THE ALBERTA NDP THE PARTY OF OIL WORKERS

THE COINCIDENTAL BIRTH OF THE NEW DEMOCRATS 

AND THE OIL INDUSTRY IN ALBERTA

Rachel Notley warned New Democrats that adopting the LEAP manifesto which demands the end of oil extraction from the Tar Sands as well as conventional and shale gas plays, and NO pipelines, would put the Eastern arm of the party in direct conflict with a party that is proudly Albertan and directly involved in the oil industry history in the province even more so than the long ruling party the PC’s.

It was the development of oil and energy in Alberta that created new wealth and a new industrial province after WWII. The discovery of oil not only brought the oil industry but also the oil and energy workers union, a small American union that had an arm in Alberta, the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers OCAW. In Alberta it was beginning its organizing of workers in the field and in the new gas and chemical plants being built between Edmonton and Fort Saskatchewan.

This was the post war boom, the party in power was Social Credit, and while  there was no NDP there was an active labour political movement housed in the AFL and Edmonton Trades and Labour Council, members belonged to the Communist Party, the CCF and some still belonged to the OBU and IWW.

Edmonton had a history of electing labour council members as Mayor, Aldermen (women), school board trustees and Hospital Board members. Elmer Roper  longtime labour activist, CCF activist and candidate, owner of ABC Printing and publisher of Alberta Labour News would be elected Mayor of Edmonton after the creation of the NDP by the merger of the CCF with the newly created post war Canadian Labour Congress.

The sixties saw the growth of the labour movement in Canada and in Alberta, including the creation of an active movement of organizing public sector workers, provincially, municipally and federally. The Federal Workers Union originating in Calgary would merge with the Ontario based National Workers Union to create what we know as the Canadian Union of Public  Employees, the Civil Service Union of Alberta would become a union known as the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.

But throughout the oil boom of the fifties and sixties the union most associated with the provincial NDP was the Oil Chemical and Atomic Energy Workers Union under the leadership of Neil Reimer and his assistant Reg Baskin

That’s right the party was brought to life in Alberta by Oil Workers in the provinces new Energy market. Its first party leader was Neil Reimer, who would meet a charismatic young politician a contemporary of Peter Lougheed and Joe Clark at the University of Alberta, Grant Notley who would go on to become party Leader and its first elected MLA.

Notley himself did not represent Edmonton but his home region, the oil rich north of Alberta, the Grand Prairie, and Peace River riding.

As it had since 1936 the Social Credit party of Alberta held power in the province as a one party state, under the permanent leadership of Premier Ernest Manning, Preston’s daddy.  The New Democratic Party of Alberta focused its energy not only on consolidating union power in the party as well as the voices of the left and progressives but in challenging that Social Credit domination of Alberta Politics.

This was also the time of the Cold War and the Anti Communist Witch Hunts, a time being anti war, anti nuclear war, pro labour, was considered suspect. Where union members who were left wing were exposed to police spying, where padlock laws in Quebec had been used to raid imprison and steal property belonging to those accused of opposing the Duplesis regime or who were suspect of being Reds.

Duplessis ‘s party in Quebec aligned with that provinces Federal Social Credit Party which was aligned with Alberta’s Party as well. In both provinces the left faced one party dictatorship which reminded many despite their democratic trappings of the forces they had been fighting against in WWII.

As in Alberta it would be the post war labour movement in Quebec under Louis Lebarge that would mobilize politically as well as economically against the Old Regime, his right hand was a young activist lawyer named Pierre Eliot Trudeau. And like Alberta they were building a provincial and national party; the Liberals.

This then is the historical basis for the differences between the left in Quebec and the rest of Canada and why it took so long to breech these two solitudes, as was done in 2012 under Jack Layton and the federal NDP.

Premier Rachel Notley, the daughter of Grant Notley, the first NDP MLA ever elected to the Legislature, the first opposition member elected against the Social Credit party of Ernest Manning  had this rich history as her prologue at this week’s national NDP Convention in Edmonton where the party adopted the LEAP manifesto which challenges the very energy economy that makes Alberta a modern industrial state.

This province created the NDP under the leadership of  Neil Reimer, an oil worker and oil union organizer.  Neil was the first leader of the Party, and Reg Baskin was his right hand in their union and the party.

Neil also created the modern Canadian Energy Workers union,  Neil and Reg first represented oil workers in the new industry in the province with the OCAW  oil chemical and atomic workers of Canada, which had one other base of expansion; Louisiana.  He and Reg made it the Canadian Energy Workers Union, which became CEP merging with the Canadian Paper workers unions in BC, and now has consolidated with CAW to create UNIFOR.

Neil’s daughter was Jan Reimer two term Mayor of Edmonton during the 1990’s and while party labels are not used in Edmonton municipal elections everyone knew that we had an NDP mayor.

Meatpackers, a union that disappeared in the eighties with amalgamation of the meat packing industry into a smaller and smaller oligopoly, was a militant base of union workers and activists including communists and socialists, that was a large base for the party, as was Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 488.

These were the post war unions that were the party’s base in Edmonton and across the province. Federally the postal workers were a strong backbone for the Federal Party, though there were two separate unions at that time, letter carriers and inside workers, the latter being more left wing and militant with OBU IWW communist, socialist and Trotskyist activist workers.

It was the discovery of tar sands oil that led to the growth of the province, the union and the NDP. It was also this discovery and its needed development during the Arab Oil Crisis of 1971 that led to the end of the Social Credit government, its movement, but not its essence. In its place came the newest members of the Alberta Legislature elected in 1967 for the first time, the Lougheed Progressive Conservatives. They would be joined by Grant Notley and the NDP in opposition in 1968, when Grant won a by-election in Spirit River.

The “Progressive” element in the Lougheed PC’s represented the post war Liberal base among the non Anglo ethnic communities in Edmonton and Calgary, such as the recent post war immigration of Ukrainians, Italians, Portuguese, Greek, European, Asian, and Displaced Peoples. The Liberals had no political existence in Alberta since they were wiped out by the United Farmers/ Labour Party coalition in 1921.

Even Lougheed’s conservatism was not the neo conservative Austrian school embraced by the republican lite Preston Manning cons of today, it was classical liberal capitalism, that progressive aspect of capitalism that sought to ameliorate through regulation what short comings capitalism itself may suffer from despite its idealism of being the ‘ideal’ system.

The history of the Alberta NDP is the history of the Oil Workers and the Oil Industry in Alberta, even more than it is for the current batch of Conservatives provincial or federal.  The NDP in Alberta grew up with the oil industry with its workers and their union. For the Alberta NDP to reject both the LEAP manifesto and those call for the end of pipelines is natural and should have been expected by those who know the party history in the province.

For those who fail to understand this historic base of the party in Alberta fail to understand the social democratic politics of the oil industry, the NDP has long supported a form of nationalization under public ownership and increased workers control through unionization.

