest royalty rates in the world for oil, heavy oil, natural gas, and shale gas. The direct consequence for ignoring Lougheed's principle in Alberta is that libertarians have bequeathed the province with billion dollar deficits and the prospect of becoming a ghost town when economic hydrocarbons run out.
3. Save for a rainy day
In the 1970s Lougheed, a long-term thinker, established one of the world's first sovereign funds or rainy day accounts. Given the finite nature of oil and gas, he believed in saving at least 30 per cent of the wealth for the inevitable economic deluge. Not surprisingly, Albertans wholeheartedly championed the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund. Norwegians copied and bettered the idea with their own pension/oil fund now worth $600 billion. But the politicians who came after Lougheed debased the concept. Today Alberta's Heritage Fund is worth a paltry $15 billion, or just $3 billion more than when Lougheed left government. Lougheed's successors didn't believe in saving. They've either lowered taxes or simply given away the balance of the province's wealth to special interest groups such as AltaLink or U.S. multinationals and companies owned by the Communist Party of China. This fundamental betrayal of the public trust "stressed out" Lougheed till the day of his death. Saskatchewan, B.C., Alberta and the Territories still do not bank a significant portion of their finite resource revenue for future generations. Ottawa, the largest beneficiary of resource exploitation in the form of corporate taxes, saves nothing.
4. Add value
Lougheed was never impressed by the convenient Canadian habit of exporting raw resources without adding value. In his reading of the nation's history, Canada should have made clothing instead of exporting raw furs. He also recognized that the majority of jobs in most resource industries didn't come from digging holes but from refining the raw stuff into something useful. As a consequence, he resolutely championed the upgrading and refining of bitumen into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and petrochemicals. Unlike Redford, Hall and Harper, he opposed the Keystone XL pipeline as wholesale job exporter. He didn't think that Albertans should be enriching refineries on the Texas coast owned by Saudi Arabia or the Koch brothers.
"I think we should be processing the bitumen from the Alberta oil sands within Alberta and creating the jobs east of Edmonton and in that area there," he recently told Policy Options. "And I think that would be, from a political and from an economic point of view, the right public policy for Alberta." A bold tax on exported bitumen still might get this economic ball rolling.
5. Go slow
Last but not least, Lougheed often lamented the speed of bitumen development in the province. His motto was "one project at a time." Over the last decade libertarians rubber stamped more than 100 projects and the gold rush overwhelmed infrastructure, bloated wages, drove up house prices and generally inflated the cost of living. Why bother with a trade or an education when a petro job will garner you 10 times the income, asked Lougheed. Knowing that busts invariably follow booms, he viewed overheated growth in the tar sands as a great calamity. Real owners don't overheat their economies or stress out their communities: they go slow. The architect of Norway's oil development, Farouk al Kasim, a brilliant Iraqi geologist, cautioned the Norwegians to do the same.
In a famous 2006 Policy Options interview, Lougheed described rapid bitumen development as a mess and just plain wrong. "I keep trying to see who the beneficiaries are. Not the people in Red Deer, because everything they have got is costing more. It is not the people of the province, because they are not getting the royalty return that they should be getting, with $75 oil." To date no Tory political leader has had the courage to address the pace and scale of bitumen development on a provincial or national level.
Yet libertarian politicians serving Big Oil continue to speed up bitumen production with potentially disastrous consequences for ordinary Albertans. Environmental and carbon liabilities remain largely unaddressed and no one has prepared for the implosion of the Chinese economy. By flooding the market place with cheap bitumen, Alberta's current stupid government has cheated the owners of a fair price in U.S. markets due to sustained lack of planning.
6. Practice statecraft
Unlike most modern politicians, Lougheed believed in competent government and a smart civil service and for good reason. Sitting on a pile of hydrocarbons has never made a people smart. A lucky resource owner not only needed good accountants and reliable scientists, but a capable political class that could monitor and regulate the resource developers overtime. If tar sands companies had 25 or 50 year plans, then government needed to do the same, reasoned Lougheed. As a consequence he steadily built the civil and intellectual infrastructure needed to make careful public policy that respected future generations.
