The overheated Alberta economy has screeched to a halt. And it does not look like the 'engine of Canada's economy' will be saving the country from recession anytime soon. So while manufacturing declines in Ontario, especially auto manufacturing, the result will mean even further decline in the need for gas and oil.
Opp's didn't plan for that did we. Of course not Alberta politicians provincially and federally oppose any concept of 'economic planning'.
And its not like we haven't been through all this before! Alberta Oil Jobs Evaporating
Despite the provincial governments head in the sand approach to oil development Albertans are speaking out, even as the oil economy bottoms out. Petro-Canada's planned pipeline bad for Alberta
And once again Alberta comes calling to Ottawa to bail it out!!! And of course the Alberta based Harpocrites are only to willing to oblige. But don't worry this is typical Conservative hype, they are simpy reannouncing previous commitments to capital investment.
Crisis forces Alberta to consider red ink
Opposition parties have been warning for years that the Tory government's spending was out of control, and that it was not doing enough to save the eye-popping surpluses it was reaping from soaring oil and natural-gas royalties. This year's surplus is expected to be $2-billion, down from the record of $8.6-billion in 2005-06.In 2007, the finance minister of the day, Lyle Oberg, speculated a deficit was possible if the province could not rein in its runaway spending. Since 2005-06, total government spending has jumped at least 32 per cent and per capita spending has been higher than that of any other provincial government.
Energy prices blamed as Alberta faces first deficit in 15 years
Alberta's decelerating energy sector can no longer be relied on to be the sole engine driving the province's economy, says a report issued yesterday by the Royal Bank of Canada. "While our new forecast for the provincial economy still reflects some degree of vigour, it does show a fair amount of steam seeping out of Alberta's engine," said Provincial Outlook, penned by economists Robert Hogue and Paul Ferley. The most visible example of the fading vigour is the delay or outright cancellation of several upgrader projects worth approximately $45 billion, as well as plans to scale back drilling because of low natural gas prices, the reports says. RBC has revised its GDP forecast to 2.1% for next year, down from a previous estimate of 3%.
Alberta inflation takes breather at 2.1 per cent
ATB Financial senior economist Todd Hirsch attributed the price jump in fruits and veggies in part to a weaker Canadian dollar."Alberta's inflation figures are being swept lower by falling commodity prices, especially crude oil and gasoline, but also by softer consumer demand," he said. Still, Canada's inflation was two per cent in November, the first time in two months that Alberta's inflation edged higher than the nation's.
Nearly across the board, oil companies have begun cutting spending. A survey by Barclays Capital found 2009 capital budgets were 12% lower than 2008 spending plans, and some believe they might head lower. Budgets in the U.S. and Canada are being cut the most, as projects in the high-cost oil-sands and unconventional natural-gas fields now make less economic sense. Companies such as Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips have delayed announcing budgets to spend more time assessing the market.
Alberta projects get$1B boost
PM commits gas tax funds to rebuilding infrastructure
A day after announcing it would sink deep into the red, the Harper government waved around a lot of green Friday in Conservative Alberta.On the heels of declaring it would run deficits totalling tens of billions of dollars over the next few years, Ottawa announced about $1 billion worth of previously committed infrastructure funding for projects in Wild Rose Country.The capital dollars come from earlier federal funding pledges, including $100 million to twin the Trans-Canada Highway near Lake Louise--with construction officially commencing today --and a promise by the Harper government to permanently allocate gas tax dollars to infrastructure.
Ottawa to give Alberta nearly $800-million
Calgary -- In a bid to keep Albertans working and help municipalities keep up with growing infrastructure demands, Ottawa announced yesterday it will pump more than $798-million into the province between 2010 and 2014.The extension to the federal gas-tax funding agreement could see cash earmarked for projects involving public transit, roads, water and waste disposal. Federal Labour Minister Rona Ambrose said the money will provide a "strong stimulus for the economy."
SEE:
Alberta Loses Billions
Recession Hits Alberta
Capitalism Caps Tarsands Expansion
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Showing posts sorted by relevance for query NEP ALBERTA. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query NEP ALBERTA. Sort by date Show all posts
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Oil Embargo on the U.S. Could Blow Up in Canada's Face
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith opposes federal threats to impose an oil embargo on the U.S.
Amid federal subsidies for clean energy, Smith has doubled Alberta's oil and gas production capacity in partnership with Enbridge.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has continued to lobby for Alberta’s interests while disparaging federal policies seen as detrimental to the province.
![]()
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is no shrinking violet when it comes to disagreements with the Canadian government over energy policy.
Smith has previously clashed with Ottawa over its carbon tax, and following a weekend visit to President-elect Trump, she did not mince words over Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly’s threat to impose an oil embargo on the US if Trump carries through with 25 percent tariffs on Canadian imports.
“Oil and gas is owned by the provinces, principally Alberta, and we won’t stand for that,” Smith told reporters at an online news conference Monday.
Alberta is Canada’s largest oil-producing province, in 2023 producing 84 percent of the country’s crude.
No country is more important than Canada when it comes to US oil imports. In 2023 the nation imported 4.4 million barrels a day, which was around 97 percent of Canada’s total crude oil exports, making it America’s top supplier.
Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has said he will slap 25% tariffs on imports coming from Canada and Mexico unless they take measures to control illegal drugs and migrants from crossing their borders.
Joly won’t rule out cutting off the supply of energy to the United States in a tariff war, telling CTV’s Question Period on Sunday that “everything is on the table”. The country is reportedly preparing a list of products against which surtaxes could be levied, should Trump make good on his tariff threat.
Ottawa made similar moves in 2019 during Trump’s first term, the National Post reported, adding more than $16 billion in surtaxes to American imports including steel, aluminum, yogurt, toilet paper and dishwashers.
But Smith said Canada shouldn’t be making empty threats and “it’s not Joly’s call to make,” she said via Global News. According to the Canadian Constitution’s section 92, provinces have exclusive jurisdiction over the exploration, development, conservation, and management of non-renewable natural resources within their borders.
Smith suggested that an oil embargo could blow up in Canada’s face, given that cutting off pipeline supplies through Michigan could choke off key supply to Ontario and Quebec.
Moreover, she said that, if Ottawa moves to cut exports, “they will have a national unity crisis on their on their hands at the same time as having a crisis with our U.S. trade partners.”
More positively, Smith told CTV News “I think oil and gas is going to be key to being able to get a breakthrough once tariffs do come in, getting them off. We maintain a strong partnership on energy. We make the case about how much the Americans benefit from that energy relationship, we demonstrate that we are a good trade partner, that we buy more goods and services from America than any other nation.”
“The bedrock of that tariff-free relationship is energy,” she added, noting that Canada exports heavily discounted Canadian oil to the US, which is then upgraded and sold as a value-added product for a price up to three times higher than the raw crude.
“I just feel like the more we make those arguments, slowly but surely we'll be able to make the case that we should continue to enjoy a tariff-free relationship,” Smith told reporters on the conference call.
Smith said she’s “very concerned” about a leadership vacuum affecting talks with the United States over tariffs. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has resigned and prorogued parliament until March. The Liberal Party of Canada has said that a new leader will be announced on March 9.
Alberta and Ottawa frequently clash over energy policy and this is just the latest spat. Older readers will remember when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau asked the Western provinces to agree to a voluntary freeze on oil prices amid the 1973 Arab oil embargo. With the embargo driving international oil prices to record highs, and nine days after asking for the price freeze, Trudeau’s government imposed a 40-cent tax on every barrel of oil exported to the United States. Revenues were used to subsidize oil imports for Eastern Canadian refiners. Then-Alberta Premier Lougheed called the decision “the most discriminatory action taken by a federal government against a particular province in the entire history of Confederation.”
The same Liberal government in 1980 introduced the National Energy Program, or NEP. The NEP aimed to reduce the role of foreign companies in the Canadian oil patch, including increasing Canadian ownership of the industry, sharing revenue between the federal and provincial governments, and developing non-conventional sources.
However, it was deeply unpopular in the Western provinces especially Alberta, where it was felt that it interfered with provincial jurisdiction and unfairly deprived Alberta of oil revenue. The program was dismantled in 1985 by the federal Conservative government.
LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for NEP ALBERTA
Fast-forwarding to present day, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has continued to lobby for Alberta’s interests while disparaging federal policies seen as detrimental to the province.
To wit, Alberta has been battling Ottawa over the carbon tax since it was introduced in 2019. Meant to tax carbon emissions, the levy is applied to homeowners’ natural gas bills, to fossil fuel producers and distributers, and to large industrial emitters through an output-based pricing system. The tax has more than tripled from $20 per tonne of carbon dioxide in 2019 to $65/t in 2023.
