CANADA FIRST; BLOG # 2046; AUG 19, 2016

THE MESSAGE:

Come on people! If we want to protect our sovereignty and our quality of life, we must develop and  manage our ample natural resources so that all citizens of Canada can be the beneficiaries. How long are we going to tolerate   the 'First Nations' concept?  It is imperative and timely to concentrate instead on what is good for Canada as a whole? There are too many Canadian zealots who are willing to hurt Canadian businesses to achieve their radical and poorly thought out goals. Let's build Canadian pipelines.  

Canada is a great nation and a wonderful place to live; with or without bleeding hearts, Liberals or fanatics. Let us move forward!

THE BLURB:

THE GREAT SUPPRESSION

Your children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, great great great, grandchildren will not know who you are, why this generation was so dumb, what was the global warming scare, how did it catch on with so many!

Canada has been out-manoeuvred by the United States in oil and gas production and development. Once its biggest customer, the U.S. has raced ahead to become our biggest competitor. Canada is blessed with big reserves, great technology, stable governments and world-leading regulation. Today, the U.S., by rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, has managed  to deter Canadian oil growth. Many Canadians themselves have allowed the U.S. to forge ahead of us by continuing to block oil and gas transportation and infrastructure in Canada. 

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a New York-based group that has launched an attack on Energy East, a pipeline proposal that would ship oil from Alberta to New Brunswick for export.

SOME HISTORY

In 1870, the Standard Oil Company was incorporated in Ohio by John D. Rockefeller. He managed to secretly buy up and control the independent oil producers and refiners. In 1883, Rockefeller moved his operation to New York City where he set up a TRUST or HOLDING company and began to devour most of the independent oil producers and refiners both nationally and internationally

THE BATTLE

Today the U.S. has grown its oil and liquefied natural gas  production to world-leading levels and pushed its Canadian counterparts out of their own backyard market. by:

• flooding Eastern Canada with their own product
• scooping Canada in the race to export around the world
• buying Canadian oil for lower prices because Canada has no other buyers
• giving large USA donations (Rockefeller foundation and the NRDC) to  selfish focal groups that enable opposition to pipelines and the tar sands within Canada

SOUND THE ALARM FOLKS!

Treasury Board and Finance officials say the Alberta climate plan could lead to 15,000 fewer jobs, a $4-billion drop in household income, as well as lower corporate profits, oil exports and overall economic activity. 

Forget the misguided promotions to eliminate  'Carbon footprints'.  We must concentrate on the footprint of the big-footed USA giant that is aimed at our collective asses.

REALITY TODAY

JOHN BRUSSA

“We as Canadians have a propensity to shoot ourselves in the foot,” says John Brussa, vice-chairman of Calgary-based law firm Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer LLP, and a board member of eight Canadian producers.

The Canadian industry was built to supply the United States, where production was peaking 15 years ago, says Brussa. Instead, the fracking revolution happened, and the Canadian oil and gas that was built up now has nowhere to go. “We have been squeezed out of most U.S. markets, and we are facing huge competition from the U.S. in our traditional market in Eastern Canada.”  He adds. As for the North American Free Trade Agreement that was supposed to promote free oil and gas trade, Brussa says, “Keystone should be a big wake-up call. It’s the U.S. market saying, 'Forget what NAFTA says, we are going to shut you out of our market.'

"Markets that should have been easily accessible, such as replacing oil imports in Eastern Canada, or exporting Canadian LNG to Asia, have been tangled in regulatory delays and new environmental priorities,  “Unless we get our act together, the capital markets just won’t give us the money to run our industry,” he says. “The reason our share prices are quite a bit lower than in the U.S. is just that. We are seen as a country that hasn’t gotten its act together and the capital market is very efficient. They are going to give people money that can make them a return.”

DAVE MOWAT

THE PANEL REVIEWING ALBERTA ROYALTY RATES.

