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Oil and Gas Sector-Politics and Image

Liberals come for Alberta oil workers with mistitled sustainable jobs act – by Rex Murphy (National Post – June 21, 2023)

https://nationalpost.com/

The title of the act is a lie. It is not about sustaining jobs. It is about killing jobs

Is it that they don’t know better? Or they simply do not care? It has to be both. The most arrogant, blundering government in modern times is fixated on devastating the most essential industry Canada has; on stopping the production of the most essential resource of the modern world. The resource that makes the world work: energy.

Everyday Albertans must be asking themselves, without hope of any reply, “What is it we have done to earn the enmity of this green cabal in Ottawa, so hypnotized by their delusional calling to save the world from global warming that they have now officially given us notice that they want to kill our most productive and central industry?

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Canada’s Mediocracy – by Diane Francis (Diane Francis Substack – June 5, 2023)

https://dianefrancis.substack.com/

In January, most Canadians were embarrassed after their federal government announced that four Leopard tanks would be given to Ukraine as it fights for its very existence, as well as Europe’s. Four more came a month later, but these were measly gifts, considering that Canada is wealthy, home to the second largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world, and America has given disproportionately more to Kyiv.

It’s also fair to assume that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has not phoned President Joe Biden or NATO or Ukraine offering help along the way, or suggesting that Canada will ship substantially more energy to help reduce energy inflation and replace Russian fossil fuels. Trudeau has been in power since 2015 and yet to meet NATO military spending commitments.

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Mining Lithium in Abandoned Oil Fields for Tomorrow’s EVs – by Jacob Lorinc and Robert Tuttle (Bloomberg News – April 20, 2023)

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/

(Bloomberg) — Chris Doornbos pulled up to Alberta’s foundational oil field in a baby-blue Tesla Model Y, a not-so-subtle nod to a new world order. It was a crisp January afternoon in Canada’s top-polluting province and a biting -5C (23F), and the 40-year-old mining executive squinted at a patch of dirt that midcentury prospectors had once scoured for oil. It doesn’t look like much now, he admitted, but what counts is the lithium beneath the soil.

The Leduc oil field was discovered in the 1940s, when a group of Imperial Oil Ltd. workers stumbled upon a well so profuse with petroleum that, on first drill, it burped a gaseous fireball almost 15 meters (49 feet) into the air.

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Enough is enough of energy absurdity – by Derek H. Burney (National Post – April 18, 2023)

https://nationalpost.com/

A line must be drawn between obtuse environmental orthodoxy and the rational need for responsible energy development

Led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) recently announced a million-barrel-per-day reduction in oil production, action only cartels can take to limit supply in order to raise prices — the cost to the global economy be damned.

It will inevitably lead to higher North American gasoline prices as refineries gear up for peak-driving summer months. Even more damning is that it exposes the inherent fallacy of the anti-energy policies of Canada and the United States, which have two of the largest oil and gas reserves on the planet.

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Analysis: Earning First Nations’ trust on resource projects – by Donna Kennedy-Glans (National Post/Wiarton Echo – April 16, 2023)

https://www.wiartonecho.com/

The Ring of Fire region in northern Ontario is one lynchpin in America’s green energy moonshot. Unearthing mineral deposits more than 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay is essential to Ontario’s future as an electric vehicle manufacturing hub. But what happens if some local First Nations want nothing to do with mining critical minerals?

In western Canada, we’ve struggled at times to develop resources, build energy infrastructure, and export oil and liquified natural gas (LNG) — with the support of Indigenous communities. There’s no straight-forward path. When a successful project emerges, it’s worthwhile taking a closer look.

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Western premiers blast Lametti for suggesting Ottawa might ‘look at’ provinces’ power over natural resources – by Elizabeth Thompson (CBC News Political – April 11, 2023)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/

Lametti told an AFN meeting he would examine calls to rescind Natural Resources Transfer Act

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and three western premiers are calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to disassociate his government from comments made by his justice minister — who promised last week to “look at” a decades-old law that gives control over natural resources to the four western provinces.

“The federal government cannot unilaterally change the Constitution,” the premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba said in a joint statement Tuesday. “It should not even be considering stripping resource rights away from the three Prairie provinces.

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Trudeau Liberals propose ripping up Constitution on oil, mining – by Brian Lilley (Winnipeg Sun – April 12, 2023)

https://winnipegsun.com/

Two different chiefs asked Lametti to take away provincial responsibility for natural resources.

Is the Trudeau government looking to rip up the Constitution of Canada on the issue of natural resources like Alberta oil, Quebec timber or Ontario mining deposits? Based on a few brief words, made by Justin Trudeau’s Justice Minister David Lametti, the answer is yes.