Although the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favor of the carbon tax in 2021, the Alberta government continues to challenge it on the grounds that it adds to already high home heating costs, and that it is unconstitutional.
In October 2024, Premier Smith announced the province has applied for a judicial review to be exempted from the carbon tax, with the greater goal of forcing Ottawa to cancel it.
Smith argues the tax places an unfair burden on Albertans, most of whom heat their homes with natural gas. Making matters worse, in 2023 Prime Minister Trudeau announced a three-year carbon tax reprieve on deliveries of heating oil. Smith says this only benefits people living in Atlantic Canada and Quebec, whose populations use heating oil, not natural gas.
Amid the controversy, Smith has doubled down on oil and gas production despite a federal government that has phased out fossil fuel subsidies — with the notable exception of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline, bought by Ottawa in 2018 for $4.5 billion but whose costs ballooned to $34 billion — and pivoted towards clean energy including billions in subsidies to EV battery production facilities.
Earlier this month Smith appeared on a video with Enbridge CEO Greg Abel to announce a doubling of oil and gas production.
“Today we've signed a letter of intent with Enbridge to accelerate these growth opportunities and ensure more capacity for oil and gas is available across more than 29,000 kilometers of pipelines in the Enbridge network,” Smith said on the Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC).
“This added capacity objective is critical to Alberta and our most important trading partner, the United States. Alberta's oil directly supports more than 50 US-based refineries with direct investment in more than 20 US states and is essential to affordability, growth, economic prosperity and energy security in the United States and globally. Alberta oil and natural gas is also a reliable and important feedstock for essential products produced in the United States especially in the Midwest states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin.”
By Andrew Topf for Oilprice.com
By Andrew Topf - Jan 14, 2025
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith opposes federal threats to impose an oil embargo on the U.S.
Amid federal subsidies for clean energy, Smith has doubled Alberta's oil and gas production capacity in partnership with Enbridge.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has continued to lobby for Alberta’s interests while disparaging federal policies seen as detrimental to the province.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is no shrinking violet when it comes to disagreements with the Canadian government over energy policy.
Smith has previously clashed with Ottawa over its carbon tax, and following a weekend visit to President-elect Trump, she did not mince words over Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly’s threat to impose an oil embargo on the US if Trump carries through with 25 percent tariffs on Canadian imports.
“Oil and gas is owned by the provinces, principally Alberta, and we won’t stand for that,” Smith told reporters at an online news conference Monday.
Alberta is Canada’s largest oil-producing province, in 2023 producing 84 percent of the country’s crude.
No country is more important than Canada when it comes to US oil imports. In 2023 the nation imported 4.4 million barrels a day, which was around 97 percent of Canada’s total crude oil exports, making it America’s top supplier.
Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has said he will slap 25% tariffs on imports coming from Canada and Mexico unless they take measures to control illegal drugs and migrants from crossing their borders.
Joly won’t rule out cutting off the supply of energy to the United States in a tariff war, telling CTV’s Question Period on Sunday that “everything is on the table”. The country is reportedly preparing a list of products against which surtaxes could be levied, should Trump make good on his tariff threat.
Ottawa made similar moves in 2019 during Trump’s first term, the National Post reported, adding more than $16 billion in surtaxes to American imports including steel, aluminum, yogurt, toilet paper and dishwashers.
But Smith said Canada shouldn’t be making empty threats and “it’s not Joly’s call to make,” she said via Global News. According to the Canadian Constitution’s section 92, provinces have exclusive jurisdiction over the exploration, development, conservation, and management of non-renewable natural resources within their borders.
Smith suggested that an oil embargo could blow up in Canada’s face, given that cutting off pipeline supplies through Michigan could choke off key supply to Ontario and Quebec.
Moreover, she said that, if Ottawa moves to cut exports, “they will have a national unity crisis on their on their hands at the same time as having a crisis with our U.S. trade partners.”
More positively, Smith told CTV News “I think oil and gas is going to be key to being able to get a breakthrough once tariffs do come in, getting them off. We maintain a strong partnership on energy. We make the case about how much the Americans benefit from that energy relationship, we demonstrate that we are a good trade partner, that we buy more goods and services from America than any other nation.”
“The bedrock of that tariff-free relationship is energy,” she added, noting that Canada exports heavily discounted Canadian oil to the US, which is then upgraded and sold as a value-added product for a price up to three times higher than the raw crude.
“I just feel like the more we make those arguments, slowly but surely we'll be able to make the case that we should continue to enjoy a tariff-free relationship,” Smith told reporters on the conference call.
Smith said she’s “very concerned” about a leadership vacuum affecting talks with the United States over tariffs. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has resigned and prorogued parliament until March. The Liberal Party of Canada has said that a new leader will be announced on March 9.
Alberta and Ottawa frequently clash over energy policy and this is just the latest spat. Older readers will remember when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau asked the Western provinces to agree to a voluntary freeze on oil prices amid the 1973 Arab oil embargo. With the embargo driving international oil prices to record highs, and nine days after asking for the price freeze, Trudeau’s government imposed a 40-cent tax on every barrel of oil exported to the United States. Revenues were used to subsidize oil imports for Eastern Canadian refiners. Then-Alberta Premier Lougheed called the decision “the most discriminatory action taken by a federal government against a particular province in the entire history of Confederation.”
The same Liberal government in 1980 introduced the National Energy Program, or NEP. The NEP aimed to reduce the role of foreign companies in the Canadian oil patch, including increasing Canadian ownership of the industry, sharing revenue between the federal and provincial governments, and developing non-conventional sources.
However, it was deeply unpopular in the Western provinces especially Alberta, where it was felt that it interfered with provincial jurisdiction and unfairly deprived Alberta of oil revenue. The program was dismantled in 1985 by the federal Conservative government.
LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for NEP ALBERTA
Fast-forwarding to present day, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has continued to lobby for Alberta’s interests while disparaging federal policies seen as detrimental to the province.
To wit, Alberta has been battling Ottawa over the carbon tax since it was introduced in 2019. Meant to tax carbon emissions, the levy is applied to homeowners’ natural gas bills, to fossil fuel producers and distributers, and to large industrial emitters through an output-based pricing system. The tax has more than tripled from $20 per tonne of carbon dioxide in 2019 to $65/t in 2023.
Although the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favor of the carbon tax in 2021, the Alberta government continues to challenge it on the grounds that it adds to already high home heating costs, and that it is unconstitutional.
In October 2024, Premier Smith announced the province has applied for a judicial review to be exempted from the carbon tax, with the greater goal of forcing Ottawa to cancel it.
Smith argues the tax places an unfair burden on Albertans, most of whom heat their homes with natural gas. Making matters worse, in 2023 Prime Minister Trudeau announced a three-year carbon tax reprieve on deliveries of heating oil. Smith says this only benefits people living in Atlantic Canada and Quebec, whose populations use heating oil, not natural gas.
Amid the controversy, Smith has doubled down on oil and gas production despite a federal government that has phased out fossil fuel subsidies — with the notable exception of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline, bought by Ottawa in 2018 for $4.5 billion but whose costs ballooned to $34 billion — and pivoted towards clean energy including billions in subsidies to EV battery production facilities.
Earlier this month Smith appeared on a video with Enbridge CEO Greg Abel to announce a doubling of oil and gas production.
“Today we've signed a letter of intent with Enbridge to accelerate these growth opportunities and ensure more capacity for oil and gas is available across more than 29,000 kilometers of pipelines in the Enbridge network,” Smith said on the Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC).
“This added capacity objective is critical to Alberta and our most important trading partner, the United States. Alberta's oil directly supports more than 50 US-based refineries with direct investment in more than 20 US states and is essential to affordability, growth, economic prosperity and energy security in the United States and globally. Alberta oil and natural gas is also a reliable and important feedstock for essential products produced in the United States especially in the Midwest states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin.”
By Andrew Topf for Oilprice.com
Monday, December 27, 2004
Alberta Provincial Election 2004
FAIR COMMENT
Below are articles I have written during the Alberta Provincial Election Campaign.
The Election was held November 22, 2004 and saw the ruling PC's lose 17 seats, which still left them with an overwhelming majority of 61 seats in the legislature, returning Alberta again to a one party state.
These stories were also posted on the web at Indymedia, StriaghtGoods, and Rabble.ca, as well as being circulated over a variety of listserves.