This occurred in the case of Suncor which was the earliest of the oil sands operators, before the Syncrude conglomerate was created.  In the early seventies after the Lougheed government promoted the oil sands, Suncor began mining operations.  Neil Reimer’s new Canadian Energy and Paperworkers union, CEP, got its birth in a long and bitter historic strike at the Suncor operations.

CEP went on to organize refineries in Edmonton, Sherwood Park and Fort Saskatchewan.

It tried but failed to organize Syncrude due to its conglomerate ownership and its concerted anti union efforts over the decade of the seventies into the eighties. Today unionized Suncor has bought out Syncrude so this situation opens it up to unionization decades later.

The seventies and eighties saw massive growth in the province including growth in both private and public union membership.

This also saw the success of the NDP and the left in Edmonton. While Grant Notley was a lone NDP member in Alberta Legislature, Edmonton saw a left wing U of A Prof David Leadbeater elected alderman.  Notley was joined in the house by Ray Martin, from Edmonton.

The NDP elected Ross Harvey its first federal MP from Alberta in the eighties from the old packing plant and union district of Edmonton Beverly. This was at the height of the Arab Oil Crisis of early eighties, which the Conservatives in Calgary blamed on the NDP Liberal National Energy Plan, NEP, which included the creation of the Canadian Publicly Owned Oil and Gas Company PetroCanada.

PetroCanada was a success and saved Calgary and the Lougheed Government during this oil crisis, it was able to buy up, nationalize, American oil companies like Gulf Mobile, Texaco, Chevron,  as well as smaller Canadian and American oil companies that were going broke or bailing out of Calgary heading back to Dallas and Huston.

And CEP was there to unionize it. Today PetroCanada is no more the Liberals privatized during the Austerity crisis of the Nineties, and Paul Martins Liberal Government sold off the last of our shares prior to the 2006 election.

Ironically it is Suncor that bought them and then bought up PetroCan and absorbed it., just as it has done with its competitor Syncrude.

It would be during the late eighties and early nineties that under Ray Martin the NDP would gain a record number of seats, going from 2 to 23 and status of official opposition. But by the time of the middle of nineties and the Austerity panic of debt and deficit hysteria and the birth of the neo conservative movement that two city Mayors, Ralph Klein of Calgary and Lawrence Decore of Edmonton would battle it out for Premier of the Province, Klein for the PC’s and Decore for the Liberals. Both ran on Austerity budgets, one promised massive cuts the other brutal cuts. It was a close election the losers were the NDP who were wiped out as a third party.

In Edmonton we had a new NDP mayor to replace Decore, Neil’s daughter Jan Reimer, joined by another leftist alderman the bus driver Brian Mason. The NDP centred itself in Edmonton at this time and got elected the enormously popular  team of Pam Barrett and Raj Pannu.

The CEP was critical in supporting the NDP at this time, including having its past president Reg Basking become leader of the Party.

After the shocking early death of party leader Pam Barrett, former alderman Brian Mason ran in her riding, Highlands, which also covers the Federal riding of Beverly that Ross Harvey once represented and won her seat in the house. Raj Pannu became the first Indo Canadian leader of an NDP party in Canada.  After he stepped down Brian Mason became the leader of the party.

The party went from four seats to two to four until Brian stepped down and the party elected Grant Notley’s daughter, Rachel Notley, who had sat in the house with Brian through all those ups and downs in electoral success.

The party base is the labour movement and left across the province and no less important unions such as CEP, IBEW, Carpenters and UA488 all involved in the oil sands and the petrochemical industry in Alberta.

So why are the various wags and pundits surprised when the Alberta NDP does not LEAP off the edge of a cliff named STOP PIPELINES, STOP DIRTY OIL.

In the finest of social democratic traditions, the Alberta NDP will do no such thing nor should it be expected to. It will ameliorate the worst of the environmental damages that the fossil fuel industry has and can be expected to cause. They will create a green plan, and expand the carbon fuel tax the PC’s brought in.

 It will do what the conservatives would not do, and that is eliminating Alberta’s Socred PC dirty energy economic backbone: coal. And that is the real dirty energy in Alberta, coal fired utility plants. These plants are evenly divided between private ownership, with state support from the ruling Socreds and PC’s, TransAlta Utilities, and publicly owned municipal utilities EPCOR and ENMAX. TransAlta is the original P3 funded by taxpayers under the Socred and spun off to become a private company where government cabinet members retire to the board of.

Even Lougheed was tied to the coal industry representing his old employer Mannix Inc, as a board member of Luscar Coal, which during the nineties created a major controversy with its efforts to mine outside of Jasper National Park.

Contrary to Greenpeace and other environmentalists who claim oil sands are the dirtiest energy the real dirty energy on the Palliser Plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan is coal.

Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel that needs to be kept in the ground. There is no such thing as clean coal!

There is however clean petrochemical fuels, that is the nature of refining, creating finer and finer grades of hydrocarbons; ethenes, benzenes, oil and gas for plastic production, diesel etc.

That is the reason for both the Joffre and Scotford massive refining projects and the plan for the heartland refining project, which would allow the province to crack and refine bitumen into secondary and tertiary hydrocarbons.

That is what the future of the energy is in Alberta, stopping the use of coal, refining hydrocarbons and shipping them south, east, and west.

Why would the NDP limit the provinces ability to ship what it processes.

As I have pointed out the pipeline west will probably go through the Peace River Athabasca highway route to Prince Rupert, which coincides with BC Site C dam development and its LNG  pipeline development, giving pipeline companies an alternative to going to Kitimat via the BC Sacred Bear Rainforest.

Energy East will be built and the NDP will promote as it did in the eighties, the idea that Alberta energy for a fair price should go east. What occurred instead was it was shipped to refineris in Ontario and Quebec at discounted prices where it was refined and sold to the US while oil was imported from the Middle East.

This was the original idea of the NEP that the NDP and Liberals promoted to Lougheed, and he agreed to! And like the NDP this was his vision for Alberta oil before he died.

While the LEAP manifesto is suitably left wing green etc, even shudder, anti capitalist ( read anti corporations) it is not something either the labour movement or NDP in Alberta will agree to do much more about than debate. Debate will be welcome, dictat not so much.

LEAP like most environmentalism today fails to take into consideration that even if workers had control of publicly owned energy companies, we would still be producing hydrocarbons, and will be even after the glorious Socialist Revolution.

The dirtiest energy causing climate change is not oil sands in Alberta or Venezuela it is coal and wood burning worldwide.  That is the challenge we face to shut down coal, and wood burning, not to accept the myth of Clean Coal, and to make sure we ameliorate environmental damage caused through hydrocarbon production.

You want to keep something in the ground its coal, and the biggest fight back in Alberta today is the utility lobbies who oppose the Alberta NDP Government ending of coal fired utilities.

