Parkland Institute disses Alberta’s support for ‘national energy strategy’
Gordon Laxer doesn’t like the direction Canada’s new national energy strategy is headed. The co-director of the Parkland Institute thinks it’s nothing more than the Canadian oil industry getting what it wants, with no thought to alternative fuels.
Laxer was responding to the recent meeting of Canada’s energy ministers in Kananaskis.
Laxer says that “there is less than meets the eye” with regards to Alberta government’s support for a national energy strategy. An excerpt from his article follows:
Laxer believes there is less than meets the eye to the provincial government's change of heart with regards to the 'national energy strategy' being proposed by the country's energy ministers.
“I never thought I’d see the day when the words “national,” “energy” and “strategy” would be strung together and promoted by the Alberta government. For 30 years, Pierre Trudeau’s 1980 National Energy Program (NEP) had been recurrently trotted out by Alberta premiers and Calgary’s oilpatch, strung up, and ritualistically pummelled.
Don’t you dare ever try a national energy plan on us again, they cried. Leave it to the market. Governments must stay out of the business of business. Canada had a new NEP — no energy plan.
Ralph Klein, the former premier of Alberta who made “get out of the business of business” the centre point of his 13-year reign, admitted — or was that bragged — “we had no plan.” Klein once claimed, apropos nothing, “By God, Ottawa, keep your hands off,” even though no Liberal in Ottawa had threatened to put their hands on.
Now we see a coordinated effort to promote something called a “national energy strategy.” Predictably, it started in business-supported think-tanks like C.D. Howe and the Canada West Foundation, associations of oil and gas corporations, and provincial hydro authorities. Soon the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), representing 150 of the largest corporations in Canada, including big, foreign oil, joined in. Then Alberta made the call for a national strategy, and finally the premiers endorsed the principle last week in Kananaskis, Alta.
Why the about-face? Was it a Saul moment on the road to Damascus where the petrocrats finally saw a light from heaven?
Did the light tell them that Canada needs what every other industrial country already has, a national plan framed around energy security? As the 14th greatest oil importing country in the world, relying on foreign sources to supply half the oil Canadians use, this country surely needs a national strategy to replace OPEC oil that now accounts for half our imports.
Did the Saul moment include a plan to create strategic petroleum reserves that every other member in the 28-country International Energy Agency has? That includes Norway, a much greater net oil exporter than Canada.
Did it include a strategy to ship tar-free domestic oil from the West in a pipeline on Canadian soil so that easterners don’t freeze in the dark when the next international oil shortage strikes?
What about energy independence, which every U.S. president since Richard Nixon has promised Americans but never delivered, because as Jimmy Carter said 34 years ago while occupying the Oval Office, “America wastes more oil than it imports”?
I searched in vain for the sustainable strategy that would deliver national energy security by strategizing how to scale down fossil fuel use in this country so we get in step with the rest of the world as it moves to a low-carbon future.
Instead, I saw a strategy for what Canada’s first Conservative prime minister, John A. Macdonald, called Canadians’ colonial role as hewers of wood and drawers of water, dressed up as a national strategy.
Gordon Laxer is co-founder and co-director of Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta. The full text of his article can be viewed at Parkland Institute’s website (parklandinstitute.ca/media/comments/what_in_tar-nation/).
Category: a-News
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