Lougheed not only constructed one of the country's most able civil services, but actively funded the same sort of environmental science and research that the Harper government has dismantled. To keep an eye on the industry's real profits and costs, Lougheed's government even owned an oil company: the Alberta Energy Company. Today Lougheed's vision of competent government has been replaced by negligent regimes that slavishly represent resource developers instead of citizens. No western province now has the ability to do long-term planning or perform critical audits such as those routinely done by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. And no western premier publicly challenged the wholesale dismantling of federal environmental legislation and science programs by Stephen Harper, yet this folly may well kill the social license for bitumen development. Dumb and dangerous petro states have actively replaced conservative vision. So here's the radical Lougheed legacy that Canada's political class has abandoned: Behave like an owner. Collect your fair share. Save for the rainy day. Add value. Go slow. Practice statecraft.
Next time you hear a gaggle of western politicians praising Lougheed, ask these extremists why they won't act like him. And whom they serve. It's not us, the owners.
As Canada's inept Tory politicians now salute the remarkable achievements of Peter Lougheed, they tellingly omit his radical views on resource development. And that should come as no surprise. Unlike the current libertarian "strip it and ship it" crowd that governs most of the west, Lougheed stood for something different. He offered a farsighted vision that was both progressive and altogether conservative. Although everybody from Saskatchewan's Brad Wall to Alberta's Alison Redford now praise the famously competent premier, none walk his talk.
Lougheed's famous principles, which greatly influenced Norway's take on oil development, strike at the core of Canadian life. Alberta's own oil patch didn't like him. Yet over the last few years the affable and charismatic statesman repeated his basic philosophy to the likes of Policy Options and this humble reporter. They should remain on the lips of every Canadian.
1. Behave like an owner
As oil prices shot up from $2 to $25 a barrel in the 1970s Lougheed learned that Albertans, the lucky occupiers of much oil real estate, needed to think and behave like owners. Ownership, of course, came with onerous responsibilities, including the basic recognition that hydrocarbons and most mineral resources are finite. "You have to look at oil and natural gas as a depleting and declining resource. And you have to manage the resource and that means to manage it with good public policy," he recently told Policy Options.
The absence of meaningful public policy on resource ownership (and only the NDP now embraces this conservative notion) puts Canada in the camp of backwater kingdoms.
2. Collect your fair share
Smart owners don't give away oil or any other depletable resource. Lougheed thought that low royalties were not only bad for the owner but encouraged Big Oil to be fat and complacent. One of Lougheed's first moves as premier was to capture a much larger share of hydrocarbon profits. In his day that amounted to raising the owner's share from 17 per cent of all non-renewable resource revenue to 40 per cent. Such increases boosted government income by $10 billion a year (and 30 per cent of that was directly saved for future generations). Industry, of course, called the man a cruel sheik and a "red Tory." Higher royalties moderated the pace of production but also forced industry to be more innovative and competitive.
Ever since then successive Tory governments have lowered royalties and thereby cheated the citizens of Alberta, the owners of the province's hydrocarbons, of tens of billions of dollars. Today, Alberta collects less than 15 per cent of available non-renewable resource revenue. Governing parties in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ottawa now shamelessly offer Big Oil some of the lowest royalty rates in the world for oil, heavy oil, natural gas, and shale gas. The direct consequence for ignoring Lougheed's principle in Alberta is that libertarians have bequeathed the province with billion dollar deficits and the prospect of becoming a ghost town when economic hydrocarbons run out.
3. Save for a rainy day
In the 1970s Lougheed, a long-term thinker, established one of the world's first sovereign funds or rainy day accounts. Given the finite nature of oil and gas, he believed in saving at least 30 per cent of the wealth for the inevitable economic deluge. Not surprisingly, Albertans wholeheartedly championed the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund. Norwegians copied and bettered the idea with their own pension/oil fund now worth $600 billion. But the politicians who came after Lougheed debased the concept. Today Alberta's Heritage Fund is worth a paltry $15 billion, or just $3 billion more than when Lougheed left government. Lougheed's successors didn't believe in saving. They've either lowered taxes or simply given away the balance of the province's wealth to special interest groups such as AltaLink or U.S. multinationals and companies owned by the Communist Party of China. This fundamental betrayal of the public trust "stressed out" Lougheed till the day of his death. Saskatchewan, B.C., Alberta and the Territories still do not bank a significant portion of their finite resource revenue for future generations. Ottawa, the largest beneficiary of resource exploitation in the form of corporate taxes, saves nothing.