In Alberta the NDP is the party of oil and oil workers. Never forget it. The old Social Credit of Preston Manning’s daddy’s day and the PC’s of Lougheed Klein were both parties of coal.

Liberals pledge $2B to help 'transition' oil workers; Alberta communities lukewarm


CALGARY — The federal Liberals have pledged $2 billion to help workers in oil-producing provinces transition to a greener economy, but the proposal is getting a lukewarm reception in communities that might be beneficiaries of the funding.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

In Cold Lake, Alta. — where more than 2,000 of the city's 15,000 residents are employed at nearby oilsands operations — Mayor Craig Copeland said he doesn't believe most people working in the sector want to switch jobs.

Cold Lake's economy has suffered over the last seven years due to low oil prices, consolidation, and layoffs in the energy sector. Copeland said local real estate prices have fallen almost 40 per cent since 2012.

However, things are looking brighter this year, thanks to higher commodity prices driving increased oilsands production. Copeland said he's optimistic about the future of his community, a place where 20-somethings can earn six figures, buy homes and raise families.

"We already have a huge industry that generates enormous wealth for people," Copeland said, calling the Liberals' transition proposal a 'made-in-Ottawa' solution not grounded in reality.

"Until you find a way to replace that, people won’t even look at retraining.”

The Liberal proposal for a $2-billion "Future Funds" program for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador is part of a larger promise to ensure workers aren't left behind as Canada pursues its climate change commitments. The party's platform contains a promise to create a "Clean Jobs Training Centre" to help oilpatch workers upgrade or gain new skills.

The Liberals have pledged to require the oil and gas industry to reduce its emissions from current levels at the pace and scale needed to achieve net-zero by 2050, and will set five-year targets toward that goal beginning in 2025.

While there are different ways to accomplish that goal, said Isabelle Turcotte — director of federal policy for clean energy think-tank the Pembina Institute — the outcome will undoubtedly have an impact on oil and gas employees.

"It's been hard in Canada to talk about reductions in oil and gas, because of workers," Turcotte said. "But regardless of the pathway (to net-zero) we choose ... we will see a decrease in production and consumption of oil and gas, all the way to 2050."

Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, said climate change is a reality his province needs to face up to.

“We’ve had a great ride with oil and gas, but the sector will never be the same engine for economic growth that it was," McGowan said. "Pretending that we can ignore the direction that the world is heading and go back to the past is not in the best interest of Alberta workers, including people working in the oil and gas sector.”

McGowan said the AFL has been lobbying for federal support in the range of $10 to $20 billion per year to help oil-producing provinces and their workers diversify. He said the labour group would like to see a new federal transfer program that could fund green infrastructure projects, training and apprenticeships in affected provinces.

Thousands of Albertans have already been affected by downsizing, automation, and the ongoing evolution of Canada's energy sector, said Adam Legge, president of the Business Council of Alberta. The percentage of the province's labour force that has been unemployed for more than one year is 2.4 per cent, the highest rate of long-term unemployment in the country (the national average is 1.4 per cent).

Legge said his organization is supportive of federal funding for clean energy, diversification and anything else that will help to keep Alberta competitive in a changing world. But he said Canada's oil and gas sector is still critical to the national economy, and will remain so for a long time.

“We support this kind of (transition fund) initiative because there are many people who aren’t going to find the same kind of job they once had," Legge said. "But what we don’t want it to be is code for ‘wind down of the sector.' We don't support that approach at all."

Ted Clugston — mayor of Medicine Hat, Alta. — said his city was "devastated" when natural gas prices collapsed in 2008. He said Medicine Hat has been pursuing diversification ever since, and has had significant success attracting solar and wind power projects to the area.

However, Clugston said the employment created by those projects doesn't come close to comparing with the thousands of local jobs created by the oil and gas sector.

"There's lots of jobs during construction, but once (wind and solar farms) are built, there's not that many jobs," he said. "I don't know where all these green jobs are going to come from."

The federal Conservative Party platform makes no mention of a transition fund for oil and gas workers, instead criticizing Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau for "wanting to phase out the sector and its jobs." It says a Conservative government would support energy sector workers.

The NDP platform pledges to "work together" with labour, employers and the provinces to find solutions that could include expanded EI benefits, re-training and job placement services.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 1, 2021.

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh pledges to end for-profit long-term care if elected

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. — An NDP government would ban the opening of any new for-profit care homes for seniors, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Tuesday.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Speaking to reporters on campaign trail in Mississauga, Ont., he said his party, if elected, would implement a plan to take profit out of long-term care homes and would create national care standards to hold institutions to account.

"It is wrong that for-profits exist in the system," Singh said.

He said seniors living in for-profit facilities had higher infection and death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Singh made the comments outside the office of Revera, a for-profit company and one of the largest long-term care home operators in the country. It is wholly owned by the Public Sector Pension Investment, the Crown corporation managing public servants' pensions.

If elected, Singh said he'd nationalize Revera and make it public.

"We fund long-term care and some of that money is going to the pockets of shareholders," Singh said.

"That is wrong. It should be going to (protecting and caring) for our loved ones."

He said he'd work with provinces and territories, which have jurisdiction over long-term care homes, but admitted it would be a challenge.

"It's not going to be easy, but it is essential and we have to get profit out of long-term care," Singh said.

He said he'd use "all the tools" at the federal government's disposal, including the use of the Canada Health Act, to get for-profit companies out of the industry.

Long-term care homes were devastated by COVID-19 across the country.

The Ryerson University National Institute on Aging has tracked 15,217 COVID-19 deaths among long-term care residents since March 2020, which amounts to 57 per cent of all deaths from the pandemic in Canada to date.

Nearly 3,800 people have died from COVID-19 in Ontario's nursing homes since the pandemic hit in early 2020.

An independent commission found long-term care homes were underfunded, suffered severe staffing shortages, had outdated infrastructure and poor oversight. Those factors, the commissioners said, contributed to the deadly toll in Ontario.

Singh said federal money for long-term care homes would have conditions attached to it.

"We provide funding and that funding should go toward the best quality of care, it should go toward staffing, it should not go toward profits," he said.

"We need to do better."

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau last week said a re-elected Liberal government would give provinces up to $9 billion over the next five years to hike wages and train more workers in Canada's troubled long-term care facilities.

Trudeau said he would work with the provinces to implement national standards for long-term care homes, but won't micromanage long-term care, which falls under provincial jurisdiction.

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet called on Trudeau to give up on the idea of creating national standards for long-term care homes.

Blanchet instead urged the federal government to provide Quebec with a "fair share" of funding through health transfers in order to improve care for the elderly.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 24, 2021.

Liam Casey, The Canadian Press

Jagmeet Singh promises to kill fossil fuel subsidies


If elected, the federal NDP would identify fossil fuel subsidies, eliminate them “once and for all,” and spend the money on the renewable energy sector, Leader Jagmeet Singh said on the campaign trail Monday morning.