“I obviously can’t pronounce on that right now, but I do commit to looking at that,” Lametti said. “It won’t be uncontroversial, I would say with a bit of a smile.” Controversial would be an understatement. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was first out the gate with a statement.

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OPINION: A lack of political guts leaves Canada on the sidelines amid global LNG boom – by Konrad Yakabuski (Globe and Mail – April 5,2023)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Canada’s reputation as a good place to do business is suffering serious damage, as the fate of resource projects are determined by the whims of politicians.

It is not enough for promoters of multibillion-dollar projects in Canada to meet among the most stringent environmental and social criteria on the planet; their projects are doomed if they do not fit the particular narrative the politicians seek to spin.

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Alberta on the cusp of another resource boom – by Diane Francis (Financial Post – March 28, 2023)

https://financialpost.com/

Alberta may end up leading the world’s transition to lithium batteries

The most important date in 20th-century Canadian economic history took place on Feb. 13, 1947, on a farm near Edmonton, when Imperial Oil made one of the largest oil discoveries in the world.

A plume of oil and flames reached 15 metres toward the sky and Leduc No. 1 ushered in Alberta’s incredible oil industry. Within weeks, 500 oil companies were formed, launching Alberta and Canada into the energy big leagues and becoming a major contributor to the Canadian economy and our standard of living.

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Alberta set to reap the second highest resource bonanza in the province’s history – by Meghan Potkins (Financial Post – February 28, 2023)

https://financialpost.com/

Danielle Smith’s pre-election budget includes $68 billion spending plan and $2.4 billion surplus

Alberta’s first provincial budget under Premier Danielle Smith shows the government’s coffers will be buoyed once again by deluge of resource revenue, estimated to reach $18.4 billion in 2023 — the second highest resource bonanza in the province’s history.

The province will end the current fiscal year with a slightly smaller surplus of $10.4 billion than was projected in November, as energy prices softened and the new premier increased spending in recent months.

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More foreign investment in our natural resources could ease financial burden on Canadians – by Mark Le Dain (Calgary Herald – January 22, 2023)

https://calgaryherald.com/

The Canadian loonie has been sitting near multi-year lows, making life more expensive for Canadians. In the past, our country had a natural mechanism that cushioned the inflation impact of a falling loonie.

As the value of the currency dropped, global operators would invest in and develop the country’s abundant natural resources. This would then lead to increased demand for Canadian currency and increased jobs and exports during critical periods when the low loonie suggested weakness in other sectors.

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Ottawa’s climate policy will prolong Indigenous poverty – by Dale Swampy (Financial Post – January 17, 2023)

https://financialpost.com/

Many will be unable to pay the high cost of utilities and energy that will follow from the plan

Canada’s latest Environment and Climate Change report to the United Nations, submitted at the end of December, fails Canada’s Indigenous people yet again, consigning us to poverty, wiping out our path to prosperity and blocking our ability to bring traditional knowledge and wisdom to bear on protecting the land.
This is only the most recent instance in a long line of failures dating back hundreds of years. Proper consultation with Indigenous people before the report’s submission might have prevented that.

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Liberals’ ‘just transition’ a fist to the mouth of Canada – by Rex Murphy (National Post – January 19, 2023)

https://nationalpost.com

A better name for the massive dislocation of the national economy and Canadian workers would be the ‘Great Disruption’

“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we — (a) select group of human beings … are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet. … I mean, it’s so almost extraterrestrial to think about ‘saving the planet.’” — John Kerry at Davos.

What’s really, finally, at the heart of radical environmentalism?

An insatiable urge, an unslakeable lust to govern the lives, habits and choices of everyone — everyone — who does not think like them, who chooses not to see the world as they prefer them to see it, who questions their furious dogmas and resists their sprawling imperatives into every corner of every person’s real life.

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Premier Smith ‘sickened’ by staggering disruption planned with Trudeau’s Just Transition – by David Staples (Edmonton Journal – January 16, 2023)

https://edmontonjournal.com/

If you’re from Alberta, Saskatchewan or Newfoundland and Labrador, this plan might well strike you as madness, as a federal government that has lost all humility and common sense

The staggering scope of change that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals intend to impose on Canadians with their Just Transition program is made clear in a newly-released government document.

Such is the magnitude of the proposed change that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she “felt sick” reading it.

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The Trudeau Liberals are about to tell Alberta workers where to go – by Rex Murphy (National Post -January 4, 2023)

https://nationalpost.com/

Will there be a ‘just transition’ for Canadian farmers, too?

National Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson plans to introduce “just transition” legislation early this year to help workers in the oil and gas sector move into green energy jobs. Help?

Well, that’s one way to start the New Year. Send out a second-tier minister, working in concert with another second-tier minister, Seamus O’Regan, and an NDP consort, Charlie Angus, to announce a peremptory, arbitrary, unnegotiated shutdown of a greatly productive province’s principal industry.

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