4. Add value
Lougheed was never impressed by the convenient Canadian habit of exporting raw resources without adding value. In his reading of the nation's history, Canada should have made clothing instead of exporting raw furs. He also recognized that the majority of jobs in most resource industries didn't come from digging holes but from refining the raw stuff into something useful. As a consequence, he resolutely championed the upgrading and refining of bitumen into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and petrochemicals. Unlike Redford, Hall and Harper, he opposed the Keystone XL pipeline as wholesale job exporter. He didn't think that Albertans should be enriching refineries on the Texas coast owned by Saudi Arabia or the Koch brothers.
"I think we should be processing the bitumen from the Alberta oil sands within Alberta and creating the jobs east of Edmonton and in that area there," he recently told Policy Options. "And I think that would be, from a political and from an economic point of view, the right public policy for Alberta." A bold tax on exported bitumen still might get this economic ball rolling.
5. Go slow
Last but not least, Lougheed often lamented the speed of bitumen development in the province. His motto was "one project at a time." Over the last decade libertarians rubber stamped more than 100 projects and the gold rush overwhelmed infrastructure, bloated wages, drove up house prices and generally inflated the cost of living. Why bother with a trade or an education when a petro job will garner you 10 times the income, asked Lougheed. Knowing that busts invariably follow booms, he viewed overheated growth in the tar sands as a great calamity. Real owners don't overheat their economies or stress out their communities: they go slow. The architect of Norway's oil development, Farouk al Kasim, a brilliant Iraqi geologist, cautioned the Norwegians to do the same.
In a famous 2006 Policy Options interview, Lougheed described rapid bitumen development as a mess and just plain wrong. "I keep trying to see who the beneficiaries are. Not the people in Red Deer, because everything they have got is costing more. It is not the people of the province, because they are not getting the royalty return that they should be getting, with $75 oil." To date no Tory political leader has had the courage to address the pace and scale of bitumen development on a provincial or national level.
Yet libertarian politicians serving Big Oil continue to speed up bitumen production with potentially disastrous consequences for ordinary Albertans. Environmental and carbon liabilities remain largely unaddressed and no one has prepared for the implosion of the Chinese economy. By flooding the market place with cheap bitumen, Alberta's current stupid government has cheated the owners of a fair price in U.S. markets due to sustained lack of planning.
6. Practice statecraft
Unlike most modern politicians, Lougheed believed in competent government and a smart civil service and for good reason. Sitting on a pile of hydrocarbons has never made a people smart. A lucky resource owner not only needed good accountants and reliable scientists, but a capable political class that could monitor and regulate the resource developers overtime. If tar sands companies had 25 or 50 year plans, then government needed to do the same, reasoned Lougheed. As a consequence he steadily built the civil and intellectual infrastructure needed to make careful public policy that respected future generations.
Lougheed not only constructed one of the country's most able civil services, but actively funded the same sort of environmental science and research that the Harper government has dismantled. To keep an eye on the industry's real profits and costs, Lougheed's government even owned an oil company: the Alberta Energy Company. Today Lougheed's vision of competent government has been replaced by negligent regimes that slavishly represent resource developers instead of citizens. No western province now has the ability to do long-term planning or perform critical audits such as those routinely done by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. And no western premier publicly challenged the wholesale dismantling of federal environmental legislation and science programs by Stephen Harper, yet this folly may well kill the social license for bitumen development. Dumb and dangerous petro states have actively replaced conservative vision. So here's the radical Lougheed legacy that Canada's political class has abandoned: Behave like an owner. Collect your fair share. Save for the rainy day. Add value. Go slow. Practice statecraft.