Speaking from Jeanne-Mance Park in Montreal, Singh said instead of giving companies “blank cheques” that may or may not be used to achieve their goals, the NDP would make direct investments to clean up oil wells and retrofit some into geothermal plants.

“What we've seen for a long time from Liberals and Conservatives is this notion that you can give money away with really no strings attached to large corporations and hope that the money will actually end up in workers’ hands or end up in doing what we need to defend the environment,” said Singh. “That approach has been shown again and again not to work.”

Lisa Marie Barron, the federal NDP candidate for Nanaimo-Ladysmith, said the recent wildfire near her riding serves as a stark reminder of the climate crisis Canadians are facing.

“I'm also hearing from young people … and quite honestly, they're scared for their future based on everything that we're seeing around us in this climate emergency,” said Barron.

Since Justin Trudeau participated in a climate march back in 2019, Barron said he “has abandoned the young people,” and instead helped “big oil and big investors.”

“Jagmeet’s announcement is very exciting to hear because we want to be a world leader on climate action. Unfortunately, right now, that's not the case. We are a joke on the world stage, and we need to be doing better,” said Barron.

Singh also promised $500 million over four years to support Indigenous-led conservation programs to protect land, water, and forests, and advance reconciliation. Few other details were made available about the criteria or nature of the programs, but Singh said the goal is to create a fund that allows Indigenous communities to choose to conserve their land, instead of being forced to log and extract resources to create jobs.

In 2020, federal fossil fuel subsidies reached at least $1.9 billion, according to a recent report from the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD). The NDP said it would do a full audit to identify and eliminate those subsidies.

The promise to end subsidies is encouraging, said Bronwen Tucker, an analyst at Oil Change International, but she also wants to see the NDP commit to ending public financing through Export Development Canada — which provides an average of $13.3 billion per year in public finance for fossil fuels — and clarify whether it would also end handouts for blue hydrogen, carbon capture and storage (CCS), and other strategies to “decarbonize oil and gas.”

“It really ignores the best science and best models that are available that say hydrogen and CCS should be reserved for that last mile (of) decarbonization, the things that are the hardest to decarbonize, which is definitely not oil and gas production.”

Vanessa Corkal, a policy adviser for the IISD, said given the billions in support from Export Development Canada, it’s concerning “there's not a broader commitment from the NDP to also end public finance for fossil fuels.”

She said we need to expand the conversation to include not just subsidies, but all forms of government support.

“The federal conversation seems to be a bit stuck on phasing out inefficient subsidies, when in fact, the global conversation is more about phasing out oil and gas production, period, and phasing out government support for oil and gas production, period,” she said.

“From my perspective, if funding is reducing the cost of business for fossil fuel producers, that's not something that we want to be supporting,” said Corkal, citing the $1.7 billion provided by the Liberal government to clean up orphan wells as an example.

“That money was pitched as a way to create jobs, to reclaim wells, and to clean up the environment. But research shows that what actually happened is that large companies were able to use that funding to pay for activities that they would have done anyways, and that there wasn't actually a large increase in cleanup. So, ultimately, the result of that subsidy is that it just made it cheaper for (those big oil companies) to do what they're normally doing,” said Corkal.

For the NDP to meet its goal of ending oil and gas subsidies and supporting workers instead of companies, Tucker said any federal money for orphan wells would need to be conditioned on or accompanied by regulatory change to ensure companies pay upfront for cleanup costs rather than being able to almost fully avoid them as the current structure allows.

Tucker said the Liberal government’s creation of and support for fossil fuel subsidies like the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, $320 million to support the recovery of Newfoundland’s offshore oil and gas industry, and funding for carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen are not in line with the best science we have.

“The idea that we can just continue to expand fracking and (the) oilsands by building CCS and hydrogen that the government pays for is really wild,” said Tucker, adding it’s “a ridiculous amount of money” that would be better spent on green industries, transitioning workers, and public services.

In response to the NDP’s announcement, Atiya Jaffar, 350.org Canada’s digital manager, said ending fossil fuel subsidies is “a necessary first step” for Canada to achieve its global climate obligations, and calls for “a moratorium on fossil fuel expansion and a big, bold just transition plan that supports workers and communities.”

With the recent International Energy Agency report calling for the end to all new investment in fossil fuels, any credible and robust climate plan must include a commitment to immediately end all subsidies, public finance and other fiscal support, said Julia Levin, senior program manager for climate and energy at advocacy group Environmental Defence.

“We can't be paying oil and gas companies to do something that we could force them to do in another way,” she said.

“By paying them, by lowering their cost of business, we are still incentivizing ongoing and increased production, which is literally pouring fuel on the fire.”

Natasha Bulowski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Canada's National Observer

CONTINENTAL GENERAL STRIKE

Canadian Pacific railway workers must answer lockout, threat of back-to-work law by expanding struggle

Keith Jones

WSWS.ORG

The contract dispute between Canadian Pacific Railway and the 3,000 engineers, conductors and yard workers it employs at its operations across Canada has rapidly escalated into a class confrontation whose outcome will have a major impact on the class struggle throughout North America.

CP Rail workers on the picket line in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan 

(Credit: Teamsters Division 510)

The workers, whom CP Rail locked out at 12:01 a.m. Sunday, are determined to put an end to a brutal work regimen that ravages their family lives and imperils their personal safety and that of the public. They are also fighting for improved wages and pensions after years of stagnating incomes and successive concessions contracts. Earlier this month, the workers voted by 96.7 percent in favour of strike action.

However, due to the sabotage by the Teamsters union, it was Canadian Pacific, Canada’s second and North America’s sixth largest railway, that took the offensive.

With its lockout, CP Rail is mobilizing big business and the political establishment on both sides of the Canada-US border to press the Justin Trudeau-led federal Liberal government to rush a back-to-work law through Parliament. Such a law would strip the rail workers of their rights to strike and bargain collectively and empower a government-appointed, pro-big business arbitrator to dictate their terms of employment.

On cue, Canada’s largest business lobby groups, from the blue-chip Business Council of Canada and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, along with the premiers of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, are imploring the government to force the CP Rail workers back on the job. So too are numerous US business organizations and senators and governors from more than half a dozen Western and Plains states.

In demanding state intervention against the CP Rail workers, these forces are cynically invoking the impact of the shutdown of the railway’s Canadian operations on supply chains and consequently consumer prices and workers’ jobs. This is a fraud. As evidenced by the North American ruling class’s ruinous pandemic policy, which that has led to both mass death and socio-economic dislocation for working people, and their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the attendant blitzkrieg of economic sanctions, their concern is not the rational functioning of the economy but amassing greater profits and advancing their predatory imperialist interests on the world stage.

