Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

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.

Anne Golden is President and Chief Executive Officer of The Conference Board of Canada. Glen Hodgson is Senior Vice-President and Chief Economist of The Conference Board of Canada.

In recent weeks there has been a recurring debate on whether the economic success being felt in much of Western Canada is hurting the rest of the country. The debate has centred on the oil sands and whether they have caused so-called “Dutch disease”, specifically in the manufacturing sector based largely in Central Canada.

The argument that good news for oil sands is bad news for the rest of the Canada is not supported by evidence.

Contrary to widespread opinion, the oil sands are not a significant share of the Canadian economy, and are not crowding out other sectors. Total energy and mining production as a share of Canadian GDP is actually smaller today that it was in recent decades – 4.6 per cent of GDP today, versus 5.1 per cent in 1990 and 5.9 per cent in 1980.

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The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

LONDON, ONT.— The impacts of reversing the flow of an Enbridge oil pipeline between Sarnia and Hamilton are “minimal and manageable,” the company’s lawyer told a National Energy Board hearing Wednesday.

But aboriginal groups disagreed – both inside and outside the hearings at a London hotel.

Traditionalist members of the Six Nations reserve near Brantford forced the hearings to adjourn for several hours just as they got going Wednesday morning, as they complained the hearings were illegitimate and undemocratic.

Once the hearings had resumed in the afternoon, Chief Christopher Plain of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation near Sarnia complained that his members “have not been consulted in a meaningful way” in the energy board process.

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The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

CALGARY—NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair might as well have declared war on the West. That’s the way it sounded from this end of the country when a couple of weeks ago he told a CBC radio program that something needs to be done about rapid oilsands development.
 
According to Mulcair, it has artificially inflated the Canadian dollar and thereby delivered a bruising blow to central Canada’s export-dependent manufacturing sector.
 
Mulcair might as well have said that the western resource-based economy is the enemy of the eastern-based manufacturing sector and must be stamped out at all costs.
 
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s team and the western premiers were quick to defend the West’s right to profit from its resource wealth. But the ensuing war of words created such a fog it obscured much more fundamental issues.

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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.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair is right with one part of his critique of Western Canada’s oil-driven economy, and wrong about all the rest. On balance, it’s a poor batting average for someone who, some day, hopes to become prime minister.

Mr. Mulcair has been chastising the oil industry, and the governments that regulate it, for not making the industry pay the full cost of emissions that create greenhouse gas emissions.

Even Exxon-Mobil in Houston (and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers) thinks there should be a price on carbon – through a tax or, less preferably, a market-trading system for emissions. Alberta has such a tax, but it is set way too low to be very effective. So Mr. Mulcair is correct that pollution costs should be factored into the product’s final cost. Otherwise, all of society loses from the pollution.

To say, however, that Alberta and Canada are acting like Nigeria in regulating the industry is political nonsense.

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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.

Thomas Mulcair says it was never his intent to spar with the leaders of the Western provinces as he blames Alberta’s oil sands for the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in Canada’s other economic sectors.

“I have far too much respect for provincial premiers or for provincial politicians, having been one myself for so many years, to ever want to be interpreted as trying to dismiss them,” the Leader of the federal New Democrats, who was once a provincial cabinet minister in Quebec, said on Friday in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

“And if that is the way it was interpreted, of course,” he said, “I regret it.”

But Mr. Mulcair continues to press his belief that allowing development of the oil sands to proceed without demanding a greater price for the toll on the environment is driving up the dollar and hurting a wide range of industries including manufacturing, fishing and forestry. New Democrats say that without the oil companies paying the true cost of environmental remediation, their profits are unrealistically high and that is driving up the dollar.

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The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

For most Canadians, the 700,000 km of crude oil and natural gas pipelines that criss-cross the country are out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Until the massive energy infrastructure intersects with international politics, the economy and environmental activism.

Projects like Keystone XL, Enbridge’s Line 9, Northern Gateway bristle with controversy (despite U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s pledge Friday to approve Keystone on his first day in office).

But the pipelines that carry millions of barrels of oil and millions of cubic feet of natural gas could transport Canada itself into the ranks of the world’s energy super powers.

But only if we move beyond our single biggest customer, the U.S., and begin supplying energy to the rest of the world – particularly energy-gobbling emerging markets, soon.

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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.

