Tristin Hopper wrote in the National Post that if Canada doesn’t like Alberta complaining, they can always send back our money. He says we are getting fleeced by Ottawa. This article was written on April 11th. Perhaps he wrote that before he had a chance to see how much Trudeau was doing for the province. Maybe he assumed he was doing as little as Premier Jason Kenney. Either way, there isn’t any way to establish this tiresome rhetoric as belonging to anything other than a Postmedia newspaper.
Mr. Kenny’s notion that Alberta is paying Quebec’s bills simply isn’t true. Mr. Hopper crunches the numbers for us in the article expecting us to believe it. Still, there are three kinds of lies which are just as prevalent today as the first time I heard them. There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
With Kim Siever’s permission, here is his recent video, “Debunked: Alberta doesn’t Send the Most Money to Ottawa.”
One might ask why Mr. Kenney, and some of his allies, continually promote the equalization formula as being wrong, even though it was he and Mr. Stephen Harper, the former prime minister, who developed the formula.
Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D., psychologist and author, has an article published by ‘Psychology Today’ that addresses this. He wrote, “when people attempt to rationalize their anger and then feel victimized, they get stuck in the angry feelings in a way that leads to an unpleasant kind of brooding that alienates others and is dysfunctional.
“Therefore, in terms of action, people need to drop certain words from their vocabulary like “fair,” “should,” “right,” and “wrong.’”
Recently the government announced a report from a panel of people who were chosen to determine how Alberta can get a fair deal within Canada. Yes, the “Fair Deal Panel” report reminds people every time the words are spoken that Albertans have been victimized by the federal government and the rest of Canada, with us being left to pay for all of Quebec’s bills.
The first item in the report is a referendum on equalization but other than a waste of time and money, there is very little that can be accomplished with this. It will keep us angry though. We get reminded of this referendum quite often in the news. The rest of the items in the report are similar in that they remind us how unfair the rest of Canada is to us. Poor us!
If the UCP government can keep us engaged in this way more than having us worry about cuts to healthcare, job losses, and the destruction our educational system, we remain dysfunctional. Even though there isn’t much we can do in some of these areas, we can get behind Mr. Kenney to show the rest of Canada how dissatisfied we are.
Just as Mr. Siever debunked how much money Alberta sends to Ottawa, many of the items in the report could stand some scrutiny. Maybe the entire UCP government needs a good hard look too. As politicians go, I’d say we didn’t get a fair deal in the last election. That makes me angry.
This story is part of a series that proposes solutions to the many issues exposed during the coronavirus pandemic and what government and citizens can do to make Canada a better place.
Demand for fossil fuels collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic as lockdown measures were introduced. In the second quarter of 2020, experts predict that global oil demand will be down 20 per cent from this time last year. Although demand is likely to recover somewhat in the next two years, some major oil company executives believe that it may never return to pre-2020 levels.
At the same time, the world remains “on fire” due to climate change, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. The year began with fires ravaging Australia, and in June, temperatures in the Arctic hit a record-breaking 38C.
The world is now at a critical juncture — a moment of uncertainty where decisions can cause dramatic shifts in the direction a society takes. The choices we make now will define Canada’s — and humanity’s — future.
As governments look for ways to help the Canadian economy recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, they must be guided by one incontestable principle: We cannot afford to invest in and expand the fossil fuel industry any further.
Why we need structural change
Daily global carbon dioxide emissions fell by 17 per cent in early April, when lockdowns were at their peak, compared to 2019. In the U.K., the decline hit 31 per cent, while in Canada it reached 20 per cent.
Emissions in 2020 are expected to be down by four per cent to (at most) seven per cent from 2019. But this falls short of the emissions cuts needed to achieve the Paris Agreement targets — 7.6 per cent a year, every year.
The lockdown has demonstrated that behavioural change alone is insufficient to decarbonize the economy; we also need structural change that gets at the root of emissions. This means addressing the contribution of the oil sector, particularly the oil sands.