The Trudeau Liberal government has repeatedly illegalized or threatened to illegalize worker job actions. Last April it used an emergency law to break a strike of Port of Montreal longshore workers, and in December 2018 it criminalized a campaign of rotating strikes by postal workers.

Its preference, however, is to rely on the trade union bureaucracy, with which it enjoys a close partnership, to smother the CP Rail workers struggle.

Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan claims the Liberal government wants a “negotiated deal.” But the language he is using makes clear the negotiations, which continue under a federal mediator despite CP Rail locking out the workers and agitating for a back-to-work law, are a sham. Even as it publicly avows support for “negotiations,” the government is readying a back-to-work law and threatening, behind closed doors, to strip rail workers of their rights, if it has not already issued an explicit ultimatum to the Teamster bureaucrats as to when a “deal” must be reached.

“We want a resolution, and we want it now,” declared O’Regan on Sunday. “This work stoppage could not have happened at a worse time.”

Rank-and-file CP Rail workers have taken the measure of the Trudeau government, which has spent the past two years blustering about being “pro-worker” while funneling unprecedented sums into the coffers of big business and the financial oligarchy and spearheading the ruling elite’s “profit before lives” pandemic policy. “I can guarantee Trudeau will force us back to work, without even thinking about the workers’ lives,” a CP Rail conductor told the World Socialist Web Site, “He will force us back regardless of our strike demands.”

The CP Rail workers have powerful enemies arrayed against them. Yet still more powerful are their potential allies among the tens of millions of workers across North America who confront the same essential problems—deteriorating living standards, unsafe working conditions, austerity, speedup and war—born of the capitalist ruling elite’s relentless drive to extract ever greater profits.

The past year has witnessed an ongoing wave of worker struggles across Canada and the US, as workers seek to resist a further erosion of their real wages as a result of surging inflation, claw back pension cuts and other concessions and demand protection from the pandemic. These include strikes by Vale miners in Sudbury, Ontario, New Brunswick public sector workers, Volvo Truck workers in Virginia, Kellogg’s workers at multiple US plants, and the ongoing strike of 4,500 educators in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In recent days CP Rail workers in discussions with the WSWS have painted a harrowing picture of the punishing schedules and work rules the company imposes through a brutal disciplinary regime and its indifference to workers’ safety.

“We are called the ‘backbone of Canada,’ but our industry just makes up its own rules,” one worker told the WSWS.

Said another veteran rail worker, “They have effectively reduced the well trained, hardworking men and women of CP into a position of folding under the constant pressure of fear of dismissal for speaking up when the actions requested of them would put either themselves, their fellow co-workers, or the public at elevated risk.”

The working conditions faced by the CP Rail workers are akin to those of workers throughout basic industry and transport, across the gig economy and even increasingly for professional workers in Canada and internationally. The ruling class’ drive to keep schools open amid the COVID-19 pandemic, so that students’ parents can be forced to keep churning out corporate profits, has demonstrated that its indifference to the health and well-being of teachers and students, as well as railway workers and meatpackers.

Two factors account for the ruthlessness with which Canadian Pacific and the ruling class as a whole have responded to the rail workers’ struggle. First, they see it as cutting across their plans—especially those of Canada’s oil and agri-business companies and the railways that transport their merchandise—to profiteer from the war against Russia. Second and more fundamentally, they fear it will serve as a catalyst for a broader mobilization of the working class.

The greatest obstacle to CP Rail workers expanding their struggle and making it the spearhead of a working class counteroffensive is the Teamsters and more generally the corporatist trade unions as a whole. For decades, the unions in Canada, as around the world, have systematically suppressed the class struggle while integrating themselves ever more fully into corporate management and the state.

Since negotiations between CP Rail and the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC) began last September, the union has done everything to demobilize the rank and file. This includes keeping workers in the dark about the negotiations.

As the lockout deadline approached, the TCRC bowed to CP Rail’s demand that the 24 major outstanding issues in the dispute be settled by binding arbitration. That is, it agreed to surrender workers’ right to strike and any means of fighting for their just demands. Only then, according to TCRC spokesman Dave Fulton, management “moved the goal posts” and announced it would go ahead with the lockout unless the union allowed it to dictate terms that would ensure the arbitrator would be compelled to do its bidding across the board.

With the workers now locked out, the union has formally proclaimed a strike. But they have no intention of doing anything to rally working class support. This is underscored by the TCRC leaders’ readiness to remain at the bargaining table even as CP Rail bays for a government back-to-work law, accuses workers of striking illegally and vows, in the words of CEO Keith Creel, to explore “all avenues to address this egregious behaviour.”

Workers’ fundamental democratic rights, especially the right to strike, have been under increasing attack for decades. Rail workers, at both Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Rail, Canada’s largest railway, have repeatedly been targeted, especially over the past 13 years.

Not only have the unions bowed to back-to-work laws and policed them. Terrified of the development of an insurgent working class movement, they have increasingly relied on the adoption or threat of these laws to provide a pretext for their short circuiting of workers’ struggles.

A special place in this political theater is reserved for the trade union-sponsored New Democratic Party (NDP). NDP provincial governments have themselves repeatedly adopted strikebreaking laws, but as a rule the social democrats condemn them in parliament while working with the union bureaucracy to corral workers back to work with claims that the “struggle must continue” in the capitalist courts and at the ballot box.

Yesterday, federal New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jagmeet Singh announced his party would not back legislation stripping CP Rail workers of their right to strike and bargain collectively, saying that to do so at this time would be “cavalier.” This is meaningless posturing of the worst kind. If and when the Liberals do introduce such a law, it will quickly pass thanks to the support of the official opposition Conservatives. Otherwise, the NDP will continue to prop the minority Liberal government in parliament as they have since 2019.

Indeed, on Monday evening it was revealed that the NDP was about to sign a “supply and confidence” agreement with the Liberals, under which Canada’s social democrats will pledge to keep the Trudeau government in power until 2025. This under conditions in which the Liberal government is playing a leading role in pressing the NATO powers to take an even more belligerent stance against Russia in the war over Ukraine, and at home is pivoting from “pandemic relief and stimulus” to austerity.

The CP Rail workers should follow the lead and join forces with the workers at BNSF, North America’s largest railroad, who recently formed the BNSF Workers Rank-and-File Committee to mobilize workers in struggle against the company, independently of and in opposition to the pro-company unions.

Last week, the BNSF Workers Rank-and-File Committee issued a statement “ Support strike action at Canadian Pacific! For a united movement of North American railroaders against wage cuts and brutal working hours! ” that called on workers at CP to form a rank-and-file committee of their own and link up with BNSF workers to “discuss a common strategy and build a powerful movement, organized through rank-and-file committees, independent of both the pro-corporate unions and the corporate political parties in each country.”