------------------------------------------
Ralph Klein kicked off the provincial election campaign kicking the disabled while they are down. Ralph is using his position as Premier not just as a bully pulpit, but as the pulpit of a bully. Making a caricature of disabled protestors, who rightly demanded a few crumbs from the Alberta Advantage (oil), Klein instead warned them that they looked able enough and that he would crack down on those abusing the system.
This is the same Premier who while drunk in public entered the single men’s hostel in Edmonton seeking out the poor to shove, berate, and threaten. His excuse then was he had a drinking problem.
No he has a poverty problem, he cannot believe that anyone in Alberta, er HIS Alberta, isn't as well off as the members of the PC's (Party of Calgary). He likes to bully the poor, the disabled, those who protest his decisions or lack of decisions.
Lets compare crooks, there is no evidence that people on AISH are taking advantage of us. For 5 years there has been no increase in AISH payments and for the past decade the number of people on AISH has not increased. 31,450 Albertan’s get $850 a month from AISH, half that is federal funding, excess federal tax credits for the poor get clawed back by the Alberta government. That comes out to over $2.6 million annually, less then the cost of the current Senate election.
If the disabled work their wages are used to claw back the $850. If they do work it will be at minimum wage, which is the lowest in Canada. In Alberta working full-time for minimum wage would earn a you $860 a month. The severely disabled are expected to live on $10,200 a year. That is below the national poverty level, no matter who calculates it Stats-Can or Ralph’s pals at the Fraser Institute.
If there is any financial funny business going on its in the Legislature, not in the AISH program. Take the Health minister's executive assistant for one. He got $400,000 for giving advice on health care projects, work he supposedly did but did not have any evidence of doing, and he got his contract without tender. We call that cronyism if not criminal. But in Ralph's World he calls it good government. Lets see that $400,000 would support 4000 severely disabled Albertan’s on AISH for a year, with spare change left over.
If this were the federal government doing this, Ralph would be joining his Calgary pal Steven Harper calling the Liberals crooks. Wait it did happen, it’s called Adscam.
But this is Alberta home of the longest lasting single party government in North America, if not the world. We are a single party state and have been for over 70 years. First it was 20 years of the United Farmers of Alberta then 35 years of Social Credit theocracy and now 33 of the right wing Tories. That is longer than Castro has ruled Cuba. It is longer than one party state rule in the Soviet Union.
Ralph likes to refer to the mythical volk of Alberta, as severely normal, so there cannot be anyone poor in Alberta, or injured workers, or seniors, or disabled. And woe betides those that insist they are not getting a fair shake in Ralphs Volkstadt. It’s the Alberta Advantage Uber Alles.
Peter Elzinga, a long time PC insider and the un-elected deputy Premier for Edmonton, is still managing this election for the party of Ralph, while he is employed by Suncor as legal counsel as they sue the Alberta Government over royalties they owe us.
And Ralph is going to lecture the disabled on abuse of the system. That’s a clear case of the kettle calling the pot black.
With 74 of 83 seats Ralph can bully anyone he wants from his Teflon pulpit. He can with the aplomb of a King Charles dismiss the legislature as a damned nuisance that gets in the way of his government. Nor does his view of parliamentary democracy include an opposition, they too are a nuisances, just as Cromwell was.
He can walk out of the Federal health care meeting to go gambling, dropping some cold Alberta cash into the VLT's in Quebec. Showing his political solidarity with the Quebec government of his protege; Jean Charest no doubt.
He dropped a wad that would have paid the rent and utilities for at least one person on AISH.
Ralph likes to drink, so we privatize the government liquor stores. Ralph likes to gamble so we introduce VLT's into bars. On the other hand, women’s shelters in Alberta have to beg for money to meet increased insurance costs.
He can hold another useless Senate election a $3 million dollar red herring while claiming there is no democratic deficit in Alberta. It would do Bonnie Prince Charlie proud. And like other leaders who follow the fueher principle Klein dismissed elected health board representatives two years into their mandate, because they were not Tories. They were another opposition to his government. He has dismissed school board trustees for the same reason. They voiced opposition to government cuts. Vox Populi is not popular with Ralph. If Ralph and the PC's had their way every level of government in Alberta would be dominated Tories. And opposition be damned.
And the reason for electing another senator in waiting, we already have two from the last exercise in futility in 2001, is because Alberta Tories want to reform the federal government. But no reform is needed in Alberta insists Ralph, where the legislature sits less often then in any other parliamentary democracy. In Alberta the most important matters of State are decided in closed cabinet meetings.
But that should be expected from a Premier who states in the legislature that Augusto Pinochet is just a misunderstood democrat. He was forced to overthrow a democratically elected government because it was socialist. Them reds got what they deserved. And with unabashed aplomb his evidence for this opinion was an essay he wrote for a University course. The fact he plagiarized whole sections of his essay off the internet was dismissed with a wave of a hand. And the iron fist of his Minister of Learning who met with Alberta’s University Presidents and demanded they write public letters of support for Ralph saying he didn't really cheat on his homework. In Alberta when it comes to the crime of plagiarism, to paraphrase Geoge Orwell, some undergraduates are more equal than others.
Ralph claims there is no democratic deficit in Alberta. In Calgary home of Canada's corporations and right wing lobby groups, all is well for the Party of Calgary and Ralph, the Reform, er Alliance, er Conservative Party of Stephen Harper demands fixed election dates, referendum, recall, and proportional representation in Ottawa. What is good for goosing Ottawa dare not be gandered in Alberta.
This election is being held 3.5 years into a possible 5-year mandate. And while our Teflon Emperor has proclaimed this is his last election that will mean Ralph expects to rule until 2010. By that time Alberta may be the last single party state in the hemisphere, including Cuba.
For the mythical "severely normal Albertans; Martha and Henry" Ralph may be their boy, for real Albertan’s living in Ralph’s World it’s Caveat Elector.
ALBERTA’S NEW DEFINITION OF ‘PC’ (Party of Calgary)
When Ralph Klein announced shortly before the election call that his government was giving $3 billion dollars as a ‘gift’ to Alberta municipalities, it looked like another typical Tory election ploy of buying votes with our own money. But in this case there was a twist, the $3 billion was not going to be divided evenly between Alberta’s two largest cities. Rather Ralph’s hometown of Calgary was going to get $1billion, Edmonton was going to only get $750 million based on its population, while the rest of the money was to be spent across the province in smaller cities and municipal districts. The reason Ralph gave for giving Calgary more than Edmonton was revealing he stated that it was because the Mayor of Calgary had come up with the idea in the first place and asked him for the money. Once again Calgary benefited while the Capital City was short-changed by Ralph and his PC party.
In Alberta it has become clear that in this election the term PC does not mean Political Correctness, nor does it mean Progressive Conservative it’s new meaning is PARTY OF CALGARY. Having re-branded themselves the Progressive Conservative Association, deleting any reference to being a political party in their ads, the PC’s as they have been known since 1971 have become a regional party representing Central and Southern Alberta. They are an ‘association’ a corporation which runs the province from the real centre of power; Calgary. They have returned to their roots, which was in the office towers of Calgary in particular the offices of the Mannix Corporation, which hired Peter Lougheed and later Ernest Manning.
After 35 years in office as the provinces ruling party, the Social Credit party of Manning was in decline with a lame duck Premier Harry Strom. In the 1971 election the small PC caucus of six swept the province with an overwhelming majority. And has stayed in power for almost as long as their predecessor.
The success of the PC’s under Lougheed was engineered by the former quarterback by amalgamating the interests of Calgary’s Liberals and Tories and with a backroom deal with Ernest Manning to quietly throw his support behind the new party pulling southern Alberta votes in for the Lougheed team. The Socreds disappeared off the map over the next decade, slowly becoming irrelevant as the PC’s amalgamated their party along with the Liberals. Only the NDP with one member in the house stood as an opposition to the Lougheed Government.
With the oil boom of the seventies and eighties, the governing Tories could do no wrong. Until that fateful mechanism of capitalism, the boom and bust business cycle slammed into the province in the 1980’s. The recession that had been hitting the rest of the world and Canada had been avoided in Alberta with the expansion of the tar sands oil project. The boom busted. Unfortunately it busted as prices for refined oil increased, while raw product declined. The bust in Alberta was a boon for eastern Canada, in particular Ontario, where much refining was done. Alberta’s export prices were kept down for a made in Canada price, while its ability to refine, process and export to the US market were limited. This was the real crisis that caused oil executives in Calgary to leap from their executive offices in a repeat of the great Wall Street crash of 1929. Construction dried up, laying-off thousands of trade’s workers, thousands of white collar workers in the oil industry in Calgary were laid off, steel and pipe manufacturing plants closed.