While emissions from other sectors in Canada have levelled off or are declining, oil sands emissions increased by 456 per cent between 1990 and 2018. Emissions from conventional oil production have also increased, but only by 24 per cent.
A flare stack at the Imperial Oil refinery in Edmonton lights the sky in December 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson
For a brief period in early April and again later that month, a barrel of Alberta oil was selling for less than a bottle of maple syrup. Although the price has since recovered somewhat, expectations for capital expenditures have changed dramatically.
While the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) has indefinitely deferred its long-term production forecast, Alberta has cut production by about 25 per cent, or one million barrels per day. According to Alberta, mega pipelines are now “fairly empty,” and Enbridge plans to use part of its aging Line 3 for oil storage. BP has written off its oil sands investments entirely.
Any government response to this lobbying isn’t a question of weighing “jobs versus the environment”: the industry has been shedding jobs for years, while extracting more oil. From 2014 to 2019, in the midst of surging production, Canada’s oil and gas sector cut 53,000 jobs — about a quarter of the sector’s 225,000 jobs. Advancements in automation and other changes in the industry mean that those jobs are not coming back, even if the troubled Keystone XL pipeline is somehow built.
While oil workers have faced unemployment and anxiety about their futures, executives and shareholders have continued to reap huge benefits. The five largest oil sands producers doled out $12.6 billion in dividends to shareholders (the majority of which are not Canadian) from late 2014 to 2017.
In May, the Canadian oil and gas industry employed roughly 163,000 people, which was less than one per cent of all workers in the country. But those jobs are highly geographically concentrated. As oil assets increasingly become stranded assets, Canada’s oil workers and oil-dependent communities will likewise become stranded.
The question of when has been answered for us. If, as a country, we can agree that bailouts are not justifiable on economic or environmental grounds, then the oil price crash dictates that the transition starts now. Recent polling indicates that the vast majority of Canadians want the federal government to invest in a “green recovery.”
In terms of how the transition occurs, redirecting the billions of dollars in subsidies that the federal government currently provides the fossil fuel industry to renewable energy and energy efficiency projects is a good place to start. This could create far more jobs while also making a contribution to our emissions reductions targets.
It is also clear that we should invest more in care work — so that we have more and better-paid nurses, and universal child care. Jobs in this sector are low-carbon and, as the pandemic has demonstrated so vividly, essential to the functioning of our society.
We can also think outside the box. The pandemic response has substantially increased awareness and acceptance of previously overlooked policy options such as universal basic income, job guarantees, and a shorter work week.
Reimagining our relationship to work and focusing on outcomes that address inequality and improve well-being can help us to reduce our emissions as well as our reliance on the industries that can no longer offer the employment opportunities that we need.
WINNIPEG, Manitoba/OTTAWA, July 2 (Reuters) – Canada’s Supreme Court removed an obstacle to expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline on Thursday, dismissing an appeal of a lower court decision that had backed Ottawa’s approval of the project.
The top court posted the decision online without elaborating.
The pipeline has put Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, which bought it in 2018 to ensure the expansion overcame legal and regulatory hurdles, in a political quandary. He has promised to reduce Canadian emissions and improve indigenous relations, but faced pressure to help the slumping oil industry critical to the national economy.
The federal Liberal government bought the Trans Mountain Pipeline from Kinder Morgan. I don’t think they will let anyone or anything stop it.
A faster corporate tax cut, a C$600-million infrastructure investment, and reannounced funding that was already allocated in the province’s spring budget are key elements of a highly-touted, $10-billion recovery plan for Alberta that is already taking fire for being far more tame and fuzzy than its architects claim.
On Monday, Premier Jason Kenney said his government expected to create 50,000 jobs by 2022 with a program that he described as the “largest infrastructure build” in Alberta history, CBC reports. The plan was also touted as a bold move toward a long-overdue diversification of Alberta’s fossil-dependent economy. But just days before the announcement, Finance Minister Travis Toews said the government would only present an “architecture” for diversifying the provincial economy, adding that “he thinks there is only so much a government can do aside from creating an environment where other industries can flourish,” the Globe and Mail says.
