June 1 is a landmark date in Canadian energy evolution.

No official celebrations, books, plaques, parades or museums highlight June 1 in the energy industry. But the date is the anniversary of a historic turning point.

“It was absolutely stunning,” Priddle has recalled. “We fought long and hard to get it,” Lougheed has remembered. “It was the only way to go.”

As of June 1, 1985, the federal and Alberta governments carried out an agreement, titled the Western Accord on Energy and reached a few weeks earlier, to stop controlling the price of oil after decades of regulation. A wide open market took over.

The value of the biggest energy product immediately turned into a moving target, liable to change every day as a business matter between willing buyers and sellers. Refinery Row on Edmonton’s eastern edge took over disclosure of the economic benchmark with daily 7 a.m. postings of prices that tracked regional, national and international oil market conditions.

Oil Freedom Day marks a radical break with a long history of “made-in-Canada” energy prices chiefly engineered in Ottawa. Under the old pattern, Alberta often protested but always made deals with the federal government. It was a case of discretion being the better part of valor. The alternative to settling was a high-risk course of pitting provincial resource ownership rights against federal power over national commerce by starting an unpredictable, winner-take-all fight in the law courts.

The Liberal 1980 National Energy Program, dismantled by the ’85 accord between Conservative federal and provincial regimes, was only the last and strictest control scheme. Political management of the entire Canadian market started in 1961, when the late John Diefenbaker’s Tory government created the National Oil Policy.

The NOP was the opposite of the NEP. The older policy set out to foster growth of the western oil industry – in ’61 still a fledgling hatched by the 1947 Leduc discovery and hungry for markets – by making consumers buy more Alberta oil and pay a premium over international prices that were depressed at the time. All of Canada west of the Ottawa River was reserved as an exclusive market for domestic production by a federal ban against cheaper imports.

The support program lasted until the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries began the “energy crisis” era of steep price hikes in 1973. Liberal national governments adopted an array of methods, eventually codified by the NEP, to hold Alberta oil prices below world levels. Gradual increases were allowed. But big shares of the resulting revenue increases were siphoned off to Ottawa for use in consumer subsidies and an industry grant scheme that enticed oil companies into drilling in federally controlled Arctic and offshore areas.

When the Western Accord discarded the NEP, Albertans cheered. Pent-up industry activity burst out across the West. Government leaders dubbed oil Canada’s “engine of growth.” Fuel was added by open markets for natural gas, which arrived under a followup pact that became known as the Halloween Agreement because it was reached late on Oct. 31, 1985.

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