In order to stabilize oil prices in Canada, the minority Liberal Government in Ottawa under pressure from the NDP introduced the NEP, (ironically named since an earlier form of the NEP was Lenin’s attempted to create a market space for capitalism in Russia in the 1920’s) and created Canada’s national Oil company PetroCanada. In Alberta this partial ‘nationalization’ of Alberta’s oil production in order to create a provincial refining processing industry is still seen to this day as having ‘caused’ the crash of the eighties. What Albertan’s forget when they mention the dreaded NEP is the famous Globe and Mail photograph of then Prime Minister Trudeau and Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed, toasting champagne glasses together over the creation of PetroCanada, as a result of the NEP. PetroCanada saved Calgary from its market forced crash. It revived the oil industry in Alberta by increasing investment in the refining process, and contrary to the gnashing of teeth and spitting of blood over the NEP, allowed for Alberta to enter an unprecedented twenty-year boom.
A room full of monkeys could have governed this province over that time, and in fact that is exactly what happened.
After Peter Lougheed retired, the natural governing party of the PC’s elected its first Edmontonian as leader; Don Getty. Getty while an Edmontonian and former football teammate of Lougheeds, was well connected with Calgarys Petroleum old boys network. He was their point man in the Provincial capital, acting an oil business consultant and lobbyist. He however was unfortunate enough to takeover the party as the economic crisis continued in Alberta. However with record oil reserves, the government was able to throw money around ‘like a drunken sailor’ in order to save collapsing farms, as well as collapsing secondary and tertiary businesses. In rural Alberta it subsidized secondary processing plants for canola, beef, and pigs. In order to save the construction industry, and maintain its rural Social Credit base it built hospitals and schools, it expanded university construction, and in order to win seniors votes it built seniors housing in the cities. And it got re-elected.
Unfortunately even though the government built much, it was unable to fund staffing for seniors homes, hospitals or universities. And it couldn’t find enough tradesmen to build infrastructure.
It invested in meat packing plants, in a hazardous waste reduction plant in Swan Hills, it began partnerships with Japanese companies in building processing plants for timber export, all with an open cheque book paid with oil money and interest from the heritage trust fund.
Getty ended his short-term premiership in a personal and political crisis. His son was busted dealing cocaine (after his parole he was hired by Tory Bagman Ron Southern of ATCO as favour to Getty), his reputation was besmirched by the party as having been a lame duck premier. The knives were out after Getty lost his seat in Edmonton to a Liberal and hadto run in Stettler in a safe seat to retain his party leadership. Getty continued to be attacked by the opposition as well as by party insiders, in particular by leadership candidate Ralph Klein. The Liberals who had not been on the Alberta political map since they lost to the United Farmers at the beginning of the 1920’s had been revived as a centre right party to contest the Tories domination of the Alberta political map.
Under Getty the party lost a record number of seats to the NDP and Liberals, and the PC’s forced Getty out. In a closely fought leadership race between Edmonton MLA Nancy Betkowski (who would later become a lame duck leader of the Liberals) and former Calgary Mayor and boozing good old boy Ralph Klein, Getty was attacked for having created a fiscal crisis in the government.
In reality Getty had primed the pump in a good old-fashioned Keynesian attempt to forestall the worst crisis the province had seen since the Great Depression.
And the Depression was a memory in the province that still brought shivers to those who had lived through it. It was this memory that had kept the Socreds in power for 35 years, it would be the NEP that would be blamed for the crisis Getty faced. Albertans have long memories of those who done them wrong and those who saved them. In the Depression it was the Socreds that challenged the ‘eastern bastards’ in Ottawa as Klein called them, after the NEP fiasco it was the Tories who challenged Ottawa. To this day Klein uses Ottawa bashing to gather round the wagons and the mere whisper of NEP is enough to silence provincial opposition politicians and federal politicians as well.
Klein won the leadership race by Getty bashing, and in no small way Edmonton bashing. If Ottawa bashing won votes in Alberta, Edmonton bashing was equally a winner in the rest of the province.
Obviously Edmonton as the Capital of the province was like Ottawa a government town, though in fact it is the largest working class city in the province, full of tax and spend bureaucrats, government workers and folks who don’t know how to balance a budget. The Tories returned to their roots in electing Klein, and once again became the Party of Calgary.
The next test of the Party of Calgary came in the provincial election of that year, which saw former Edmonton Mayor Lawrence Decore leading a revived Liberal Party face off against former Calgary Mayor Ralph Klein leading the Party of Calgary. The NDP had been the official opposition for the first time in it’s history prior to the election, but by the end of the election were wiped off the map.
Like the rest of the country and in fact the rest of the world, the province was facing a short-term deficit which was increasing the provincial debt. All levels of government were facing increasing debt as corporations and foreign investors began divesting themselves of bonds in order to have access to cash.
Once again the business cycle of capitalism was glossed over, while politicians blamed the Getty government for its excess spending. In the United States and England Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher were elected and blamed Keynesianism for the economic downturn. It was the big lie of debt and deficit that allowed right wing politicians to begin to move towards increased privatization and outsourcing of government services based on the demands of business lobbies with cash to invest.
Decore called for ‘brutal cuts’ to government spending, Klein called for ‘massive cuts’, Klein won. Albertans stick with the one that brung ya. The vote was, ironically against the Tory government of Don Getty, with both Klein and Decore making him the boogieman.
In Edmonton and Calgary a sense that the crisis facing the Tories could mean a Liberal victory, led to strategic voting which ended in a wipe out of all the sitting members of the NDP, a larger Liberal Opposition and the election of Ralph as Premier of Alberta.
The Tories could do no wrong in Alberta except in Edmonton, where every sitting Tory lost to the Liberals. The Edmonton Sun renamed the city Redmonton, after the Liberal party colour of Red.
It would be a black day for the city, for government services, for democracy in the province as the Klein government would adopt the Republican Agenda, the New Zealand Agenda and the Thatcher Agenda to deal with its short term deficit crisis.
The Klein Government embraced privatization and outsourcing of government services and cutting payments to the poor, the disabled, and the artistic and cultural communities. Getty style Keynesianism was replaced with Fraser Institute policies. In fact Ralph became the poster boy for the Fraser Institute and its Free Market / Less Government policies.
Calgary became the HQ not only of the Oil industry in Canada but the HQ of privatized federal corporations like CN and former Quebec companies like the CPR. It became the HQ of National Citizens Coalition, (NCC) the right wing political arm of the Fraser Institute and the Business Council on National Interest. And it gave birth to the Reform Party of Canada, led by Ernest Mannings little boy Preston. The Reform party became the Canadian Alliance and now today is the Federal Conservative Party (having dropped any pretence to be being ‘Progressive’ by removing that prefix). The current leader of the Conservative Party is Stephen Harper who was also spokesman for the NCC.
Under Klein Calgary has boomed with growth of white collar, high-income movers and shakers. While across the rest of the province secondary and tertiary industries have declined like meatpacking. Hospitals have been closed, nurses and doctors laid off, social services have been cut, work for welfare has been imposed, private secondary and post secondary schools compete with the public schools and universities, teachers have been cut.
Where there haven’t been cuts is in Northern Alberta, where there is a construction boom in the oil industry of the Tar Sands and the secondary refining and processing plants in and around Edmonton.
This later boom was originally created by the NEP and has been funded by reduced royalties that the Klein government introduced when it took over. It was these very reductions in royalties that exasperated the Alberta deficit that led to such brutal cuts in the nineties.
It is Calgary where the right wing think tanks, the political science department at the U of C, and others have launched their cross Canada attempts to promote: charter schools, privatization of liquor stores, an elected Senate, and a firewall around the province. Calgary represents the new conservative politics of the Republican Party North.
Jean Charest when he was leader of the Federal Progressive Conservative Party during that first term when Klein began his ‘revolution’ said "Alberta sets the agenda for Canada". Today Charest is Liberal Premier of Quebec and modeling his restructuring of Quebec’s social contract on what he learned from Klein, as is B.C. Premier Gordon. That Agenda is alive and well in Canadian politics provincially and federally, but let’s call a spade a spade, it’s not the Alberta Agenda anymore than Klein’s Party of Calgary represents the province, it’s the Calgary Agenda.
ALBERTA’S SENATE ELECTION-Don’t Vote It Only Encourages Them
Below are articles I have written during the Alberta Provincial Election Campaign.
The Election was held November 22, 2004 and saw the ruling PC's lose 17 seats, which still left them with an overwhelming majority of 61 seats in the legislature, returning Alberta again to a one party state.
These stories were also posted on the web at Indymedia, StriaghtGoods, and Rabble.ca, as well as being circulated over a variety of listserves.
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ALBERTA UBER ALLES
(1214 words)
Ralph Klein kicked off the provincial election campaign kicking the disabled while they are down. Ralph is using his position as Premier not just as a bully pulpit, but as the pulpit of a bully. Making a caricature of disabled protestors, who rightly demanded a few crumbs from the Alberta Advantage (oil), Klein instead warned them that they looked able enough and that he would crack down on those abusing the system.
This is the same Premier who while drunk in public entered the single men’s hostel in Edmonton seeking out the poor to shove, berate, and threaten. His excuse then was he had a drinking problem.
No he has a poverty problem, he cannot believe that anyone in Alberta, er HIS Alberta, isn't as well off as the members of the PC's (Party of Calgary). He likes to bully the poor, the disabled, those who protest his decisions or lack of decisions.
Lets compare crooks, there is no evidence that people on AISH are taking advantage of us. For 5 years there has been no increase in AISH payments and for the past decade the number of people on AISH has not increased. 31,450 Albertan’s get $850 a month from AISH, half that is federal funding, excess federal tax credits for the poor get clawed back by the Alberta government. That comes out to over $2.6 million annually, less then the cost of the current Senate election.
If the disabled work their wages are used to claw back the $850. If they do work it will be at minimum wage, which is the lowest in Canada. In Alberta working full-time for minimum wage would earn a you $860 a month. The severely disabled are expected to live on $10,200 a year. That is below the national poverty level, no matter who calculates it Stats-Can or Ralph’s pals at the Fraser Institute.
If there is any financial funny business going on its in the Legislature, not in the AISH program. Take the Health minister's executive assistant for one. He got $400,000 for giving advice on health care projects, work he supposedly did but did not have any evidence of doing, and he got his contract without tender. We call that cronyism if not criminal. But in Ralph's World he calls it good government. Lets see that $400,000 would support 4000 severely disabled Albertan’s on AISH for a year, with spare change left over.
If this were the federal government doing this, Ralph would be joining his Calgary pal Steven Harper calling the Liberals crooks. Wait it did happen, it’s called Adscam.
But this is Alberta home of the longest lasting single party government in North America, if not the world. We are a single party state and have been for over 70 years. First it was 20 years of the United Farmers of Alberta then 35 years of Social Credit theocracy and now 33 of the right wing Tories. That is longer than Castro has ruled Cuba. It is longer than one party state rule in the Soviet Union.
Ralph likes to refer to the mythical volk of Alberta, as severely normal, so there cannot be anyone poor in Alberta, or injured workers, or seniors, or disabled. And woe betides those that insist they are not getting a fair shake in Ralphs Volkstadt. It’s the Alberta Advantage Uber Alles.
Peter Elzinga, a long time PC insider and the un-elected deputy Premier for Edmonton, is still managing this election for the party of Ralph, while he is employed by Suncor as legal counsel as they sue the Alberta Government over royalties they owe us.
And Ralph is going to lecture the disabled on abuse of the system. That’s a clear case of the kettle calling the pot black.
With 74 of 83 seats Ralph can bully anyone he wants from his Teflon pulpit. He can with the aplomb of a King Charles dismiss the legislature as a damned nuisance that gets in the way of his government. Nor does his view of parliamentary democracy include an opposition, they too are a nuisances, just as Cromwell was.
He can walk out of the Federal health care meeting to go gambling, dropping some cold Alberta cash into the VLT's in Quebec. Showing his political solidarity with the Quebec government of his protege; Jean Charest no doubt.
He dropped a wad that would have paid the rent and utilities for at least one person on AISH.
Ralph likes to drink, so we privatize the government liquor stores. Ralph likes to gamble so we introduce VLT's into bars. On the other hand, women’s shelters in Alberta have to beg for money to meet increased insurance costs.
He can hold another useless Senate election a $3 million dollar red herring while claiming there is no democratic deficit in Alberta. It would do Bonnie Prince Charlie proud. And like other leaders who follow the fueher principle Klein dismissed elected health board representatives two years into their mandate, because they were not Tories. They were another opposition to his government. He has dismissed school board trustees for the same reason. They voiced opposition to government cuts. Vox Populi is not popular with Ralph. If Ralph and the PC's had their way every level of government in Alberta would be dominated Tories. And opposition be damned.
And the reason for electing another senator in waiting, we already have two from the last exercise in futility in 2001, is because Alberta Tories want to reform the federal government. But no reform is needed in Alberta insists Ralph, where the legislature sits less often then in any other parliamentary democracy. In Alberta the most important matters of State are decided in closed cabinet meetings.
But that should be expected from a Premier who states in the legislature that Augusto Pinochet is just a misunderstood democrat. He was forced to overthrow a democratically elected government because it was socialist. Them reds got what they deserved. And with unabashed aplomb his evidence for this opinion was an essay he wrote for a University course. The fact he plagiarized whole sections of his essay off the internet was dismissed with a wave of a hand. And the iron fist of his Minister of Learning who met with Alberta’s University Presidents and demanded they write public letters of support for Ralph saying he didn't really cheat on his homework. In Alberta when it comes to the crime of plagiarism, to paraphrase Geoge Orwell, some undergraduates are more equal than others.
Ralph claims there is no democratic deficit in Alberta. In Calgary home of Canada's corporations and right wing lobby groups, all is well for the Party of Calgary and Ralph, the Reform, er Alliance, er Conservative Party of Stephen Harper demands fixed election dates, referendum, recall, and proportional representation in Ottawa. What is good for goosing Ottawa dare not be gandered in Alberta.
This election is being held 3.5 years into a possible 5-year mandate. And while our Teflon Emperor has proclaimed this is his last election that will mean Ralph expects to rule until 2010. By that time Alberta may be the last single party state in the hemisphere, including Cuba.
For the mythical "severely normal Albertans; Martha and Henry" Ralph may be their boy, for real Albertan’s living in Ralph’s World it’s Caveat Elector.
ALBERTA’S NEW DEFINITION OF ‘PC’ (Party of Calgary)
(2336 words)
In Alberta it has become clear that in this election the term PC does not mean Political Correctness, nor does it mean Progressive Conservative it’s new meaning is PARTY OF CALGARY. Having re-branded themselves the Progressive Conservative Association, deleting any reference to being a political party in their ads, the PC’s as they have been known since 1971 have become a regional party representing Central and Southern Alberta. They are an ‘association’ a corporation which runs the province from the real centre of power; Calgary. They have returned to their roots, which was in the office towers of Calgary in particular the offices of the Mannix Corporation, which hired Peter Lougheed and later Ernest Manning.
After 35 years in office as the provinces ruling party, the Social Credit party of Manning was in decline with a lame duck Premier Harry Strom. In the 1971 election the small PC caucus of six swept the province with an overwhelming majority. And has stayed in power for almost as long as their predecessor.
The success of the PC’s under Lougheed was engineered by the former quarterback by amalgamating the interests of Calgary’s Liberals and Tories and with a backroom deal with Ernest Manning to quietly throw his support behind the new party pulling southern Alberta votes in for the Lougheed team. The Socreds disappeared off the map over the next decade, slowly becoming irrelevant as the PC’s amalgamated their party along with the Liberals. Only the NDP with one member in the house stood as an opposition to the Lougheed Government.
With the oil boom of the seventies and eighties, the governing Tories could do no wrong. Until that fateful mechanism of capitalism, the boom and bust business cycle slammed into the province in the 1980’s. The recession that had been hitting the rest of the world and Canada had been avoided in Alberta with the expansion of the tar sands oil project. The boom busted. Unfortunately it busted as prices for refined oil increased, while raw product declined. The bust in Alberta was a boon for eastern Canada, in particular Ontario, where much refining was done. Alberta’s export prices were kept down for a made in Canada price, while its ability to refine, process and export to the US market were limited. This was the real crisis that caused oil executives in Calgary to leap from their executive offices in a repeat of the great Wall Street crash of 1929. Construction dried up, laying-off thousands of trade’s workers, thousands of white collar workers in the oil industry in Calgary were laid off, steel and pipe manufacturing plants closed.
In order to stabilize oil prices in Canada, the minority Liberal Government in Ottawa under pressure from the NDP introduced the NEP, (ironically named since an earlier form of the NEP was Lenin’s attempted to create a market space for capitalism in Russia in the 1920’s) and created Canada’s national Oil company PetroCanada. In Alberta this partial ‘nationalization’ of Alberta’s oil production in order to create a provincial refining processing industry is still seen to this day as having ‘caused’ the crash of the eighties. What Albertan’s forget when they mention the dreaded NEP is the famous Globe and Mail photograph of then Prime Minister Trudeau and Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed, toasting champagne glasses together over the creation of PetroCanada, as a result of the NEP. PetroCanada saved Calgary from its market forced crash. It revived the oil industry in Alberta by increasing investment in the refining process, and contrary to the gnashing of teeth and spitting of blood over the NEP, allowed for Alberta to enter an unprecedented twenty-year boom.
A room full of monkeys could have governed this province over that time, and in fact that is exactly what happened.
After Peter Lougheed retired, the natural governing party of the PC’s elected its first Edmontonian as leader; Don Getty. Getty while an Edmontonian and former football teammate of Lougheeds, was well connected with Calgarys Petroleum old boys network. He was their point man in the Provincial capital, acting an oil business consultant and lobbyist. He however was unfortunate enough to takeover the party as the economic crisis continued in Alberta. However with record oil reserves, the government was able to throw money around ‘like a drunken sailor’ in order to save collapsing farms, as well as collapsing secondary and tertiary businesses. In rural Alberta it subsidized secondary processing plants for canola, beef, and pigs. In order to save the construction industry, and maintain its rural Social Credit base it built hospitals and schools, it expanded university construction, and in order to win seniors votes it built seniors housing in the cities. And it got re-elected.
Unfortunately even though the government built much, it was unable to fund staffing for seniors homes, hospitals or universities. And it couldn’t find enough tradesmen to build infrastructure.
It invested in meat packing plants, in a hazardous waste reduction plant in Swan Hills, it began partnerships with Japanese companies in building processing plants for timber export, all with an open cheque book paid with oil money and interest from the heritage trust fund.
Getty ended his short-term premiership in a personal and political crisis. His son was busted dealing cocaine (after his parole he was hired by Tory Bagman Ron Southern of ATCO as favour to Getty), his reputation was besmirched by the party as having been a lame duck premier. The knives were out after Getty lost his seat in Edmonton to a Liberal and hadto run in Stettler in a safe seat to retain his party leadership. Getty continued to be attacked by the opposition as well as by party insiders, in particular by leadership candidate Ralph Klein. The Liberals who had not been on the Alberta political map since they lost to the United Farmers at the beginning of the 1920’s had been revived as a centre right party to contest the Tories domination of the Alberta political map.
Under Getty the party lost a record number of seats to the NDP and Liberals, and the PC’s forced Getty out. In a closely fought leadership race between Edmonton MLA Nancy Betkowski (who would later become a lame duck leader of the Liberals) and former Calgary Mayor and boozing good old boy Ralph Klein, Getty was attacked for having created a fiscal crisis in the government.
In reality Getty had primed the pump in a good old-fashioned Keynesian attempt to forestall the worst crisis the province had seen since the Great Depression.
And the Depression was a memory in the province that still brought shivers to those who had lived through it. It was this memory that had kept the Socreds in power for 35 years, it would be the NEP that would be blamed for the crisis Getty faced. Albertans have long memories of those who done them wrong and those who saved them. In the Depression it was the Socreds that challenged the ‘eastern bastards’ in Ottawa as Klein called them, after the NEP fiasco it was the Tories who challenged Ottawa. To this day Klein uses Ottawa bashing to gather round the wagons and the mere whisper of NEP is enough to silence provincial opposition politicians and federal politicians as well.
Klein won the leadership race by Getty bashing, and in no small way Edmonton bashing. If Ottawa bashing won votes in Alberta, Edmonton bashing was equally a winner in the rest of the province.
Obviously Edmonton as the Capital of the province was like Ottawa a government town, though in fact it is the largest working class city in the province, full of tax and spend bureaucrats, government workers and folks who don’t know how to balance a budget. The Tories returned to their roots in electing Klein, and once again became the Party of Calgary.
The next test of the Party of Calgary came in the provincial election of that year, which saw former Edmonton Mayor Lawrence Decore leading a revived Liberal Party face off against former Calgary Mayor Ralph Klein leading the Party of Calgary. The NDP had been the official opposition for the first time in it’s history prior to the election, but by the end of the election were wiped off the map.
Like the rest of the country and in fact the rest of the world, the province was facing a short-term deficit which was increasing the provincial debt. All levels of government were facing increasing debt as corporations and foreign investors began divesting themselves of bonds in order to have access to cash.
Once again the business cycle of capitalism was glossed over, while politicians blamed the Getty government for its excess spending. In the United States and England Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher were elected and blamed Keynesianism for the economic downturn. It was the big lie of debt and deficit that allowed right wing politicians to begin to move towards increased privatization and outsourcing of government services based on the demands of business lobbies with cash to invest.
Decore called for ‘brutal cuts’ to government spending, Klein called for ‘massive cuts’, Klein won. Albertans stick with the one that brung ya. The vote was, ironically against the Tory government of Don Getty, with both Klein and Decore making him the boogieman.
In Edmonton and Calgary a sense that the crisis facing the Tories could mean a Liberal victory, led to strategic voting which ended in a wipe out of all the sitting members of the NDP, a larger Liberal Opposition and the election of Ralph as Premier of Alberta.
The Tories could do no wrong in Alberta except in Edmonton, where every sitting Tory lost to the Liberals. The Edmonton Sun renamed the city Redmonton, after the Liberal party colour of Red.
It would be a black day for the city, for government services, for democracy in the province as the Klein government would adopt the Republican Agenda, the New Zealand Agenda and the Thatcher Agenda to deal with its short term deficit crisis.
The Klein Government embraced privatization and outsourcing of government services and cutting payments to the poor, the disabled, and the artistic and cultural communities. Getty style Keynesianism was replaced with Fraser Institute policies. In fact Ralph became the poster boy for the Fraser Institute and its Free Market / Less Government policies.
Calgary became the HQ not only of the Oil industry in Canada but the HQ of privatized federal corporations like CN and former Quebec companies like the CPR. It became the HQ of National Citizens Coalition, (NCC) the right wing political arm of the Fraser Institute and the Business Council on National Interest. And it gave birth to the Reform Party of Canada, led by Ernest Mannings little boy Preston. The Reform party became the Canadian Alliance and now today is the Federal Conservative Party (having dropped any pretence to be being ‘Progressive’ by removing that prefix). The current leader of the Conservative Party is Stephen Harper who was also spokesman for the NCC.
Under Klein Calgary has boomed with growth of white collar, high-income movers and shakers. While across the rest of the province secondary and tertiary industries have declined like meatpacking. Hospitals have been closed, nurses and doctors laid off, social services have been cut, work for welfare has been imposed, private secondary and post secondary schools compete with the public schools and universities, teachers have been cut.
Where there haven’t been cuts is in Northern Alberta, where there is a construction boom in the oil industry of the Tar Sands and the secondary refining and processing plants in and around Edmonton.
This later boom was originally created by the NEP and has been funded by reduced royalties that the Klein government introduced when it took over. It was these very reductions in royalties that exasperated the Alberta deficit that led to such brutal cuts in the nineties.
It is Calgary where the right wing think tanks, the political science department at the U of C, and others have launched their cross Canada attempts to promote: charter schools, privatization of liquor stores, an elected Senate, and a firewall around the province. Calgary represents the new conservative politics of the Republican Party North.
Jean Charest when he was leader of the Federal Progressive Conservative Party during that first term when Klein began his ‘revolution’ said "Alberta sets the agenda for Canada". Today Charest is Liberal Premier of Quebec and modeling his restructuring of Quebec’s social contract on what he learned from Klein, as is B.C. Premier Gordon. That Agenda is alive and well in Canadian politics provincially and federally, but let’s call a spade a spade, it’s not the Alberta Agenda anymore than Klein’s Party of Calgary represents the province, it’s the Calgary Agenda.
ALBERTA’S SENATE ELECTION-Don’t Vote It Only Encourages Them
(881 words)
For the third time in seven years Albertan’s will get the privilege of electing our Senators in waiting, which are the proverbial bridesmaids of Canadian Politics. This is a $3 million dollar farce foisted on the taxpayers of this province by Ralph Klein in order to appease his parties Calgary rightwing rump, who are the movers and shakers in the new federal Conservative party. Albertan’s are one again being led down the golden brick road by Ralph, in this election which is non-binding on the Federal government. Don’t peek behind the curtain, or the smoke and mirrors of this non-event will become clear.
It’s all about the old Reform party agenda of having a Triple E Senate, ‘Equal, Elected, Effective’, but wait the Reform party is no more. And the masses have not been clamoring for an elected Senate, heck Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party (the Reform party in wicked witch of the west drag) didn’t even raise the issue in the June Federal Election. Ralph wasn’t even going to run any of his own party candidates in the Senate election till he faced pressure from some of those same Federal Conservative faithful about what a sham a Senate election looked like when the ruling party in the province didn’t play along.