The rise of the U.S. oil and gas industry was highlighted as a big concern by the panel that recently reviewed Alberta royalty rates. In an attempt to promote economic diversity and encourage more investment in Alberta, the Panel also considered diversification opportunities such as oil refining and upgrading in the province, and further development of the petrochemical industry in Alberta. The Panel recommended that the government undertake to develop a value-added natural gas strategy in Alberta and to evaluate the potential for partial upgrading of bitumen in the province. “The U.S. is now a rejuvenated force in oil and gas production, one that poses huge risks to Alberta’s market share,” the panel said in its report. “This is problematic, since we have long relied on the U.S. as our primary (and to some extent, only) customer, and we do not have sufficient means to move and sell our oil and gas to other countries.”

TIM MACMILLAN, 

PRESIDENT OF THE CANADIAN ASSOCIATION OF PETROLEUM PRODUCERS. 

A big reason for the divide is that while Canadians keep debating about whether to keep fossil fuels in the ground, the Americans put their oil “on ships in the Gulf Coast and bring it around to harbours here in Canada,”  Their faster response also means they are attracting the capital". 

JEFF TONKEN

The chief executive of Birchcliff Energy Ltd., a Calgary-based intermediate oil and gas company, is frustrated with Eastern Canadian politicians and consumers. They don’t want pipelines from Western Canada and demand the highest environmental standards for domestic production. Then they buy U.S. oil and gas that is less regulated. “We need Canadians to use Canadian energy first,” he says. “In Alberta, we don’t flare our gas, we try to make our environmental footprint as small as it can be, we don’t spill oil, we watch everything we do. ” now Alberta is faced with a new Carbon tax!

“Quebec brings in oil from nations that don’t have civil rights, human rights, or any legislation on how they produce their oil and gas,” 

U.S. producers have also benefited from faster policy changes and fewer regulatory delays. This has enabled the U.S. to become an oil-exporting nation, while Canadian oil remains landlocked by a lack of pipelines.

A  federal regulatory decision that was  due in April was delayed yet again while federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna further assesses environmental impacts.

PATRICIA MOHR

Delays in building oil export pipelines have also cost Canada customers, says Mohr, former vice-president of economics at the Bank of Nova Scotia. “We have been going through lengthy regulatory processes to try to get public buy-in, and the market that should have been ours is being taken by Iraq and Iran, and to some extent by Russia,” she says. Like their U.S. counterparts, other countries are aggressively stepping in while Canada waits for everyone’s approval.

KEN GREEN

Delays in approving and building liquefied natural gas export projects will cost British Columbia $20 billion a year in lost revenue from 2020 onwards, according to a study by the Fraser Institute.

“As a result, British Columbians will invariably forgo higher levels of job growth and billions of dollars in tax revenues which could pay for things like health care or public education,” said  Green, co-author of the report and senior director of natural resource studies at the Fraser Institute.

Delays in approval from the federal government, provincial authorities and First Nations would likely see the B.C. lose 9.5 per cent of its current GDP, the report said. It argues that “the cost of regulatory de­lay imposed upon LNG investments in B.C., de­fined as export revenues forgone. That cost is substantial: $22.5 billion in 2020, rising to $24.8 billion in 2025.”

THE TORONTO GLOBE & MAIL

Unbridle Inc. and its oil industry partners have seen their faint hope for the Northern Gateway pipeline project dealt a major blow  as the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal quashed the permit issued by the federal cabinet two years ago.

The three-justice panel concluded that the former Conservative government failed in its duty to consult First Nations prior to issuing a cabinet order approving the $7.9-billion pipeline that would deliver 525,000 barrels a day of oil sands crude to the West Coast for export to Pacific markets.

THE QUESTION:

What do you get by taking all of the income from the 1% of the Canadian population and distributing it among the poor folks? 

THE ANSWER:

More poor people! DO THE MATH!

THE LEMON:

This week's award goes to all those people who refuse to understand that there needs to be a balance between the the Environment and the Economy.

THE QUOTE:

"I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

THE CLIP: