It’s Time to Nationalize Canadian Oil and Gas
Back in 2014 Canada considered nationalizing Canada’s oil industry. It should now receive serious consideration. Exports to the United States do little to actually help Canadians, and it would appear that our American neighbours, have little interest in being friendly.
As Martin Lukacs intimated back then,
“It would be hard to invent a more destructive ritual of national self-punishment. Year after year, we hand oil companies gigantic tracts of pristine land. They skin them of entire ecosystems. They vacuum billions of dollars out of the country. Their oversized power, sunk into lobbying and litigation, upends government law-making.
And Canada’s return? The exploitation of the tar sands provides just two percent of our GDP. It has gutted manufacturing jobs and made a mockery of our emissions targets. And now that oil prices are crashing – as resource commodities predictably do – it is putting a vicious squeeze on government spending.
Faced with similar recklessness, people in other countries are setting out to take back control of their energy. As Naomi Klein documents in her new book This Changes Everything, it hasn’t been driven by ideological fervour. Towns like Boulder, Colorado, concerned by the threat of climate change, have started demanding a clean, renewable alternative from their energy providers.They are then discovering that private utility companies simply refuse to provide it.”
There is an ongoing myth for more than forty years: that private companies better serve our needs than public institutions. In fact, private utility and oil companies — like all large corporations —are legally designed to look after only a single need: the maximization of profits.
It is long past time for American corporations to reap the benefits and the spoils of Canadian resources. There has been the opportunity for a hundred years in this country to reinvent nationalization and sell our products on the open market for fair market value, rather than accept a depreciated value that Americans place on Canadian oil, yet still purchase every day to their advantage.
It’s time to build Canada’s infrastructure, east and west, instead of North and South. We should be creating the finished products in this country, instead of exporting the near raw resource and earning pennies on the dollar in value. Canada should ban lobbyists from every provincial and federal office in the country and to develop the necessary refineries, again as nationalized entities, in order to provide Canadians with all the benefits of Canadian resources.
Norway’s example of resource management, ownership and taxation should become the standard in Canada as well. Statoil, a Norwegian national company created a pension fund ensuring savings for its citizens and contained over a Trillion U.S. dollars in 2014. This year Statoil and Equinor, another state holing will generate 89 Billion U.S. dollars in 2024. Assuming 75 Billion in earnings on average since 2014, that would mean that Norway now has 1.75 Trillion dollars in its surplus fund.
Norway has a population of 5.2 million people and in 2014 each citizen had approximately $200,000 in their pension fund, just from Oil Revenues. Canada produces 5.2 million barrels of oil a day, two and a half times the production of Norway, yet there is next to no money held by Canadian banks.
Canada should either take the profits, similarly to Norway, or retain the oil as an emergency reserve for Canada’s strategic use. Canada could then invest much more heavily in green technologies that generate ‘seven to eight times’ more jobs than similar investments in the oil sector.
Canada is, and will remain a democratic country. It’s time that billionaires, who mostly take the money and run, are cut out of Canada’s resource industry.
And it shouldn’t end with gas and oil. Canada produces surplus electrical capacity, has massive reserves of gas and a 200 year supply of oil, the second largest oil reserve on earth. Canadian strategic minerals are significant and Canada’s Arctic holds the promise of substantial oil and gas deposits as well. It’s time for Canada, to look after Canadian interests. Doing so will ensure the standard of living in Canada, and will enable wholly owned Canadian corporations to thrive, selling products globally to its economic advantage.
Water is a resource that cannot be undervalued, and Canada should commit to husbanding this resource for the future. Canada’s vast boreal forest and massive mining resources should also see ownership by Canadian companies, not American companies who claim that the companies are Canadian while skimming all of the profitability out of the shell company and its assets.
America is no longer Canada’s ‘friend’, that is obvious. Have no illusions. Donald is only interested in the art of the ‘steal’. Donald Trump has made that quite clear. It’s time Canadians take control of Canada’s resources and finances, increasing Canadian investment and ownership and securing Canadian sovereignty by building a much larger, stronger and technologically state-of-the-art military.
America has had a near free-ride on the backs of Canadians, yet now threatens Canada and offers nothing but even more threats for the future.
Donald – please build your wall, – on your side of course. The vast majority of Canadians will welcome it with open arms.
(Information in part due to the Guardian, Dec. 3rd, 2014, author; Maring Lukacs.)
Leave a Reply