So the provincial Tories are running candidates. The newly formed Alberta Alliance (another incarnation of Mormon-Elder Randy Thorsteinson attempt at creating a rural right wing party, he was the leader of the Alberta Social Credit party in the last election) is running the majority of candidates and there are three Independents all former supporters of the Reform party.
It’s a race to the right. The provincial and federal Liberals and NDP are not running candidates, nor is the Green Party, or the Communist Party, or the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist, nor even the Natural Law Party.
During the last Senate election at least there were truly independent candidates, severely normal Albertan’s as Klein calls them, running. Not so in this non-event. And the lack of any real election presence, signs, leaflets, radio, TV or newspaper ads underlies the whole phoniness of this election of a Senator in waiting.
And given the fact that Senate appointments are a lifelong appointment to the Red Chamber, one has to wonder how you can even elect one once every twenty-five years let alone having three elections in seven years.
Did I mention that Senators are appointed? Appointed by the Government of Canada, the Senate is a Federal institution and it has not been reformed to be a Triple E Senate, despite the feeble attempts by the Calgary based right wing party known as the Reform-Alliance-Conservatives, in its early years to make this an issue.
The only place one hears of Senate Reform is from the mouths of Calgarians, such as Peter Lougheed, Preston Manning and Stephen Harper. For the rest of us in Alberta and across Canada it’s a non-issue.
And we still have Senators in waiting elected prior to this election awaiting appointment by the Federal government, so why do we need more? The fact that these previous elected Senators, members of the Reform party, like the current crop has a snowballs chance of being appointed is irrelevant. It is another shtick the right wing can use to proclaim from the office towers in Calgary of how the West Wants In and no one in Ottawa is answering the door.
Once upon a time it was about electoral reform in Canada, the agenda of the Reform party was Referendum, Recall and a Triple E Senate. As it went through its transformations into the Conservative party, it dropped all pretence to democratic reform, and is now all about States rights, err Provincial rights, Flat Taxes, Tax Reduction, Privatization, the Republican Agenda for Canada.
The real question is not about reforming the Senate but why we should even have this elitist institution, a vestigial remnant of the British Parliamentary system modeled on its House of Lords. In order to be appointed to the Senate you must be a landowner. You must own property renters need not apply. It does not even represent all the parties in the Federal House of Commons, there are neither NDP nor BQ Senators. Of course in the case of the NDP that’s because they have held that this elitist establishment should be abolished. Now there is a real reform.
We should not be electing Senators but abolishing the Senate. Real reform would be to expand the House of Commons through a system of proportional representation to make up for elimination of this archaic vestige of British colonialism.
Senate reform is not on the agenda for any of the Federal parties, proportional representation is.
In Alberta on the other hand such radical ideas challenging the severe democratic deficit we face under the one party state of Ralph Klein is not even on the horizon. Instead Ralph gives us a phony election for a phony senator. Smoke and mirrors.
When it comes to electing a Senator from Alberta the old adage; "Don’t Vote It Only Encourages Them", holds true.
For background on Abolish the Senate Campaign in 2001 see my web-site:
http://www.connect.ab.ca/~plawiuk/senate.html
THE ALBERTA LIBERALS ARE NDP LITE
(540 words)
If imitation is the highest from of flattery, Brian Mason and the NDP should be blushing. With only two members in the Alberta Legislature they have been the sharpest critics of the Ralph Klein regime. The Alberta NDP has set the agenda in Alberta for mobilizing opposition to the right.
It’s the proverbial battle of Alberta. It’s the Edmonton Oilers against the Calgary Flames, the Edmonton Eskimos against the Calgary Stampeders. It’s a case of Edmonton Reds versus Calgary Rednecks.
With the election of Kevin Taft as leader of the Liberal Party and the ‘official’ opposition, which have seven seats all from Edmonton, the Liberals have abandoned their centrist attempt to be Tory Lite and have become NDP Lite.
Since this election is a forgone conclusion, the only real challenges and races will be in Edmonton. It’s the battle for Redmonton. And Tafts Liberals keep trying to be the NDP.
They have called for public auto insurance, a long time NDP policy. They have called for tuition freezes for post secondary students, the NDP has called for a 10% rollback in tuition and a freeze.
The latest election foible Taft has thrown out is a call for a review of Alberta’s Democratic Deficit, which really is what this election should be all about. He is calling for proportional representation, which the NDP has called for over the past two elections. He has raised the issue of reducing the number of seats in the Legislature to 64, an issue the NDP raised back in 1986.
There is nothing that the Liberals have said this election that differentiates them from the NDP.
They even changed their party logo to appear more radical, they have eliminated the Lubex L that symbolized their party in the past, for a slick black and red banner, an obvious attempt to appeal to the anarchist youth vote.
The Liberals have been on a decline since their heyday over a decade ago under the leadership of Lawrence Decore. Since then they have had three leadership changes, every time they lost the election to the Tories, they lost seats, and inevitably they bring out the knives and change leaders.
Today they are a left rump in Edmonton. But the NDP has returned, and with only two MLA’s in the house has still been a more effective opposition than the Liberals, who maintain ‘official opposition’ status by the skin of their teeth. Decore’s neo-conservative Liberals are no more, the Liberals under Taft are the left of the party, and what’s left of the party.
Instead of being NDP Lite they should simply give up their pretence to being a centrist-left party and join the NDP, giving Edmontonians a solid voice of opposition to the Party of Calgary and its leader Ralph Klein. The battle is for Redmonton and it is only a matter of time before this stark choice will be made clear to Taft and company. That time is fast approaching and will be made very clear on Nov. 23.
The Liberals are only the official opposition in name and should do Edmontonians a favour and unite with the NDP.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Shower With A Friend
That is Alberta Preimer "Fast" Eddie Stelmach's suggestion to Albertans. Big Oil is not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, no siree, its you and me he says.
Stelmach promised that his government will set mandatory emissions intensity targets this spring, but he suggested individual Albertans can help by conserving electricity and hot water.
And of course following that logic we all use much more water than the TarSands do, NOT, so we should all shower with a friend to help save Alberta's water. Can you spell goof; EDDIE.
As I said here before when Conservatives accept the need to do something about Global Warming they will say it is an individual problem, not a problem of capitalism.The premier said it's wrong to place all the blame for greenhouse gases on the energy sector.
"The energy sector is number 1 (in emissions), but of course every time you put on your lights in the house or turn on your TV, you're using electrical energy," said Stelmach.
"So it's going to require all Albertans working toward one common goal."
In dry Alberta, conflict over water has been going on for years, fuelled by an industry that, it's estimated, requires between two and 4.5 barrels of H2O to produce a single barrel of crude. Moreover, while Canada boasts 20% of the world's freshwater, Alberta gets by with only 2.2%.
The reason for the outburst is Fast Eddie is all upset over comments made by the Liberals but was deafeningly silent over threats from his pals in the New Conservative Government of Canada to introduce a new NEP.
And Eddie claims voluntary caps are working!! Funny that's not what Harper and Baird say.
But Mr. Baird did say something of great note, something that those in the business community, especially oil and gas, have been lobbying successfully against for 15 years. Said Mr. Baird: "Voluntary compliance is not enough. We actually have to regulate. Those regulations have to be enforceable." And, he said, these regulations will be tougher than anything the Liberals ever proposed.
Someone should get the Federal and Provincial Tories on the same messaging page.
Oh wait they are, the Feds want to cap "emmision intensities", which will NOT result in a decrease in Greenhouse gases as Alberta has already shown.
And Fast Eddie needs his newly appointed Tory Media hacks to properly brief him, they are no longer working for the Sun.....
Ouch!!!"Alberta is the only province on record that has actually reduced CO2 emissions by 16 per cent," he said.
But the premier later conceded he was talking about so-called emissions intensity, which is a measurement against the growth in industrial production rather than a total measurement of what's coming out of the smoke stack. If a company increases emissions at a slower rate than it increases production, then emissions intensity is reduced even though absolute emissions have increased.
An Alberta Environment official later confirmed that total emissions have increased by 40 per cent since 1990, but emissions intensity is down by 16 per cent over the same period.
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Saturday, December 16, 2006
Chavez vs. Klein
An interesting post that was published in Alberta Views magazine and is now online, comparing Alberta and Venezuela. This was written prior to Ralph Klein stepping down on Thursday, finally.
Interesting how the U.S. media refers to Chavez as a dictator but they never refered to Klein that way, though in Venezeula there is actually more opposition in government than there is in Alberta.
