Can Canada’s energy fiefdoms work together?
Oil sands critiques don't add up to a NEP redux
There must be an election in the offing, for how else can the recent display of posturing over subsidies to the oil sands be explained? An east-west battle is brewing as Canada’s premiers meet for the annual Council of the Federation in Vancouver, we’re told. The ghost of no less a figure than Pierre Elliot Trudeau is back, rattling his chains and recalling terrifying visions of the reviled National Energy Program, writes Jason Fekete at the Calgary Herald.
Evidently I missed something. Between the start and conclusion of an otherwise highly orchestrated Energy Mines and Ministers’ conference held this past week in Kananaskis, Alberta, reactionaries in the west would seem to have cobbled together a time machine and set a course for the hard-scrabble 1980s. With Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty on the cusp of a fall election, one that he’s convinced can be won by appealing to voters’ so-called pocketbook values, regionalism is suddenly, irrevocably, back in vogue.
None of this comes as a surprise, writes Gary Lamphier at the Edmonton Journal. Parochialism is right up there with Maple Syrup as an integral component of the national identity. Yet it’s worth exploring the notion that we’re somehow stuck under the shadow of the reviled NEP. If memory serves, that unpopular bit of policy was first and foremost about price controls. So the Ontario premier, whose government now faces a NAFTA challenge from famed oilman Boone Pickens over the vaunted Green Energy and Economy Act, bellyaches about “subsidies” and politicians in the west go on the defensive by dredging up past ills. Nothing wrong with that, right?
Well … Not so fast. As long-time energy observer (and former AO editor) Gordon Jaremko has noted, this vague sense of western alienation was an invention of academic and national political commentators, one that evolved in the 1970s and ’80s as Albertans fought federal energy taxes, price management, export barriers and – inevitably – their Liberal party architects. The theory was a cop-out. “It was easier to sidestep the resistance as deranged than to deal with a complicated case rooted in constitutional resource ownership and jurisdictional rights,” Jaremko notes.
The reverse is happening today. Just as it’s easy for western commentators to dredge up the memory of an ill-conceived policy to fend off criticism, it’s far easier for the McGuinty government to cry foul over oil sands “subsidies” than to pull up a chair and actually participate in the legwork of building a national dialogue. Where was his Energy Minister, Brad Duguid, as federal and provincial ministers convened in Kananaskis to hash out an admittedly vague policy document on the subject?
Ontario’s embattled Liberal government, as much as its western reactionaries, would do well to review a bit of history. When Syncrude Canada Ltd. partner Atlantic Richfield Canada Ltd. pulled out of the consortium in the mid-1970s, it was the Ontario, Alberta and federal governments who stepped in to cover the lost 30 per cent share and, ultimately, salvage what was, at the time, a multibillion-dollar science experiment. Imagine that – when they’re not bickering, provinces can actually get things done.
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