Re: Stéphane Dion criticizes Thomas Mulcair for East-West strategy
Mulcair placed all the blame on the west.
Nope.
He commented on shale production in Ontario, and how avoiding the cost of environmental cleanup nationwide also contributes to artificially inflating the dollar.
Anyway, it's time to take a fresh look at this, as I'm tired of reciting the same points to everyone in this thread.
Thomson: A refreshingly thoughtful discussion of oilsands challenges
EDMONTON - It wasn't exactly a day at the beach or even a day at the spa - but a conference put on by the University of Alberta this week was something of a welcome escape from the daily grind.
And by grind I mean the ongoing war of words between those who consider the oilsands the root of all evil and those who think the oilsands the pinnacle of all that is good, a war that has been heating up lately with an anti-oilsands attack from federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair followed by counterstrikes from hot-under-the-collar western politicians.
For those of us who have to pay attention to this pingpong game, the conference put on by the university's Institute for Public Economics (under the slightly cheeky title, Boom and Bust Again: the Sequel) offered an escape from the rhetoric into a refuge of critical thought where you could sit back, close your eyes and let some of Canada's leading economists verbally massage the kinks and knots from what is often a polarizing and exhausting debate.
The analysts are not anti-oilsands bashers and neither are they cheerleaders. Nobody was unfurling banners at the conference for Greenpeace or Ethical Oil.org.
Instead, the conference looked at, among other things, the social cost of Alberta's boom and bust cycle, the pressures of oilsands growth on the labour market and the impact of all of this on Alberta's First Nations.
The conference heard from Finance Minister Doug Horner and "oilsands mayor" Melissa Blake of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.
And because this was a conference of economists, at least one of the two-dozen-or-so speakers argued that Alberta should adopt a provincial sales tax and reform the province's income tax system.
A sales tax makes perfect sense in the ivory tower of academia but Alberta politicians realize that adopting a consumption tax would be about as popular as importing Norwegian rats into the province.
But the refreshing aspect of these kinds of academic conferences is that they continually push boundaries that are not always, fiscally speaking, politically correct.
They challenge conventional wisdoms and offer new ways of looking at old ideas. They discuss the challenges facing Alberta's petro-economy - and our reliance on the oilsands - in a manner critical, but never cynical.
Energy economist Andrew Leach, for example, argued that when it approves a new mega project, the provincial government is not properly estimating the true impact of the project on the provincial economy and how much royalty it will generate.
The more projects we approve, said Leach, the greater the pressure on inflation as competition for skilled labour and materials drives prices up.
A project designed to generate 100,000 barrels of oil a day, he said by way of illustration, might drive up costs for the entire industry by 10 cents a barrel - which could actually mean less money for the provincial treasury.
"There's more revenue on that particular project but what if I'm losing 10 cents a barrel on my royalties over three million barrels because of cost inflation across the whole industry?" said Leach. "I produce 100,000 new barrels but by producing those 100,000 barrels perhaps the province is losing 10 cents a barrel on three million, that's a different calculation."
Leach says at some point approving more and more oilsands projects without factoring in the full costs of development will be selfdefeating.
Another challenge facing oilsands development is the environmental cost - and it's a cost that's going to get higher.
Andre Plourde, an economist who sat on the province's Royalty Review Panel in 2007, is arguing that Alberta must introduce a substantial carbon tax, somewhere between $5 and $50 a tonne on all emissions.
The province currently has a $15-per-tonne tax on large emitters (over 100,000 tonnes) but it's based on the intensity of emissions, not on absolute emissions. This means the tax gets watered down and is actually much lower than $15 per tonne.
Plourde says each $5 increment in a carbon tax would only add 25 cents to the cost of each barrel of oil - and it would send a message to the rest of the world that Alberta is seriously trying to reduce the environmental footprint of the oilsands, the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.
"The challenge that we're going to face in the future is not that we're putting our oil producing industry in a competitive disadvantage by acting on climate change but that we're going to lose the international social licence to operate if we don't do this," says Plourde.
"That's my worry. We're potentially going to see all kinds of jurisdictions finding ways to make life difficult for Alberta and Canada to continue to produce and export bitumen."
Plourde's comments are sure to set some Albertans' teeth on edge - but for those Albertans looking for logical solutions to the challenges facing Alberta's oil industry, he offers some cool logic to offset the overheated rhetoric.
Thomson: A refreshingly thoughtful discussion of oilsands challenges
