Last Friday, when Ron Liepert, Alberta’s new Energy Minister, turned up at Calgary’s Metropolitan Centre for a breakfast speech to talk about “the Future of Alberta Energy,” he may have made history. For the first time old Tories could remember, none of the city’s energy firms had purchased one of the $850 tables.
“You’ve got a Calgary guy, a Calgary minister, a tough-nosed Energy Minister, he’s going to be talking about the royalty review that’s coming, and he drew maybe 130 people,” says one astonished senior Tory. “Even in the bad old days under [former premier Don] Getty, the oil and gas guys would buy a table just to show their sign,” even, he says, “if they ended up sending the guys from the mailroom” to fill the seats.
Such are the depths of the strained relationship between Alberta’s energy patch and their old friends in the PC government — and the impetus behind the announcement yesterday in Calgary of a new and improved royalty regime.
Described as a “competitiveness review,” it might better have been called a make-up letter, intended to heal the deep wounds inflicted by 2009’s sweeping royalty adjustment, when Premier Ed Stelmach insisted the government wasn’t getting its “fair share” of the oil-boom windfall, and stunned the oil patch by grabbing a 20% bigger take.
Five different attempts to tinker since then seemed only to aggravate executives and investors who couldn’t bear the government’s unpredictability.
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Ed “Chavez” Stelmach “stunned the oil patch by grabbing a 20% bigger take. …Five different attempts to tinker since then seemed only to aggravate executives and investors who couldn’t bear the government’s unpredictability.”
“Predictability”, that’s a sacred word to investors and thus the key driver to the creation of jobs. Stelmach is no different than Obama; he cannot connect the dots between predictability, investment, company growth and job creation.
“Report after report showed Alberta had dropped from one of the most competitive Canadian jurisdictions for energy investment to one of the worst.”
Added to this mix is the deplorable MSM coverage of that 20% Chavez-like theft. At the time this happened Diane Francis who bills herself as a business journalist verbally assaulted Ezra Levant by calling him just another redneck from the West because Ezra had appropriately called this what it was … theft. In one stroke Stelmach repudiated Alberta’s valuable contractual commercial reputation. He cavalierly tossed it away after decades of building trust between oil investors and the Alberta government. The red Tories are done, Wildrose is in, Ontario listen up and learn how change can happen.
Re: #1 — “The red Tories are done, Wildrose is in”
True enough. I can’t believe Alberta Tories took a fantastically rich province in two short years into near bankruptcy. Destroyed it all because “red tories” chose a leader much like Joe Clark.
“Ed” should resign immediately but like Clark he won’t and that leaves one option.
He must be fired.
Ed was not elected leader by conservatives, red or any other color. The party was so hungry for money they allowed anyone on the day of the vote, pay their fee and get a ballot. Then, on the second vote, more of the non conservative group showed up to buy a membership and vote. So, it was ndp, greens, and members of every other protest group that elected Ed.
They never realized that they would be subject to all the decisions his government made, or lose jobs, and suffer the deficit.
Now, a lot of those people showed up at the leadership convention to support Ed.
The rest of us started to work for the WRA, and join.
Ed was told what would happen if he changed the royalty fees, but was told by his advisors that those companies would stay regardless.
The oil, and the companies will still be there long after Ed is gone. I doubt his change in the rates will help him much.
Well you can’t say that Special Ed wasn’t warned. The problem he has is he has trouble listening to anyone who is not a member of the bureaucracy. The unions pushed and Special Ed said, “Yes sir” and the rest they said is history. I only hope our suffering will help the rest of Canada realize what happens to a rich country that decides to become socialist.