Next time you hear a gaggle of western politicians praising Lougheed, ask these extremists why they won't act like him. And whom they serve. It's not us, the owners.
walleyes
Crew Member
I do know that there are those out there that are interested in the truth and not the typical air headed blabber that is the norm on this site. Getting their information from the celebrities and Socialist ideologists that live a 1000 miles away from us but yet seem to know more about our business than we ourselves do,, could never figure that one out. I raise my kids here, feed my family here, live and play in the woods here yet you all living on the left coast and those living in Hollywood know more about my way of life than I do. Cant quite figure out how that is. I help set up budgets for drilling programs based on prophet margins on sales on our product,, yet you all seem to know more than I do what those prophet margins are. Cant quite figure that one out. I work with and help design and have many friends that work in the environmental end of this industry yet some how you are telling us what is happening here, you all some how know more about it than we do,, cant quite figure that one out. Are there issues in this industry,, absolutely there is. But leaps an bounds are being made and millions of dollars being spent in addressing these issue. What is it with you all,, do you think we are all just a bunch of idiot drunken fools out here with no regard for our environment. I am a fishermen and hunter and outdoor enthusiast extreme I doubt very little on here spend as much time out there as I do. I am a 3rd generation Albertan and outdoorsman do you not think I give a damn ?? Yes it hurts to see some of what is going on,, I am one of those that is losing his hunting and fishing grounds,, the heck with the Indians,, most of these Indian bands that are crying the most have not lived off the land for generations now, most of them wouldn't know the head from the butt of a moose yet they get the attention.. Yes it hurts but I live in the real world and sometimes we have to give,, there has to be a certain amount of loss to have gain. We are humans, we need the things we need and to get those things we leave a mark it cant be helped. What we can do is our damn best to ensure that mark is minimal. I insist on it, my bosses insist on it my company and all of them insist on it.
I really feel sorry for you people I do, and that's the Gods honest truth, as frustrated as I get with you all I do feel sorry for you. I just really wonder what BC has planned.. I have said it on here before,, personally I don't care if the pipeline goes through and I truly think it should be BC's choice if it goes through on their ground,, I can respect that. A line will go through someplace, Alberta will get its oil out to market. But what I cant stand is the useless, un informed blabber about an industry you all obviously know very little about.
I will continue to post links and information for those more enlightened to learning. For those of you with your head in the sand,, continue on as you were. Don't worry Alberta will keep growing, your kids will continue to leave home and come here to work.
Just wondering,, what is the BC advantage ? welfare or a plane ticket to Alberta or Sask.. As far as our short falls in public infrastructure,, there is no doubt this is an issue here, it concerns us all but really guys,, you are blaming the oil industry because our useless left wing government over spends its budget. How can you blame the industry for that. If you have a spending problem you don't just throw more money at it,, you quit spending and put the money where it belongs. That's a governing issue not an industry issue. These companies are huge contributors to our communities,, huge,, most give millions a year out to the communities they work in.
I really feel sorry for you people I do, and that's the Gods honest truth, as frustrated as I get with you all I do feel sorry for you. I just really wonder what BC has planned.. I have said it on here before,, personally I don't care if the pipeline goes through and I truly think it should be BC's choice if it goes through on their ground,, I can respect that. A line will go through someplace, Alberta will get its oil out to market. But what I cant stand is the useless, un informed blabber about an industry you all obviously know very little about.
I will continue to post links and information for those more enlightened to learning. For those of you with your head in the sand,, continue on as you were. Don't worry Alberta will keep growing, your kids will continue to leave home and come here to work.
Just wondering,, what is the BC advantage ? welfare or a plane ticket to Alberta or Sask.. As far as our short falls in public infrastructure,, there is no doubt this is an issue here, it concerns us all but really guys,, you are blaming the oil industry because our useless left wing government over spends its budget. How can you blame the industry for that. If you have a spending problem you don't just throw more money at it,, you quit spending and put the money where it belongs. That's a governing issue not an industry issue. These companies are huge contributors to our communities,, huge,, most give millions a year out to the communities they work in.
as has already been pointed out in some detail, dilbit behaves totally differently that heavy crude. as a result, once it hits the bottom of say a river in Michigan, it is there FOREVER, there is no way to clean it up save tearing out the entire bottom of that drainage. as all of us have seen, no matter what the PR department says, pipe lines leak. if will simply be a matter of time before the pristine waterways of BC are destroyed forever as a result of a dilbit leak.
I am not at all confident that Obama will say no to a pipeline running the length of the US from N to S and so we will join you in watching our environment and aquifers being destroyed all for a few corporations making obscene profits at the expense of the majority of citizens no matter which side of the border you reside.
GLG
Well-Known Member
Walleyes thank-you for your thoughts.
We will lock horns but believe me I have everyone's interest at heart.
People and the environment are very important.
The environment can live without people but not the other way around.
I have family in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
In fact I have family in your town and you may even know them.
Last we spoke they were worried about the algae that grows in the lakes.
You see they fish and hunt too.
My family also runs deep like yours, but perhaps a little deeper
http://www.visitstalbert.com/Blog/tabid/146/EntryId/12/Exploring-Founders-Walk.aspx
Yup I even have family in Fort Mac. Even worked there as a high school summer student.
My second real job was spent (5 years) analyzing core samples from tarsands.
I spent another fifteen years in the patch on pipeline and drilling.
I do know a thing or two about whats going on in Alberta.
I'm very concerned with what's happening in Canada.
I come from a long line of conservative voting Canadians.
That record stretches back to 1667. No that's not a typo.
Yup 200 years before confederation.
Our family has been here for a spell.....
Here are the issues....
Climate Change and our dependency on tarsands.
Governance and Democracy.
Freedom and Rights
Currently we are heading down a road that lays waste to those things.
We see it every day and some of us are willing to say something about it.
Other should say something but don't, not sure why.
The way I see it, the thinking in Western Canada follows the Calgary School.
You may want to Google that to find out what that means.
I left Alberta because it went from a wonderful place to raise your kids to... not so much.
No regrets and my kid is a better person for it even if we had to give up some of that Alberta Advantage.
As far as I'm concerned things went to crap when my neighbor started running Alberta. You may know him as Ralf but I know him as the drunk who shared his time between the local pub and the Cecile hotel. The mistake he made was taking his advice from the Calgary School.
I should know as I have family in that school too.
We will lock horns but believe me I have everyone's interest at heart.
People and the environment are very important.
The environment can live without people but not the other way around.
I have family in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
In fact I have family in your town and you may even know them.
Last we spoke they were worried about the algae that grows in the lakes.
You see they fish and hunt too.
My family also runs deep like yours, but perhaps a little deeper
http://www.visitstalbert.com/Blog/tabid/146/EntryId/12/Exploring-Founders-Walk.aspx
Yup I even have family in Fort Mac. Even worked there as a high school summer student.
My second real job was spent (5 years) analyzing core samples from tarsands.
I spent another fifteen years in the patch on pipeline and drilling.
I do know a thing or two about whats going on in Alberta.
I'm very concerned with what's happening in Canada.
I come from a long line of conservative voting Canadians.
That record stretches back to 1667. No that's not a typo.
Yup 200 years before confederation.
Our family has been here for a spell.....
Here are the issues....
Climate Change and our dependency on tarsands.
Governance and Democracy.
Freedom and Rights
Currently we are heading down a road that lays waste to those things.
We see it every day and some of us are willing to say something about it.
Other should say something but don't, not sure why.
The way I see it, the thinking in Western Canada follows the Calgary School.
You may want to Google that to find out what that means.
I left Alberta because it went from a wonderful place to raise your kids to... not so much.
No regrets and my kid is a better person for it even if we had to give up some of that Alberta Advantage.
As far as I'm concerned things went to crap when my neighbor started running Alberta. You may know him as Ralf but I know him as the drunk who shared his time between the local pub and the Cecile hotel. The mistake he made was taking his advice from the Calgary School.
I should know as I have family in that school too.
GLG
Well-Known Member
Agreed Gunsmith ... agree but how do we get there?
Gunsmith
Well-Known Member
I agree with that fact but you still have to accept that the "Good" crude is still on the beaches of Alaska how many years later?
My point is that all of sudden the only "Bad Child" is the oilsands.
My point is that all of sudden the only "Bad Child" is the oilsands.
didn't mean to imply that. only pointing out the difference in the products involved. the gulf of mexico will also be seeing crude washing ashore for long time to come in spite of the cleanup efforts involved. but spill dilbit in water, there won't be any clean up possible.
GLG
Well-Known Member
What do we do? Now I'm not much for unions but I'm not going to shoot the messenger.
In the Harry Potter stories, characters are too afraid to utter the name of the villain, Voldemort.
