Grab Alberta’s oil while the grabbing’s good

Ralph Klein is not up to the coming storm over Alberta resources. Time for the feds to seize them

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

A federal election campaign, one-time Prime Minister Kim Campbell once famously quipped, is no time to talk about issues. Fifteen years and four campaigns later, everyone seems happy to take Campbell’s Maxim to heart.

Conservative leader Stephen Harper won’t come anywhere nearer to current issues than 2003 with his reprise of the same-sex marriage issue, and goes even further back, to 1990, to unearth, once again, the GST issue.

Not to be outdone, Liberal leader Paul Martin is countering by reaching back to 1995 and the Quebec sovereignty issue. Topping them both is NDP leader Jack Layton, heading all the way back to 1962 and the universal health care issue. Maybe Green Party leader Jim Harris can best them all by going all the way back to the 19 th Century to replay the industrial revolution issue.

Meanwhile, in the world of the here and now, reality confronts our willfully blind bunch of nincompoops with a cornucopia of current issues. None is bigger and more far reaching into every facet of Canadians’ lives, yet none goes more unremarked upon, than the dawning of the age of energy depletion. What do the parties and their leaders think the national implications of globally declining energy resources are, and what plans are they formulating and offering up for us to consider in this election? Answer: “Globally what?”

The long-predicted oil, gas, and electricity supply crunch is on now. The three are interrelated because most new electricity plants are natural gas-fired, and most gas fields produce gas by using the same underground pressure that oil reserves need to pump their last remaining available drops up to the surface. All national governments in the world will now become preoccupied with sticky and highly contentious questions about rationing, price controls, and management problems to do with shrinking economies.

American natural gas and chemical company executives, together with state and federal officials, for example, have already decided that when an arctic outflow plunges northern cities like Chicago and Detroit into deepfreezes this winter, police-enforced rationing of dwindling natural gas supplies will ensure Texas chemical companies get first dibs before cold homeowners in the north. Hawaii is just the first US state to legislate lower and locked-in gasoline prices, without actually explaining how the state will make oil tankers still come to Hawaii. Energy-import dependent nations around the world have already created, or are working on, similar contingency plans.

Canada has not, yet its case is especially tricky. Canada is almost unique in the world as both a highly energy-dependent advanced-industrial economy, and at the same time a major energy producer and exporter. And it is all the more alone in the world in that its national government has no control over either demand or supply in its energy sector. Demand is left entirely up to the vagaries of the free market, while Canada’s provinces have all the control over supply.

That’s why Canada’s role as a producer and exporter presents particularly thorny problems for the national government. Right now, the constitution dictates that provinces have jurisdiction over underground resources like oil and gas. Alberta is alone in the world being a relatively politically stable jurisdiction with huge and not yet fully developed energy production capacity. The world’s capacity is currently able to produce about 85 million barrels of oil per day (mbd). World demand is right now about 85 mbd. Nearly all known oil fields in the world are producing the maximum amount of oil the reserves can bear and cannot with any amount of investment or known technology produce more.

Consider US oil fields, which at one time gushed to the sky producing most of the world’s supply and fueling the rapid rise of America to take its place as the world’s predominant industrial power. Today, the average US oil well pumps 90% water and only 10% oil, meaning 90% of the work, the pressure, the pipes and the refining is wasted on water. The ratio can only go up. More wells, more pressure through technology, more pipes, and more refineries will only bring more water to the surface.

Only Iraq and Alberta show any known potential for greater oil production with more investment. You can see what the attention that fact has brought to Iraq, and what suffering it has brought to the Iraqi people. Alberta will inevitably draw the same level of attention from the same world-beating actors once they are done with Iraq.

With that juggernaut coming, a clown posing as the leader of Alberta passes the time in the interim playing childish games. Cash handouts directly to the already prosperous citizens of Alberta and a propensity to tirelessly snub their noses at the much-maligned federal government I’m sure is all fun and games in the Prairie Province. But the behavior shows a profound irresponsibility on the part of the provincial government and a stunning ignorance of the new state of the world and the precarious position Albertan oil and gas fields play within it.

While Edmonton blithely luxuriates, clashing industrial empires lay waste to whole nations in their desperate contest for the last remaining supplies of energy. A winner-take-all world-wide war for remaining energy resources is on right now. The stakes could not be higher and the players could not be more determined. Picture a poker game at which, after a long hard night, four armed and dangerous players are maxed out and all are completely into the high-heaped pot for the last hand of all time, while a fifth player—Ralph Klein—giggles, makes faces, counts chips and orders more drinks. He doesn’t seem to notice what is going on or how deadly serious everything has suddenly become. One wants to tap him on the shoulder.

Nor does Alberta seem capable of getting properly into the big game frame of mind, being a junior provincial government with lots of petty complaints, and not a serious national government with lots of dicey considerations. Yet things only get more serious from here on in.

That is why now is the time for the federal government to help erase Albertan’s memory of the hated 1980s National Energy Plan by invoking the notwithstanding clause and breaching the constitution to seize total control over all underground resources, especially energy resources under Alberta. Before doing so, it would only be best for Albertans if Canada deployed the armed forces in huge numbers to Cold Lake and other facilities so that when the announcement of the appropriation is made, Albertans will see soldiers on every street corner in Calgary and know before anybody gets hurt the futility of fighting the feds on this one. It needs to be made clear that this is not about health care or political alienation, this is serious, and there will be nothing but the brig for anyone who even so much as whispers the word “separation.”

Oh, they’ll howl for awhile no doubt, and there will inevitably be those who actually start shooting or bombing and will have to be hunted down and taken care of. But for the sane majority, a deal can be offered: acquiesce to the complete appropriation of all energy resources by the federal government, or see the feds also seize all Alberta government accounts, including the rich Heritage Fund. It would only be gracious to give Klein a day to formulate his answer—and to surround the Alberta legislature with Canadian soldiers to help him see the one true path.

Sounds extreme? Consider the real alternative. When the new Great Game is finished with Iraq, it’s going to come to Alberta. Say what you will about the federal government, but when China, India, Russia, the EU, and the US show up at the front door, the back door, and all the windows, who do you want inside negotiating our safe passage out of the line of fire? Those with some awareness of the outside world, the nature of those working in it, and its alarming goings on? Or that sometimes drunk clown, the laughable and lovable teddy bear Ralph Klein who can’t even dodge lesbian-chucked cream pies?

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