Like the CP Rail workers, the BNSF workers are facing state attack. The US courts have issued an injunction barring them from striking or taking any job action to oppose management’s imposition of a punitive “Hi-Viz” attendance policy.

The big business line-up against the Canadian Pacific workers and the injunction against the BNSF workers underscore that workers are fighting not just a particularly reactionary employer, but rather the ruling class as a whole, its political representatives and state. Consequently, they confront a political struggle.

Militant industrial action—including preparations to defy a back-to-work law—must be tied to the fight for a workers’ government that would institute socialist policies in opposition to the ruling class agenda of unending pandemic, low wages, brutal working conditions, austerity and war.

Rachel Notley is Alberta’s real progressive conservative

'I disagree with him completely': Rachel Notley says of Jagmeet Singh's oilsands stance

08:10
CTV QP: Notley against cutting oilsands production

Spencer Van Dyk
CTV News Parliamentary Bureau 

Writer, Producer
Updated May 13, 2023 6:12 p.m. MDT

Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley says she completely disagrees with federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s stance on oil and gas industry subsidies, because she thinks the economy driving sector needs investment to stay competitive internationally and find innovative ways to reduce emissions.

Notley told CTV’s Question Period host Vassy Kapelos, in an interview airing Sunday, she thinks the oil and gas sector needs to be “at the table” in conversations about how to reduce carbon emissions.

She added that while the oil and gas industry saw record profits last year, she still believes it needs investment, especially if Canada is going to compete with the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, which offers billions of dollars in energy incentives south of the border.

Meanwhile Singh, Notley’s federal counterpart, has long been calling on the Liberal government to “stop giving billions of dollars of public money to oil and gas companies.”

The oil and gas sector made record profits last year — reaching more than $34 billion — and Singh has said he wants to see the Liberals cancel all subsidies to the industry, including the Carbon Capture Tax Credit.

Notley, however, said she “disagree(s) with him completely on this issue.”

She said while oil and gas profits “are spectacular right now,” the sector also “suffered significant losses during (the pandemic),” and there’s a pressing need to stay competitive with the Inflation Reduction Act.

“So there are a lot of different factors that play at it,” she said. “But I do disagree with this idea that there should be no partnerships with oil and gas when we are in a position of it playing still such an important role in our economy.”

She added she disagrees with “this idea that we can just simply walk away from something that contributes such a large amount to our economy, not just in Alberta, but across Canada, on a point of principle.”

With little more than two weeks until Albertans head to the polls, both Notley and UCP Leader Danielle Smith have also pushed back against the federal government’s emissions reduction targets.

Last March, the federal government proposed targets to reduce overall emissions to 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, with the oil and gas sector having the goal of cutting emissions by 42 per cent in the next seven years.

Notley has called the targets “unrealistic.”

She said while an emissions cap is “part of the tools necessary” to achieving the goals of reducing emissions, ensuring products are sustainable, and expanding access to international markets, she doesn’t believe the federal government’s target is reasonable.

“But to do that, it has to be practical and it has to be achievable,” Notley said. “Aspirational goals can sometimes serve to be less effective than no goals, although I'm not in favor of either of those things.”

“What I want to see is practical goals, and then a very practical plan,” she also said, adding she wants to see an emissions reduction, not a production reduction.

“The emissions output must be cut, but we don't want to see actual production cuts as an effort to achieve emissions reduction,” she said. “So let's be very clear: we're not going to be endorsing production cuts. We think that we can reach emissions reductions through other means.”

SEE

THE ALBERTA NDP THE PARTY OF OIL WORKERS

THE COINCIDENTAL BIRTH OF THE NEW DEMOCRATS 

AND THE OIL INDUSTRY IN ALBERTA

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for OIL NDP 

Rachel Notley is Alberta’s real progressive conservative
By Max Fawcett | Opinion, Politics | May 4th 2023

Rachel Notley's embrace of Alberta's oil and gas industry is all part of her value proposition to former Progressive Conservative voters. 

Photo via Rachel Notley / Twitter

Peter Lougheed was Alberta’s 10th premier, the creator of its Heritage Savings Trust Fund, and the architect of a four-decade political dynasty that would see his Alberta Progressive Conservatives win 12 consecutive elections, most of them in a walk. He went to war with Pierre Trudeau, helped defeat the National Energy Program, and fought effectively for Alberta’s place in Confederation. And if he was alive today, he’d probably be voting for Rachel Notley’s NDP.

Just ask Danielle Smith — yes, that Danielle Smith — who wrote back in 2019 that “Notley is, without question, the inheritor of the Lougheed tradition. That’s not to say he was a full-on socialist, but Notley isn’t either. I think most Albertans have been shocked to see how pragmatic she has governed, particularly as it concerns natural resources.”

Smith would probably like to take back that endorsement, but Notley’s NDP continues to attract the support of prominent former members of Lougheed’s government, from MLAs like Allan Warrack and Ron Ghitter to Lougheed’s chief of staff (and later federal MP) Lee Richardson.

Notley’s appeal to former Progressive Conservatives is a product of her party’s deliberate shift to the political centre, along with her Lougheed-esque stewardship of Alberta’s resources. The federal purchase and construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, which will be completed sometime this year and in service by the first quarter of 2024, speaks to the success of those efforts.

But Notley’s appeal among more progressive conservatives is also a reflection of just how toxic Smith’s brand of conservatism is to many otherwise conservative Albertans. Her recent admission that she looks to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as role models for Alberta says everything about her politics, and how prominently the COVID-19 pandemic still figures in them.

Before he was known for banning books and getting sued by Disney, DeSantis made his name in Republican circles by making Florida the most COVID-friendly state in the union. Noem made her own bid for that title back in 2021, when she proclaimed: “If @joebiden illegally mandates vaccines, I will take every action available under the law to protect South Dakotans from the federal government.”

If Smith had been in power during the pandemic, it’s easy to imagine her saying something similar. This sort of live-and-let-die attitude is at odds with the more compassionate (and informed) brand of conservatism that Lougheed is remembered for.

But as Jared Wesley and Ken Boessenkool argued in a piece for The Line, Smith is really a conservative in name only. “Smith is not a temperamental conservative. Indeed, she is rarely an ideological conservative. Instead, her politics amount to libertarian-laced populism, directly opposed to the sort of principled, incrementalist politics Albertans have appreciated from conservative governments in the past.”

Smith is certainly no fiscal conservative, although that’s a much rarer breed than most Albertans have been led to believe. After passing the biggest spending budget in Alberta history, Smith opened the campaign by offering up a 20 per cent tax cut on incomes up to $60,000 that would cost the Treasury as much as $760 per adult. In order to pay for it, Smith plans to rely on a continuation of the recent gusher in oil and gas royalties — one that may already be in the process of evaporating, as oil prices crashed below $70 a barrel this week.

