Gravelbourg & District Tribune

You pay the price when you don’t control your own destiny.

 

There may have been a time when a conflict in Europe or Asia had little impact on farming operations in Canada. That isn’t the case today. We have the oil and gas and potash but we don't control it.

 

Back in the 1980s, after the OPEC crisis of 1973, the federal government led by Pierre Trudeau, brought in the National Energy Program. The plan was to start a Canadian oil & gas company, Petro Canada, build pipelines across the country and establish a made in Canada price for oil and gas in order to stabilize price swings caused by world conflicts.

 

Then along came Mulroney and the Conservatives. They sold off Petro Canada stopped the pipeline project and said the only customer we needed was the U.S. The Free Trade Agreement further guaranteed the U.S. 60% of our oil production and pricing was set by the West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which is a benchmark for oil pricing in the United States.

 

Norway, with a population of 5.6 million, discovered offshore oil in the North Sea. The oil companies paid as much as 78% royalties. Today they have over $2 trillion in a bank account (2 trillion as a number is 2000000000000 and it has 12 zeros… just saying). Now imagine if Alberta, with a population 5 million, with three times the oil reserves had managed their resource the same way? Instead they have billions of debt.

 

In Saskatchewan we had the Devine government of the late 1980s and early 1990s privatize the potash company. As a Crown corporation it would have generated trillions for the provincial government. We’re stuck with a $40 billion debt.

 

These sell offs made some private foreign owners very rich. At the expense of our children and grandchildren. We are truly a nation of "hewers of wood and drawers of water". No longer masters of our own destiny.

 

Could the war in Iran be a wakeup call?