Something similar appears to be happening in the Alberta election when it comes to two key issues related to the oil sands: upgrading and royalties. Albertans clearly want to talk about these issues, but for some reason, most of our politicians seem unable or unwilling to speak. Consider the results of two recent polls:
A Leger Marketing poll shows that about 60 per cent of Albertans don't think they're getting fair value for the sale of our province's collectively-owned energy resources. A ThinkHQ poll shows an even greater majority (81 per cent) would support some kind of government intervention to encourage upgrading and discourage raw bitumen exports. Despite the clear weight of public opinion, only one of the five parties contesting the race (the NDP) says it would even consider increasing royalty rates. Most are also silent on the subject of upgrading. Why the remarkable disconnect between what voters want and what parties are willing to offer? The answer can be summed up in two words: power and fear. Everyone knows that oil and gas is Alberta's most powerful industry – and they have aggressively used that power to get a sweetheart deal for themselves. They've also used their power to make sure that it's industry – not ordinary Albertans or their elected representatives – who decide how and when to develop our province's resources.
It was the industry, for example, that actually wrote the oilsands royalty regime that Ralph Klein implemented in mid-90s – a regime which, in most important respects, is still in place today. How sweet is the deal? Oil companies pay a token royalty of as little as one per cent on gross revenues until all of a project's costs are paid off. Even after pay-out, royalties are dramatically lower than rates in other jurisdictions.
No other industry in Canada enjoys this kind of special treatment. It means developers get their main input – bitumen – virtually free. To put it another way, it means that ordinary Albertans (who own the bitumen) are actually paying for the construction of all those oilsands facilities (in the form of foregone revenues).
In a similar way, the energy industry has been successful in discouraging government from implementing policies aimed a increasing value-added production – even though such measures were instrumental in creating Alberta's successful petrochemical industry in the 70s and 80s. To defend the status quo they've created, the industry and its defenders employ several fear-based arguments. For example, they say that ultra-low royalties are needed to attract investment to a high-cost sector like the oilsands. This argument may have carried some weight when the oilsands were a marginal industry and oil was trading at $15 a barrel, as it was when the current royalty regime was introduced in 1997. But should we continue the giveaways when oil is trading at $100 a barrel and the industry is making profits of $32 billion a year, as it did in 2010? The industry also argues that their prescription of low royalties, limited government oversight and quick project approvals (a strategy recently embraced with gusto by the Harper government) means "jobs, jobs, jobs" as far as the eye can see.
But this strategy has several obvious downsides. For example, it means that more and more potential jobs in upgrading will be sent down the pipeline to place like Texas and China. It also means that the province doesn't get the revenue it needs for things like high-quality health care and education and care for seniors and the kids of working parents. Ever wonder why Alberta, Canada's wealthiest province, is running multi-billion deficits and saying it can't afford to maintain middle-of-the-road spending on vital public services? Or why the Heritage Fund is worth less on a per capita basis today than when it was established 35 years ago?
That's what happens when you sell your most important assets for a song. So why won't Alberta politicians speak out and demand a better deal on royalties and jobs? The problem is that they are taking their cue from Ed Stelmach when they should be looking for inspiration in bolder (and much more successful) former Conservative premiers like Peter Lougheed and Newfoundland's Danny Williams. Unlike Stelmach – who didn't fight back when a recession-induced slowdown in investment was used by industry as proof that royalties should never be raised– Lougheed and Williams both understood that you have to bargain the best possible deal with energy companies, not simply cater to their every whim. As Lougheed famously said, Albertans need to think like owners. Owners know that sometimes they need to accept less. But they also know that, when conditions improve, they can and should demand more. Anything less would amount to being played for a sucker. These are the keys to breaking the spell that has rendered most of our politicians mute: they need to remember that Albertans, not oil companies, are the owners of their resources and they have to find the will to bargain hard on behalf of the people they represent. Gil McGowan is president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, representing 145,000 unionized Alberta workers.
Edmonton Journal, Wed Apr 4 2012
Byline: Gil McGowan
In the Harry Potter stories, characters are too afraid to utter the name of the villain, Voldemort.