And when it comes to law and order, Smith has a track record of siding with the people trying to upend it. There’s her fawning phone call with far-right preacher (and Coutts blockade supporter) Artur Pawlowski, who was found guilty of mischief and breaching his bail conditions on Tuesday. And as Press Progress reported that same day, her support for the blockade apparently ran even deeper than that. In a February 2022 livestream with the Western Standard, Smith says, “We want to see it win in Coutts.”

The Coutts blockade, remember, included a group of heavily armed men making threats against law enforcement that included conspiracy to commit murder. But even before those charges were laid, it was clear the blockaders were interfering with the movement of goods and people across the border. That doesn’t seem to have bothered Smith, though. “This whole phrase of ‘peace, order and good government’, I think it’s become a shorthand to the federal government can do whatever the heck it wants and we just have to be peaceful and orderly about it,” Smith said.

Smith, then, is not any kind of conservative that Peter Lougheed would identify with. If anything, she and the “Take Back Alberta” group that helped elect her as party leader have more in common with the Alberta Social Credit party that Lougheed defeated in 1971. The real question for conservatives in this election is whether they still identify with Peter Lougheed or not. If enough of them do, Notley will make history as the first former premier to get returned to power — and join Lougheed as one of the most important political leaders in Alberta history.

This column is featured in my new newsletter, which you can get delivered to your inbox once a week. If you want to stay up to date on my signature, no-nonsense opinion writing, subscribe here

Who's the true conservative in Alberta's provincial election? The answer is more complicated than you might think — and it holds the key to victory for Rachel Notley. @maxfawcett writes for @NatObserver

May 4th 2023

Max Fawcett
Lead Columnist, Podcast Host
@maxfawcett

Calgary·Analysis

No, Jagmeet Singh isn't Rachel Notley's boss. But their 'union' remains rivals' target

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As UCP ratchets up scrutiny, Alberta NDP less reliant on 

federal or labour support

Jason Markusoff · CBC News · Posted: May 14, 2023 

Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley lays out her jobs plan at a campaign event. Don't expect to see federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh campaign in Alberta with her, a reality that perfectly suits Notley's team. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press)

There was a time, a rather long time, when the Alberta NDP was little more than the labour unions' partisan mouthpiece, and the largely inconsequential cousins of the federal New Democrats.

With a more diverse — read: less union-centric — candidate roster and political positions that shuck much of what Jagmeet Singh's party stands for, the provincial NDP has arguably never been as independent from influence of its longstanding organizational partners as it is now.

And yet never before has the Alberta NDP faced such a torrent of rival accusations it's in thrall with organized labour, and had its relationship with the federal branch depicted as not cousin-cousin, but parent-child or master-slave.

Danielle Smith declares Singh is Rachel Notley's "boss" nearly every chance she gets: "I question whether she works for Albertans or whether she works for her federal leader," the UCP leader said at one campaign event. 

Marks against them

The jabs are rooted in some long-standing truths and technicalities. The Alberta NDP constitution does declare the party a branch of the Canadian party, and membership in one equals membership in the other.

And unions and the Alberta Federation of Labour have roles specified in the party's structure. Plus, there's the inescapable reality that Notley's husband Lou Arab worked with the Alberta division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees throughout her premiership, and continues to.

But these have been structural realities of the provincial NDP for decades. Ties with unions and the federal party have always come with benefits on the organizational and support side, along with headaches when big labour or Ottawa drags down the provincial party's reputation.

What's new in 2023 is the UCP leader's public focus on it. Jason Kenney and other past  Alberta conservatives loved to pin this or that left-of-Alberta federal remark on Notley's party — but the "boss" stuff is new.

Theoretically, yes, the constitutional structure of the Alberta NDP and other provincial counterparts holds that the federal branch is supreme. But there is no modern history of Singh or past leaders wielding the club to enforce obedience on a disagreeable faction of this pan-Canadian orange network.

Orange rebellion

More than four decades ago, Saskatchewan NDP premier Allan Blakeney clashed with then-federal leader Ed Broadbent. Ottawa abided by restiveness in the colonies.

The more recent examples of a Provincial Orange freely standing up to Big Orange belong to Notley. After fighting for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, she openly slammed Singh's opposition to the project, saying that he was thumbing his nose at the working people who relied on the energy economy. 

Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh at a 2021 federal election event in Edmonton. The party has two seats in Alberta's capital, but rivals the Trudeau Liberals for popularity in the rest of the province (and that's no sign of strength). (Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press)

"To forget that and to throw them under the bus as collateral damage in pursuit of some other high level policy objective is a recipe for failure and it's also very elitist," she told the Edmonton Journal in 2018.

Notley swiped at Singh again Sunday on CTV's Question Period. She said she completely disagrees with the federal leader on ending support for oil and gas companies, and "this idea that we can just simply walk away from something that contributes such a large amount to our economy, not just in Alberta, but across Canada, on a point of principle."

There aren't too many disses outside of the energy file. Dismissiveness, more so.

Earlier this month, Notley said she last spoke with Singh six to 12 months ago — a long time to go without talking to one's supposed boss — and cannot remember what they spoke about. "Whether I am talking to the leader of the federal NDP, whether I am advocating in Ottawa, whether I am talking to New Democrats in B.C., Albertans know that I have always been quite ready to do whatever is necessary to stand up for the best interests of Albertans," she told reporters.

During elections, there's a perennial air drop of activists from the federal and other provincial NDP wings to lend campaign support — including Nathan Rotman, flown in from Ontario to be Notley's campaign manager. (Similarly, federal Conservative veteran Steve Outhouse temporarily moved from Ottawa to run Smith's campaign.)

• AUDIO
  Small towns with big city problems

Sure, there's plenty of points of commonality, the shared crusades in Alberta and Ottawa for a higher minimum wage and lower child-care fees. But look up and down Singh's support agreement with the Liberals and Justin Trudeau, and there's not a ton that checks both sides' boxes.

The provincial NDP isn't gung-ho on many of the federal party's priorities in its agreement with Trudeau, like pharma-care and dental care or an end to fossil-fuel subsidies. And when the two party factions speak of just transition alongside climate action, they seem to make different points.

In fact, the biggest bit of federal platform borrowing by Notley wasn't from Singh. Her promise to give families a tax credit for children's sports or arts activities was a page ripped from those reliable buddies, the Stephen Harper Conservatives.

Protesters disrupted a United Conservative Party media availability held on Thursday. Conservatives eagerly identified one participant as a past federal NDP candidate. (CBC News)

But it's little surprise that Smith's team spotted a former federal NDP candidate in the disruptive protest at a UCP event and branded him a Notleyite. Despite intra-party differences, federal candidates still run provincially and vice versa, including candidates in this race in Maskwacis, Chestermere and Calgary–North East.

It used to be more routine for the Alberta NDP's candidate roster to be filled with local union stewards or labour leaders, especially to fill slates in low-hope ridings. Many surprise 2015 election winners came from those ranks.