In the end, out of the total $10-billion package, “$6.9 billion was already earmarked in the spring budget and it’s unclear just how much of the $3 billion left over is new spending that hasn’t previously been announced,” CBC writes. “CBC News is awaiting further clarification from the government. The province did say at least $600 million will be new, large-scale projects that will start construction this summer, but no details were immediately available.”
Kenney “also said his government would speed up the implementation of corporate tax cuts, slashing the rate to 8% from 10% starting on July 1,” CBC adds. “That’s 1.5 years ahead of schedule. The government claims the cuts will create an additional 55,000 jobs by 2022 and attract $4 billion in investment annually, starting in 2023.”
The province is also diverting $1 million from its hapless fossil energy “war room” to cover a four-month extension for its inquiry into alleged “foreign-funded radicals” opposing fossil development in Alberta.
The day after the announcement, U.S.-based Fitch Ratings announced it was reducing the province’s credit rating from AA to AA-, citing “a concern with sharply higher borrowing done by the province to deal with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic,” The Canadian Press reports. The news agency says the province’s budget deficit is on track to increase from $7 to $20 billion this year.
In its story leading up to the announcement, the Globe said the provincial plan would be “laid out in two stages: short-term investments centred on infrastructure and longer-term efforts to diversify the economy, according to a senior government source.” The paper added that “long-term diversification plans to help specific sectors will be announced by the government in the coming weeks, but the source said they would include items such as logistics hubs for e-commerce, agriculture, technology, and rare mineral development.”
But that was where Toews said he didn’t see much of a role for government. “I’ve come to the conclusion that, in some ways, there are limited things a government can do to truly diversify an economy,” he told the Globe. “There are a lot of things the government can do to get in the way of true diversification, and so our view is that we want to get government out of the way. We want to ensure we have the most attractive business environment where creative and innovative Albertans and businesses can allocate capital into sectors of the economy where they believe there’s promise and a future.”
On iPolitics, self-described “journalistic gadabout” Graham Thomson says the Kenney announcement “is either a bold and ambitious plan or a hackneyed and desperate gamble,” depending on who you ask. Thomson’s own view is that the recovery plan “is still fuzzy. Kenney says he’ll be releasing more details over the summer. Right now, it glances in the direction of diversification but remains overly focused on fossil fuels, cutting already low taxes, and ramping up a public relations campaign,” making it “neither bold nor ambitious”.
Thomson also echoes the observation that some of the big-ticket items in the announcement—including Alberta’s lavish, $1.5-billion subsidy to the Keystone XL pipeline—are not new investments. “Re-announcing the project doesn’t change the fact that it is a gamble,” he writes. “Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, has vowed to scrap the scheme should he win this year’s election.” [And by the way, in Thursday’s polling summary on electoral-vote.com, Biden was leading the current occupant of the White House by 368 electoral votes to 132, with 270 needed to win. Just 122 more sleeps until the vote, 200 until the inauguration.—Ed.]
CBC and the Globe have reaction from opposition politicians, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and at least two technology entrepreneurs who saw little to cheer about in Kenney’s announcement.
Fired BlackRock executive Mark Wiseman named chair of AIMCo by Kevin Orland, Bloomberg News, June 20, 2020
Alberta Investment Management Corp. named Mark Wiseman, a BlackRock Inc. executive who was ousted for violating the company’s relationships policy, as its new chairman.
Wiseman’s appointment is effective July 1, Edmonton-based AIMCo said Friday. He replaces Richard Bird, who will have served two three-year terms.
There’s a little more info about this on the forum.
Tristin Hopper wrote in the National Post that if Canada doesn’t like Alberta complaining, they can always send back our money. He says we are getting fleeced by Ottawa. This article was written on April 11th. Perhaps he wrote that before he had a chance to see how much Trudeau was doing for the province. Maybe he assumed he was doing as little as Premier Jason Kenney. Either way, there isn’t any way to establish this tiresome rhetoric as belonging to anything other than a Postmedia newspaper.
