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Alberta’s strategy: take the money and run

“Alberta has proven its leadership in addressing climate change year after year.” Lewis Carroll didn’t write that sentence. One thing is perfectly clear though; whoever did has made one too many trips down the rabbit hole.
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“Alberta has proven its leadership in addressing climate change year after year.”

Lewis Carroll didn’t write that sentence. One thing is perfectly clear though; whoever did has made one too many trips down the rabbit hole.

This self-serving bit of puffery was puffed by the province’s Environment(sic) Minister in a recent propaganda treatise called Alberta’s Climate Change Strategy. Assuming you have the stomach to actually read past this lie — rumour has it at least one aide was speared to death when the Minister’s nose Pinocchioed through his heart moments after he proudly recited it to his gathered minions — you are treated to the musings of a seriously deranged man, presumably speaking for an entire province of seriously deranged individuals deep in the throes of denial.

Reading the report, which took both alcohol and drugs to get through without massive mental anguish, several things are abundantly clear. Alberta’s “Screw You” attitude to the rest of the world is very likely to do what clubbing baby harp seals and mowing down B.C.’s old growth forests fell short of accomplishing: Making Canada the pariah of the developed world, at least as far as environmental terrorism goes. It will keep the country from meeting even the anemic greenhouse gas reduction targets set by Little Stevie Hapless’s government. It will unjustly enrich both the oil companies engaged in the rape and pillage of the oil sands and Alberta’s provincial coffers… at the expense of the rest of the country and the rest of the world. And it will, at some date uncertain in the future, leave Alberta a more or less poisoned dystopia and Albertans choking on their air and unable to drink their poisoned water.

Where’s Pierre Trudeau when you need him most?

Chances are pretty good any Albertans reading this far just doubled over as though kicked in the solar plexus, such is the visceral hatred with which the former Prime Minister is reviled in Texas North.

When Marc Lalonde, Trudeau’s Minister of Energy, announced the National Energy Program in October, 1980, the price of gas had skyrocketed to about 40 cents a litre. The heavy-handed NEP had three stated objectives: making Canada self-sufficient in energy production; redistributing energy wealth away from producers and the provincial government towards the federal government and consumers; and fostering greater Canadian ownership of the industry.

It was a miserable failure.

It was a failure because it was a bald-faced money grab. It was a failure because of timing. The ensuing economic meltdown — remember, the Prime Rate was about to soar to 23 per cent — would have devastated Alberta’s capital-intensive extraction economy all by itself, but coupled with the timing of the NEP, it made the program seem even more nefarious, not to mention a convenient scapegoat. And it was a failure because it was implemented with a heavy hand, with no tangible input from Alberta and because it sprung from the mind of a Quebec-born, Liberal, eastern bastard many Albertans would have been happy to see freeze in the dark.

But that didn’t mean it was a bad idea.

Ever since, Albertans have feared the resurrection of the NEP though the likelihood of anything even resembling the NEP is probably not feasible. Ironically, it was Mr. Trudeau’s repatriation of Canada’s Constitution in 1982 that makes the federal government’s ability to impose a unilateral production tax problematic. Funny, he never gets much credit from Albertans for that.

But the ghost of the NEP is never far from Albertans’ minds. Last fall’s Our Fair Share, a report produced by the Alberta Royalty Review Panel — a group of free-entreprisers — was denounced by elements of the energy industry because its call for a modest royalty increase was, “…another NEP grab that would devastate the industry.”

The energy industry, enabled by Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach — Motto: Climate change? What climate change; we’ve always played golf in February. — is swept up in a headlong rush to suck every bit of oil out of the ground as quickly as they can… before someone with half a brain puts a stop to the madness. And why not? It’s made the Alberta government rich enough to solve all the province’s social ills, not that they’re interested in doing that, just that they’re rich enough to do it if they had half a brain.

The oilmen want to let the market and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of former Newfie fishermen determine the rate of extraction. This is understandable with the world price of oil wandering in excess of US$100 per barrel. The run up in the price of oil has been pure profit to them. The cost of exploration, extraction and refining haven’t risen more than a fraction of the market price.

Of course, if the price should fall — don’t hold your breath — these same free marketeers would be the first to whine to Ottawa to bail their asses out. And when environmental Armageddon rolls around, they’ll be the first to look to Ottawa for solutions. But then, didn’t someone smart say something about consistency being the hobgoblin of small minds?

Funny though. Those same fishermen from Newfoundland and Labrador, labouring in the oilfields, used to have more or less the same attitude to the federal government imposing limits on their cod catch.

The parallels aren’t exact. Alberta’s oil reserves are massive, second only to Saudi Arabia’s. Of course, oil isn’t a renewable resource, but then, cod doesn’t seem to be either.

The parallel is the inexcusability of the federal government letting another resource extraction industry run roughshod over concerns for sustainability, concerns for the environment and concerns for the social dislocations visited on the broader society by such a massive greedfest. A new NEP, guised in environmental protection language, is needed. So is a carbon tax or rigourous cap-and-trade system. Without some form of federal control, Alberta will be nothing but a fabulously rich, environmentally unlivable wasteland when the oilmen suck the last drop out and move on.

Even the blue-eyed sheik, former premier Peter Lougheed, has come out and called what’s happening in the oil sands a disaster, one that’ll leave Alberta the country’s major environmental villain in the eyes of its neighbours.

But what the hell. As long as there are profits to be made, externalities to be spewed into the air and water and moonscape left behind, as long as there are Hummers to drive and energy to burn, let’s party like there’s no tomorrow and pretend we’re not living a self-fulfilling prophecy.