CALGARY— Ottawa has placed 905,000 hectares of the northern offshore up for bids, clearing the way for energy companies to snap up exploration rights for an area half the size of Lake Ontario. The scale of the offer indicates eagerness in the oil patch to drill for new finds in Canada’s northern waters less than two years after such plans were put on hold following the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a major Arctic drilling safety review.

The Arctic exploration auction resumes as the Harper government is promoting greater development of the country’s resources. It has taken steps to speed regulatory approvals for major energy projects such as the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, promising to limit the ability of environmental groups and other opponents to block or delay new developments.

The prospect of further northern drilling fits squarely with that mandate, said Jason MacDonald, spokesman for John Duncan, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, which oversees the northern land auction.

“The bid call reflects the potential that we see for resource development,” he said.

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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.

In a joint announcement two weeks ago, the United States and Japan (along with ConocoPhillips, the U.S.-based multinational oil company) announced the world’s first successful field trial (in Alaska) of a technology that uses carbon dioxide to free natural gas from methane hydrates – the globally abundant hunks of porous ice that trap huge amounts of natural gas in deposits, onshore and offshore, around the world. It’s a neat feat. You use CO2, which isn’t wanted, to produce natural gas, which is. But it’s more than neat – much more.

Methane hydrates constitute the world’s No. 1 reservoir of fossil fuel. Ubiquitous along vast stretches of Earth’s continental shelves, they hold enough natural gas to fuel the world for a thousand years – and beyond. Who says so? Using the most conservative of assumptions, the U.S. Geological and Geophysical Service says so.

The U.S. now produces 21 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas a year. But it possesses 330,000 tcf of natural gas in its methane hydrate resource – theoretically enough to supply the country for 3,000 years (give or take). Using less conservative numbers (for example, a methane hydrate resource of 670,000 tcf), the U.S. is good to go for 6,000 years (give or take).

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 Maclean’s is the largest circulation weekly news magazine in Canada, reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events.

Cross-border crime is only one of the issues affecting ‘the Fort McMurray of the U.S.’s north’

The strip clubs in Williston, N.D., are the rowdiest that Tatiana, an exotic dancer who has performed in Las Vegas and New York, has ever seen. Oil workers coming off the nearby rigs pack the city’s two clubs, Whispers and Heartbreakers, every night. They smell like work. They wear dirty T-shirts. They fall asleep face first on the bar. And then there are the prostitutes. Tatiana, who asked that her real name not be used, noticed them wandering though the crowd looking for customers on her first night in North Dakota. “They’re not in there to tip the dancers,” she says with a laugh.
 
Williston is the heart of Bakken oil country, the Fort McMurray of the U.S.’s north, for all the good, and bad, that brings. There are at least 3.1 billion barrels of recoverable oil trapped in the Bakken shale, a teardrop-shaped formation spread between North Dakota, eastern Montana and Saskatchewan, and likely many billions more. In recent years, new technology and high prices have made that oil both easier to get at and more valuable to sell. Today the race to pump it out—via a complex process known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”—is running at an Olympic pace.
 
As a result, North Dakota’s economy is the hottest in the U.S. Unemployment there was just three per cent in March, the lowest in the country. In neighbouring Montana, where oil exploration has been far more modest, the jobless rate stands at six per cent, well shy of the national average of nine per cent.

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

Philip Cross is the former chief economic ­analyst at Statistics Canada.

Jeff Rubin forgets that knowledge, not cheap oil, brings growth
 
Jeff Rubin is the kind of guy I want to like. He made a remark in 2005 about sheiks and mullahs controlling oil supplies that provoked his handlers at CIBC, where he was chief economist for 20 years, to send him on a course to heighten his sensitivity and political correctness. If my former employers at Statistics Canada had been nearly as skittish, I could have spent much of my 36 years there taking courses. Anyway, the course apparently had its desired effect on Rubin, as his new book on The End of Growth is as politically correct as it gets when it comes to decrying our addiction to autos and suburbs, our indifference to climate change, and ultimately our grubby materialism.

This book is an extension of his previous work, in which he predicted high oil prices were here to stay, and would fundamentally alter how and where we live and work. In this book, he extends this thesis to claim that permanently high oil prices will permanently cripple economic growth. The book notes that this may not be all bad, since the end of growth would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, although I think for most people that would not take the sting out of being unemployed.

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