Now this is the challenge facing our new President of the Executive Council of Alberta, Ed Stelmach. Bet you didn't know that Alberta had a President. Yep that's the Premiers official designation. CEO of Alberta Inc.
This aritcle reminds me of the Parkland Institutes reccomendations for a new energy policy for Alberta A Made In Alberta Canada First Energy Policy
Auctioning Canada’s Future Under the Klein Government
While Venezuela has taken advantage of record oil prices to invest heavily in social spending, Alberta’s Klein government has moved steadily in the opposite direction. Private companies investing in Alberta’s tar sands pay just 1 per cent royalties until all capital costs are paid off. Because of incentives from the provincial and federal governments, corporate taxes are low on tar sands projects and declining in the oil and gas sector as a whole.
Nonetheless, Alberta government revenues have increased in tandem with rising global prices—from just $2.6-billion in 1998 to a whopping $9.74-billion in 2004-05. Yet this money has been spent largely on maintaining the country’s lowest income tax rate and paying off the deficit. Despite the oil-fuelled economic boom, Alberta continues to have the lowest minimum wage in the country. While social spending has increased slightly in recent years, it has not yet been restored to the levels it achieved before 1993, when the government cut social spending by 30–40 per cent.
Despite this enormous surplus, the Alberta government has pushed for an expansion of public-private partnerships in the health care sector. Critics argue that this is just a code word for privatization and that it violates the Canada Health Act. According to a recent report by the Edmonton-based Parkland Institute, the affordability of public health care is not at issue—the government has more than enough money from recent oil and gas windfalls. Rather, the report argues, funding social programs is contrary to the Klein government’s market-obsessed ideology.
Strategic Skeptics
Of course, there are those who argue that Alberta’s oil policy is preferable to Venezuela’s. They raise two main criticisms of the emerging Venezuelan model. The first is the fear that PDVSA’s newfound assertiveness will scare away foreign investment. “If competitive rules aren’t in place,” warns James Williams of WTRG Energy Economics, “they won’t be able to develop the heavy oil—unless Chávez does it himself. Foreign investors won’t be there.” British Petroleum (BP) CEO John Browne recently mused to an interviewer, “One has to question whether Venezuela wishes foreign oil companies really to be there in any big way.”
But the next day, not wanting to compromise his company’s substantial investments in Venezuela, Chevron’s Latin America director Ali Moshiri noted, “The name of our company is Chevron, and our Chairman is David O’Reilly. We have a different view [than BP] on Venezuela.” The fact is that despite raising the cost of investment for foreign companies, big oil remains in Venezuela—and, with prices surging, it’s not going anywhere.
The second critique is that Venezuela’s excessive social spending will doom the industry by ignoring crucial reinvestment. In late 2004, the IMF called on oil-producing countries to save profits from high oil prices rather than spend them. Oil industry analysts in the US make the same argument: Jenalio Moreno warns, “Windfalls from higher oil prices are enabling nations such as Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela to mask the mounting urgency for reforms and investments needed in the region's energy sector.” Moreno cites Ricardo Amorim, head of Latin America research for WestLB in New York City: “One of the effects that you have when you have high oil prices is you can temporarily solve structural problems. Those countries are not investing as much as they should in the future and that could create bottlenecks.” Funding social programs with high oil rents is all well and good, say these analysts, but if maintenance of industry infrastructure (wells, pumps, roads) isn’t kept up, these oil-funded programs will be unsustainable.
But, according to the Venezuelan government, the future is precisely what Venezuela is investing in. In the same year that PDVSA invested US$3.7-billion in social programs, it reinvested almost twice that amount back into the company. The conflict at root of the “re-nationalization” process occurring under the Chávez government is between the “old PDVSA”—a profitable multinational that gave highly generous terms to private companies but transferred little profit back to the Venezuelan government—and the “new PDVSA,” managed efficiently and professionally in the interests of Venezuelan citizens.
Bolívar North?
A better deal for Alberta depends on the involvement of the rest of the country. This can come about only as the result of a collective decision by citizens to force it onto both provincial and federal agendas. But nationalist politics are probably not enough.
Canada has been riven by conflict over Alberta’s oil wealth for decades. During the days of the National Energy Program, Alberta fumed as the rest of Canada ate up their profits during boom-time. Since the death of the NEP, and despite relatively small surpluses in a few other provinces, the rest of Canada has come to resent what they perceive to be Alberta’s greed in hoarding a national patrimony as a provincial right.
This tension is, perhaps, less potentially divisive than it first appears. When we consider the potential rents that the provincial and federal governments are handing out in incentives to private companies, it becomes clear that there is enough money to go around—it’s just kept to a very small circle. A higher proportion of windfall profits would permit Alberta to reinvigorate and expand the Alberta Heritage Fund (a rainy day fund to protect Albertans in case of future price drops, the fund has been stagnant since the 1980s), bring funding for social-programs at least up to pre-1993 levels, begin serious restoration and mitigation of ecological damage resulting from oil extraction, and share a significant amount of money with its poorer brethren in the rest of Canada. As we have seen with Venezuela, the claim is preposterous that big oil would no longer find the tar sands profitable with royalties at such a rate. Oil-producing countries have the upper hand.
Alberta is not just missing out on the windfall profits currently enjoyed by private companies; it is squandering Canada’s reimbursement for the exhaustion of a non-renewable resource. The extraction of tar sands and extra-heavy crude is more than three times as ecologically damaging as conventional oil extraction. The resultant increase in greenhouse gas emissions is already encouraging the Harper government to renege on our responsibilities to Kyoto.
The impact is arguably even greater in Venezuela, where environmental regulations have historically been less stringent. Indigenous communities in both countries may be the worst losers in the race to the dirty-energy throne: both Canada and Venezuela are currently negotiating pipelines through indigenous territories, threatening to displace whole communities, with little compensation, if any, on offer.
Why isn’t Alberta investing a portion of current oil profits in developing an alternative energy industry that could establish itself as a leader once fossil fuels are exhausted, or once we decide that the cost is just too high? By taking the lead in alternative energy, protection of the environment and equitable partnership with indigenous communities, Canada could establish itself as model for constructive, socially just development.
The Alberta model depends on the assumption that private profits will be reinvested back in the industry, with resulting job creation. But oil companies are having difficulty finding projects in which to invest; their record profits are currently being passed on to shareholders. The distinction seems relatively straight-forward; but, at root, separating the Albertan and Venezuelan models are questions of power, and ultimately of ideology.
Prior to Chávez, Venezuela was pursuing an oil policy very similar to that of the Klein government. The transition was only possible by organizing and involving the populace while simultaneously implementing progressive policies from above. Similar changes in the Albertan context would depend on a corresponding mobilization of Canadian citizens—both here and in the rest of the country.
At present, this question isn't on the agenda in Canada—in 2005 it wasn't even an election issue. Making it one will require an ideological challenge to neo-liberalism, including a serious rethinking of our relationships with corporations at the provincial and national levels. It will also demand revisiting the relationship between natural resources located in Alberta and the broader Canadian social and political context. The popular mobilization needed in Alberta to develop a progressive oil strategy cannot occur in isolation from the rest of Canadian society. We must overcome the individualistic chauvinism that so often drowns out progressive voices in Alberta.
Jonah Gindin is an independent journalist and researcher living between Toronto and Caracas. He has written for Venezuelanalysis.com, ZNet, and NACLA Report on the Americas, among other publications.
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Sunday, July 02, 2006
The Myth of the NEP
I have said this before about the phoney hysteria around the NEP and its impact on Alberta and others have disputed my claim, so sad too bad. The truth is still the truth. Nice to see it confirmed by an independent source.
Re-inventing the NEP
Larry Johnsrude looks at the memory of the National Energy Program in the Conservative race.
The fact is the NEP did drain more than $1 billion from Alberta. But it also coincided with the drop in world oil prices to about $8 US a barrel from over $40. The two are inextricably linked in peoples’ minds, and Conservative politicians have done nothing to change the perception the NEP somehow caused the world price to tumble.Many of the economic benefits Alberta is seeing now are the result of the NEP’s promotion of non-conventional energy sources such as oil sands, heavy crude and off-shore oil.Also See:
Living In The Past
Nationalize the Oil Industry
It's Time to Take Back Our Oil and Gas
Corporate Welfare for Big Oil
Dark Prince of Oil Decries Dark Side of Oil
Alberta's Tar Sands Gamble
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Johnsonrude, Edmonton, Alberta, Journal, Edmonton-Journal, oil, Tar-Sands, NEP,
Monday, May 02, 2016
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.
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