But with the party's hopes ascendent in 2023, they've gotten more candidate recruits from outside their labour base. Even if Gil McGowan's AFL and major unions remain active players within the party, the diversified influences mean those are less likely to be the only voices Notley and her brain trust hear.

Again, Smith has raised concerns over long-standing relationships, including Notley's husband and the AFL's former role within her rival's party. "We should be very, very concerned about the influence on the NDP, not only of the unions that are embedded in their decision making process and their delegate status and choose their leader," Smith said recently, when deflecting a question about the unclear degrees of influence the group Take Back Alberta has on her party.

The Alberta NDP had to wean itself off of its heavy reliance on union donations eight years ago when Notley banned union and corporate contributions to parties. But both types of entities retained their power to spend heavily on elections with the third-party advertiser system.

Labour pains

Controversial reforms that Kenney passed have restrained the way union groups can participate in elections, but the UCP has lately raised alarms about the extent to which big labour is assisting Notley. Smith's party wants Elections Alberta to use those Kenney reforms as a cudgel against the AFL and unions, alleging they're breaking the new rules.

McGowan and others insist they're following the law, even if he brands what United Conservatives want to do with it as unconstitutional. "They're indignant that we found a way to legally exercise our free speech rights, despite their best efforts to shut us up and shut us down," the AFL leader said in a statement this week.

• ANALYSIS
  Donations from wealthy individuals more important under new Alberta election ad rules

There are no doubt moments when some in Notley's inner circle wish their union affiliates and federal cousins would pipe down, and not occasionally force Alberta NDP to have to distance themselves from erstwhile allies.

But as long as Notley's party resists any formal dissolving of the ties that bind them to organized labour and every other politician in Canada attached to the NDP, it will have to take the good and bad of this solidarity forever.

Corrections

• An earlier version of this analysis incorrectly stated that Lou Arab, the husband of Rachel Notley, has an executive role with a union group.
  May 15, 2023 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Markusoff

Producer and writer

Jason Markusoff analyzes what's happening — and what isn't happening, but probably should be — in Calgary and sometimes farther afield. He's written in Alberta for nearly two decades with Maclean's magazine, the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal. He appears regularly on Power and Politics' Power Panel and various other CBC current affairs shows. Reach him at jason.markusoff@cbc.ca

Trudeau’s oil and gas policies too harsh for 

Rachel Notley

Centre-left contender looking to reclaim power as premier of Alberta in upcoming election

Bloomberg News
Brian Platt and Robert Tuttle

Last updated May 11, 2012

Rachel Notley is running to be premier of Alberta again. The province goes to the polls on May 29. PHOTO BY BEN NELMS/BLOOMBERG
Article content

The woman who’s looking to reclaim power in Canada’s energy heartland is pushing back against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s targets for cleaning up the oil and gas industry.

Rachel Notley, who was the centre-left premier of Alberta from 2015 to 2019 and is running for the job again, said Trudeau’s plan for cutting the sector’s emissions by more than 40 per cent by the end of the decade is too onerous. Her stance mirrors that of the country’s largest crude producers — and it’s also one that may be a political necessity as her New Democratic Party battles for votes in a province where oil is king and the prime minister is deeply unpopular.

“I don’t believe that the current drafted emissions caps that we’ve seen are realistic,” Notley said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “If we don’t get down to work and come up with a more practical cap, we are not going to be successful in mapping out a process that will get us there.

Trudeau’s government has promised to limit emissions in the energy sector to ensure Canada meets its climate targets, but hasn’t yet chosen a mechanism for doing so. His government published a plan last year that modelled a 42 per cent cut in oil and gas sector emissions by 2030, which oil executives have said isn’t possible without slashing output. More draft regulations are expected to be released within weeks.

Relations between the federal government and Alberta — whose nearly four million barrels of daily oil output makes Canada the world’s fourth-largest crude producer — are a perennial flashpoint in local politics. Notley’s 2015 victory was a rare win in a traditionally conservative province. She’s looking to defeat the United Conservative Party, currently led by Danielle Smith, in an election set for May 29.

Although Notley is generally much more aligned with Trudeau’s environmental agenda than Smith, she said the federal government is trying to move too fast on cutting oil-sector emissions. The vast majority of these emissions in Canada come from Alberta’s oilsands, which is among the world’s most carbon-intensive crude sources.

Race for premier is tight

“Using aspirational numbers to drive practical policy is not a recipe for success,” Notley said. “The key is making sure that what we put in place is practical and achievable, and it doesn’t become so oppressive that we find ourselves shutting in production.”

Notley said she doesn’t oppose a cap in principle, but she declined to provide her own emissions target, saying she’d consult with experts and industry on the matter.

“We’re not going to be unambitious,” she said. “But we are going to be realistic, and we’re going to make sure that the industry is able to continue to flourish.”

Polls suggest the race between Notley and Smith is very tight. A recent Leger survey found the New Democrats had a two-point lead over the United Conservatives, while another poll by Ipsos found Smith’s party was up by four points.

Notley is expected to sweep much of Alberta’s capital city of Edmonton, while Smith is dominant in the smaller population centres and rural areas. The election will likely come down to who wins the most districts in Calgary — where many of Canada’s energy companies are headquartered.

Notley argued that in the bigger picture, Canada’s environmental policy needs input from Alberta, and that has been prevented by the hostility between Smith’s United Conservatives and Trudeau’s Liberal Party.

“Both Alberta and Canada do best when energy policy is crafted, quite frankly, by Alberta,” she said. “So we want to be at the table, we want to be driving the conversation, and we want to be coming up with solutions that ultimately drive investment and grow our markets.”

Another of Trudeau’s signature environmental policies is a carbon tax on consumer fuels, which kicks in if a province doesn’t have an equivalent carbon price of its own. Notley said she would leave that as a federal tax, instead of replacing it with a made-in-Alberta version.

‘More money’ from Ottawa

To help push the oil sector to decarbonize, Trudeau has also introduced tax credits to defray the capital costs of building carbon capture systems. The credits are worth up to $12.4 billion over the next 10 years, federal officials estimate.

Even more public money for carbon capture might be necessary to compete with the lucrative production tax credits in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, Notley said. She declined to say if she would commit the provincial government to providing the funds.

“It really is a matter still for negotiations,” she said. “My first goal will be to get more money out of the federal government.”

Yet another federal policy that’s been the source of controversy in Alberta is an impending requirement that electricity grids be made net-zero emissions by 2035.


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Notley said Alberta can achieve the milestone at a reasonable cost if she’s elected premier and that trillions of dollars of global investment in renewable energy projects are coming over the next decade.

“It would be utterly ridiculous for Alberta to not be at the table trying to attract some of that,” she said. “So that is going to require some smart government policy, that’s going to require some incentives.”

Bloomberg.com