The Plunder of Alberta

Gateway, Queensway and Keystone XL

Phil Burpee, Columnist, Pincher Creek Voice
Phil Burpee is a carpenter and farmer living north of Pincher Creek. He keeps an eye on the world from under the big Alberta sky.

Phil Burpee

Ralph Klein, the unlamented, slobbovian ex-premier of Alberta, began his political life as a populist communitarian, and ended it as a shambling apologist for elitist thieves. We will remember, during his tenure as mayor of Calgary, that infamous and starkly non-federalist taunt  -  "Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark!" Yeah!  -  flip ‘em the bird, Mr. Mayor! Very statesman-like. This was King Ralph's summary response to Ottawa's attempts to initiate a National Energy Policy (NEP) under Pierre Trudeau. It was indeed a flawed document, which sought to appropriate for Ottawa resource tax dollars which ought rightly, under existing constitutional frameworks, to have accrued to the province of origin of that resource - in this case Alberta.
Of course, conveniently and studiously forgotten at the time of Mr. Klein's neighbourly rejoinder was the bookend to this proposal, which was the National Oil Policy (NOP) brought in by John Diefenbaker’s Tories in 1961. This gave western producers a monopoly west of the Ottawa River, supposedly in order to bolster the fledgling, but pricey, hydrocarbon industry in Alberta, and make it more competitive for breaking into eastern markets, which preferred offshore oil. Mind you, the savings which were meant to be enjoyed by the consumer never materialized, as the big eastern refineries pocketed the difference anyway, buying relatively inexpensive Venezuelan and Saudi oil, and bolstering the price before it got to the pumps. But the salient issue was that Alberta certainly did not peep when the market was manipulated in our favour under the NOP, but complained bitterly when that same heavy hand of manipulation resulted in the perceived loss of both revenue and sovereignty under the NEP.

A somewhat more nuanced response to the NEP was Premier Peter Lougheed's establishment in 1976 of the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund. This was intended to be Alberta's cookie jar. Mr. Lougheed chipped $11 billion (bn) into the kitty, with the understanding that the provincial government would continue to add to it as the years went on through a process of equitable, market-based allocation of royalties against hydrocarbon extraction. This Fund would not only provide a buffer against the coming day when hydrocarbon resources would begin to fade from the portfolio of governmental income, but it would also be available for creative and diversified entrepreneurial activity which might move Alberta progressively away from a purely resource-based economy. Along with this, he warned that the then newly-burgeoning Tarsands project ought to be conservatively and methodically disbursed so that the resource might continue to be of benefit to future generations as the world sequentially weaned itself off of carbon-intensive energy forms. Today, however, over one hundred leases have been given out by the province, and the exploitation of the Tarsands is proceeding at a fire-sale pace  -  flagrantly beyond the actual needs of the province. Far from this Market serving the needs of Albertans, who actually own this oil under administration of the Crown, quite the opposite is taking place. We are being fleeced.

Today, our Heritage Fund stands at a mere $14bn, with perhaps another $10bn sprinkled around in various endowments and research funds. It is almost entirely commodity-based (oil). The Alberta Financial Investment and Planning Committee, struck by Premier Ed Stelmach, came in with a strong recommendation that the Fund be grown to at least $100bn by the year 2030, if it is to be of any lasting value. Their report has languished. Monies which should be appropriated for this Fund continue to haemorrhage out of the province. Quebec has a sovereign wealth fund of $150bn, which is non-commodity based, meaning that it is a diversified fund spread throughout a full range of economic activities and savings mechanisms. Norway, which has a similarly-sized oil sector to Alberta's, has a sovereign wealth fund valued at $550bn, and is a major player in international bond and investment markets. The Norwegians long ago took a look at their hydrocarbon sector and rightly determined that it was far too important to the wellbeing of the Norwegian people to be left to the vagaries of private interests. So they nationalized the resource. Indeed, last year we saw on a TV documentary a representative of Norway's Statoil, the national oil company, confessing to a certain embarrassment at acquiring a vast Tarsands lease at a ludicrously favourable rate. "It shocks me," he said. "I feel sorry for the people of Alberta, that we get so much and they get so little." Alberta continues to have one of the most liberal (aka cheap) royalty regimens in the world. And Ralph Klein, under whose premiership so much of the Tarsands were signed away, and who earned the moniker 'No Plan Ralph' for admitting to not having anticipated the problems resulting from such a dizzying pace of development, has enjoyed, until his recent unfortunate health problems, the fellowship of many pin-striped representatives of the oil industry. We can only shake our heads in wonderment and dismay.