Something similar appears to be happening in the Alberta election when it comes to two key issues related to the oil sands: upgrading and royalties. Albertans clearly want to talk about these issues, but for some reason, most of our politicians seem unable or unwilling to speak. Consider the results of two recent polls:
A Leger Marketing poll shows that about 60 per cent of Albertans don't think they're getting fair value for the sale of our province's collectively-owned energy resources. A ThinkHQ poll shows an even greater majority (81 per cent) would support some kind of government intervention to encourage upgrading and discourage raw bitumen exports. Despite the clear weight of public opinion, only one of the five parties contesting the race (the NDP) says it would even consider increasing royalty rates. Most are also silent on the subject of upgrading. Why the remarkable disconnect between what voters want and what parties are willing to offer? The answer can be summed up in two words: power and fear. Everyone knows that oil and gas is Alberta's most powerful industry – and they have aggressively used that power to get a sweetheart deal for themselves. They've also used their power to make sure that it's industry – not ordinary Albertans or their elected representatives – who decide how and when to develop our province's resources.
It was the industry, for example, that actually wrote the oilsands royalty regime that Ralph Klein implemented in mid-90s – a regime which, in most important respects, is still in place today. How sweet is the deal? Oil companies pay a token royalty of as little as one per cent on gross revenues until all of a project's costs are paid off. Even after pay-out, royalties are dramatically lower than rates in other jurisdictions.
No other industry in Canada enjoys this kind of special treatment. It means developers get their main input – bitumen – virtually free. To put it another way, it means that ordinary Albertans (who own the bitumen) are actually paying for the construction of all those oilsands facilities (in the form of foregone revenues).
In a similar way, the energy industry has been successful in discouraging government from implementing policies aimed a increasing value-added production – even though such measures were instrumental in creating Alberta's successful petrochemical industry in the 70s and 80s. To defend the status quo they've created, the industry and its defenders employ several fear-based arguments. For example, they say that ultra-low royalties are needed to attract investment to a high-cost sector like the oilsands. This argument may have carried some weight when the oilsands were a marginal industry and oil was trading at $15 a barrel, as it was when the current royalty regime was introduced in 1997. But should we continue the giveaways when oil is trading at $100 a barrel and the industry is making profits of $32 billion a year, as it did in 2010? The industry also argues that their prescription of low royalties, limited government oversight and quick project approvals (a strategy recently embraced with gusto by the Harper government) means "jobs, jobs, jobs" as far as the eye can see.
But this strategy has several obvious downsides. For example, it means that more and more potential jobs in upgrading will be sent down the pipeline to place like Texas and China. It also means that the province doesn't get the revenue it needs for things like high-quality health care and education and care for seniors and the kids of working parents. Ever wonder why Alberta, Canada's wealthiest province, is running multi-billion deficits and saying it can't afford to maintain middle-of-the-road spending on vital public services? Or why the Heritage Fund is worth less on a per capita basis today than when it was established 35 years ago?
That's what happens when you sell your most important assets for a song. So why won't Alberta politicians speak out and demand a better deal on royalties and jobs? The problem is that they are taking their cue from Ed Stelmach when they should be looking for inspiration in bolder (and much more successful) former Conservative premiers like Peter Lougheed and Newfoundland's Danny Williams. Unlike Stelmach – who didn't fight back when a recession-induced slowdown in investment was used by industry as proof that royalties should never be raised– Lougheed and Williams both understood that you have to bargain the best possible deal with energy companies, not simply cater to their every whim. As Lougheed famously said, Albertans need to think like owners. Owners know that sometimes they need to accept less. But they also know that, when conditions improve, they can and should demand more. Anything less would amount to being played for a sucker. These are the keys to breaking the spell that has rendered most of our politicians mute: they need to remember that Albertans, not oil companies, are the owners of their resources and they have to find the will to bargain hard on behalf of the people they represent. Gil McGowan is president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, representing 145,000 unionized Alberta workers.
Edmonton Journal, Wed Apr 4 2012
Byline: Gil McGowan
GLG
Well-Known Member
Yup your resources are committed (USA) and have been for pennies on the dollar. So the question you should be asking is, why is that.
Here is the lesson for BC.
Currently we are in a race to the bottom of the royalties barrel.
The competition is Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Never mind the rest of the world as they are no problem we have them beat by a long shot.
No one in the world can touch us on that one.
What are we going to do?
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