Year: 2012

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

It’s human nature to want to avoid admitting mistakes, and the bigger the mistake, presumably, the bigger the temptation to escape the blame.

Far easier to blame someone or something else, preferably some force beyond one’s control. I couldn’t do my homework because the dog ate my notes; sorry I missed the deadline but there’s a traffic jam on the highway; I remembered your birthday but the package didn’t arrive in time; I wouldn’t have ruined the economy but the dollar is too high.

That last humdinger was offered Monday by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty in a bid to slough off responsibility for the economic mess now confronting the province he has led for the past eight years. Politely invited by Alberta’s Premier Alison Redford to lend support to her province’s effort to defend its oil industry — which has been a key reason Canada has avoided recession  — Mr. McGuinty responded with a churlish refusal. Instead he sought to explain away Ontario’s slow slide into debt and deficit as the result of a stronger currency.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

There’s an old, never-fail strategy in Alberta politics: When your government is in trouble on the eve of an election, pick a fight with Ottawa. Almost nothing rallies Alberta voters around their provincial government like a dust-up with the feds. The only thing better is when Ottawa starts the skirmish.

Alberta may as well not even have held its 1982 campaign. Coming the year after the Trudeau government imposed the National Energy Program on the province, the provincial Conservatives could have run tree stumps as their candidates in most constituencies and won. There were 79 seats in the Alberta legislature that year. The Tories won 75. They earned over 62% of the popular vote.

New Alberta Premier Alison Redford is at the head of a government in trouble (although, according to recent polls, not as much trouble as when she took it over last fall from the bumbling and unpopular Ed Stelmach). And a provincial election is expected this spring. But until Monday, it looked as though Ms. Redford wouldn’t have a central Canadian bogeyman to run against.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Hot on the heels of Alberta Finance Minister Ron Liepert’s North American tour, Premier Alison Redford is hitting the road – visiting key American cities, including Chicago, New York and Washington – to sell her vision of a more co-operative energy strategy. But along the way, the rookie Premier seems to be getting a hard lesson in the harsh reality of politics.

Ms. Redford is facing a tough challenge: The capacity of existing pipelines will soon be maxed out and Alberta needs to get the approval of other jurisdictions (either B.C. or the United States) to build new ones. Oil sands opponents have a keen understanding of this dilemma. Their strategy has been to block Alberta’s access to foreign markets, in the hopes of preventing further expansion of the oil sands. In order to counter its opponents and enable the land-locked province to export its bitumen, Ms. Redford has been trying to get other politicians to help her sell the oil sands – specifically, the Premier of Canada’s largest province, Dalton McGunity.

“We in Alberta have a resource that matters to the rest of the country,” said Ms. Redford. “It’s not enough for Alberta to be talking about the importance of Keystone in the United States. We need the Premier of Ontario talking about that.”

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Dalton McGuinty, the Premier of Ontario, should not have responded ungraciously to an appeal by Premier Alison Redford of Alberta for solidarity from Ontario and Quebec, in the course of her speech on Friday to the Small Explorers and Producers Association on Friday. In particular, she wants the Premiers of the two Central Canadian provinces to help articulate the importance of the Keystone XL pipeline to the country as a whole.

“If I had my preferences,” said Mr. McGuinty – using the subjunctive mood to express what grammarians call a contrary-to-fact hypothesis – “as to whether we had a rapidly growing oil and gas sector in the West or a lower dollar, I’ll tell you where I stand: with the lower dollar.”

But Mr. McGuinty cannot enforce his preferences. Such exercises of the imagination are futile. There is of course a correlation between the exchange rate of the Canadian dollar and foreign demand for Canadian commodities, and a higher dollar means that Canadian goods – both manufactured products and natural resources – are more expensive.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

TORONTO AND CALGARY— Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s vision of a national Canadian energy strategy has bogged down in an increasingly bitter dispute with Ontario over the economic benefits of the oil sands.

Ms. Redford had suggested Ontario should be a more vocal advocate for oil-sands development, on the grounds that related businesses benefit Ontario’s economy. That met with a rebuff on Monday from Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, who said Canada’s high “petro dollar” has hobbled exporters in his province.

That prompted a sharp rebuke from Ms. Redford. She said Mr. McGuinty’s “simplistic” approach to the oil sands and the Canadian dollar is based on a “false paradigm” and suggested that the leader of the country’s one-time economic powerhouse needs to broaden his outlook.

“When we talk about oil sands, it’s not about what’s in Alberta’s best interests,” Ms. Redford told reporters Monday. “It is about what’s in Canada’s best interests.”

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The Toronto Sun is the city’s daily tabloid newspaper.

QMI Agency

Three years ago, taxpayers were forced to loan $13.7 billion to General Motors and Chrysler because no banks were crazy enough. Some of that taxpayers’ money has been repaid, but $5.5 billion will never be recovered.

Could you imagine if Alberta’s premier had campaigned against that bailout? Or even spoke out against it now? It’s not like the bailout worked, after all.

There are 2,000 fewer jobs at GM today and 800 fewer at Chrysler. As economist Mark Milke points out, the jobs that were “saved” — at least for now, until the next bailout — cost $90,000 each at Chrysler, and $474,000 each at GM. That’s not a typo. Taxpayers spent $474,000 to “save” each job at Government Motors.

What if Alberta’s premier had said: “If I had my preferences as to whether we prop up a failing, obsolete, over-unionized company in the East or lower taxes, I’ll tell you where I stand: With lower taxes.”

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. Terence Corcoran is the editor and columnist for the Financial Post section of the National Post.

By saying no to Alberta’s oil sands, McGuinty is starting a campaign for Ottawa to bail out Ontario

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, his province in hock up to a looming $400-billion and his political future looking grim, has decided to do what demagogues often do best: take on an extraterritorial foe. If you can’t win at home, maybe you can pretend to destroy some mythical foe thousands of kilometres away. These days, what could be safer for a broke lefty premier who has squandered billions on dead-end green energy projects than to direct attention to Alberta’s oil sands and Alberta Premier Alison Redford.

What Mr. McGuinty is really after here, however, is not the humiliation of Alberta but the transfer of federal cash to Ontario. The oil sands comments are a pretext, another McGuinty McGuffin that is the front for other real motives.

For weeks now, Ms. Redford and key members of her Conservative Cabinet — Energy Minister Ted Morton and Finance Minister Ron Liepert — have been trying to enlist Ontario and other provinces in a campaign to boost the oil sands as part of a Canadian Energy Strategy.

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