But the saga continues. We now see in the works major pipeline projects which would accelerate even further the rush of resources out of the province, to the significant betterment of the corporate players at work, and to the enduring loss of the people of Alberta. And not only the raw material itself is planned to be shipped, but along with it the processing jobs and resulting proceeds which might otherwise have accrued to Alberta workers and businesses. On top of it all, there is a grand tangle of geopolitics at play here which far exceeds the capacity of the tiny, little, backwater brains up in Edmonton to sort out. For the Dragon (China) is at work here, and the Bear (Russia), and the Eagle (USA). And the weenie little Beaver is way out of his pond. For these great animals will have their bounty. A Hong Kong-based business consortium called Queensway Corporation has recently garnered some news-play owing to its almost complete monopolizing of various African oil fields, with the oft-suspected compliance of national leaders, and to the apparent detriment of their peoples. It is quietly but widely assumed that Queensway answers ultimately to Beijing. And Beijing is the world's single greatest proponent of State Capitalism, a type of market-play that does not require the complicity of a shareholder electorate (hmm  -  not altogether unlike Alberta). Beijing, of course, looks forward with comfortable anticipation to the laying of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline direct from Fort McMurray to Kitimat, B.C., from whence will be loaded raw bitumen slurry onto vast supertankers to be transhipped forthwith to Chinese refineries. Yet, notwithstanding the collegial assumption on the parts of the Premiers of Alberta and B.C., as well as Prime Minister Harper, that this will be done, it remains to be seen to just what extent our Sisters and Brothers in the affected First Nations of Northern B.C. along the proposed route, for whom the whole issue of land title is still an open book, will stand for all this  -  perhaps not at all.

Likewise, the now much fought-over Keystone XL pipeline would deliver that same slurry to the Texas Gulf coast, where it would be processed, refined and squirted without further delay into the gas tanks of America's SUVs  -  and probably sold back to us at significant profit. Even as we consider this, Canadian pipeline company Trans Canada Corp., the proposed builder of this line, is taking ranchers, farmers, environmental organizations and municipalities in Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma to court seeking eminent domain in order to force compliance with their planned routing. Not unlike Altalink here in Alberta, they've pulled out the hard ball (and bat) before approval has even been formally given. Overriding the concerns of directly affected parties is the common factor at work here. We see this in the Arctic where Exxon Mobil, that same band of merry thieves who still have not paid up for their despoiling of Prince William Sound after one of their drunken sailors piled his tanker onto a reef one night over a bottle of Wild Turkey, has taken up with Rosneft, the Russian state-controlled oil company, in slavering anticipation of the feeding frenzy of oil extraction as the Arctic sea ice recedes  -  even as, of course, the product they are so keen to extract is the cause of that very same melting. Rocket science all 'round.

We are being robbed, still and again, and our leaders in the provincial government have got themselves into such a bind of compromise, indebtedness and virtual betrothal to the massive, trans-global corporate monstrosities that are weaving this mighty web of duplicity and larceny, that they simply can no longer articulate any alternative to the status quo. There is no doubt that they should all be summarily dismissed, if not prosecuted  -  but they won't be. They will muddle on, perhaps with different party names and/or some new players. It will fall to the citizenry to properly clarify that which is seemingly so opaque to our elected representatives. I wonder if we can muster the resolve?

And somewhere down in Nebraska, a weather-beaten old rancher is standing up to the Beast. He probably doesn't know it, but by looking out for his animals and his livelihood and the cleanliness of his water, he is hollering out something that maybe we should take note of  -  "Somebody oughta maybe stop the plunder up there in Alberta. It's makin' a mess all over the whole goddamn country...................."

Phil Burpee
November 5th, 2011